As eighth grade approached, almost every kid in my neighborhood was going to camp. I made my feelings about it well known to my folks, but I still worried about it, to the point of taking money out of my dad's money clip (He always had a ton of cash on him) to make an "escape from camp fund". I normally didn't worry about stuff, but that summer, until August, I kept waiting for my folks to send me off.

The next summer, my dad joked about sending me to Howe military school, where three of the neighbor's kids went. They were obviously sent there to get rid of them as the parents traveled all over the world and would come back in the summer. Again, I worried myself to the point I started having stomach problems, thinking I might be sent off. Again, I built up escape money, just in case. When it finally got late enough it was obvious I wasn't going anywhere, I told my folks about my paranoia, and they both cracked up. As much as I hated regular school, I don't know how I could have hated military school any more than I hated it!

Even though I stated that I was forced to go to camp for 7 years - three months of it annually, I have to admit that I learned to swim a mile, became familiar with "salting off" leeches from the lake when we swam after the rain, learned to sail a comet, paddle a canoe, rode the biggest palomino horse in history fairly well, and can still play an excellent game of Jacks. My parents thought that it would be "good" for me. Maybe it was, but I was always very homesick.

Perhaps you were afraid of being abandoned to strangers and regimentation. That is what I did not like about it all.

It wasn't a fear of being abandoned, it was just that I hated all the stuff I would have had to do. I hated the heat, the food (I'm as picky as they get), the "activities", all of it. I wanted to spend the summer doing what I wanted, not what someone wanted me to do. It's like I took a tour deal one time on a vacation. I made it one day before I had enough and said, "Ill see you on Friday morning before we leave, and spent the next four days doing what I wanted, for as long as I wanted. Turned out to be the best trip I ever took.

What a spoil sport!

I bet your peers loved hanging out with the "Oh dear God, not a ROPES course!" kid