For Bobbie

She was just Bobbie, one of the big kids with the long legs at camp; much sought after when we played those long games of Run Sheep Run and Capture the Flag..She paid no attention to me then in my dumb little baby shorts with elastic waistbands and curls foaming from the top of my head like water from the blow-hole of a whale  - but suddenly the summer I was 12 she was my counselor, still fleet of foot and glamorous but now she taught us swimming and slept in our cabin, a goddess among trolls, and tucked us in after Taps.She was my counselor again the next summer when Patty O’Donnell and I lit up cigarettes, big as day, right in the cabin, the summer Joey Cardamone lost her retainer a record ten times...And then suddenly I was 15 and in the C.I.T. cabin and here she was once again our counselor, this time riding us hard, giving us the requisite Counselor in Training tests and lectures and every other day it seemed pulling me aside to point out my many shortcomings.By the time I myself became a counselor she was off at a fancy camp in California and never did come back to Fernwood. I was in her wedding though as she would have been in mine if she weren’t half way across the world by then. But along about the time she was expecting her first child we connected again and talked through our way through every little kid question, raising-a-teen dilemma, kid-out-of-college conundrum, marriage mystification, spiritual query, hormone issue and medical mystery . She worked 20 years in corporate America, then started her own business and ran with that for a decade. Now she works out every day and reads to the dying and and impersonates sick people at a med school  - it’s not a scam it’s a job - and  helped elect Joe Sestak to Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional district in '07.She just got back from hiking in Iceland and today is her birthday. So this is the shout-out on my blog to my wise elder and spiritual counselor Bobbie who on my birthday sent a shout-out to me on hers.

Bobbie then-Bayley as a camper herself with Mary Creagh, counselor Percey Williams and Ellen Smith in a summer in the Camelot years