My First Hero

I still dream about the summer camp I went to - the wind in the trees, the sudden storms coming over the mountain - and at a recent reunion, I found out I wasn’t the only one. All of us former campers remembered these things, and remembered too how safe and cared for we all felt at that place; how tall and kind our counselors were when we were little, shampooing our hair in the sinks and tucking us into our beds.I remember especially my counselor Barbara, who taught us Arts & Crafts - that's me on the left - and could paint and sing and ski and play every instrument in the book, even that old Army bugle she pulled out of the air a couple of dozen times a day to tell us where we belonged.Once she found me crying in my bed on account of a mean thing the new girl said about my mother, who was the camp’s owner and director. “Your mother is OLD!” she sneered and when I tried to say that no, she was only 30, she laughed in my face. “SHE’S not 30! MY mother is 43 and your mother looks WAY older!”That’s when Barbara stepped into the cabin.“Listen,” she said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “Maybe your mom is 30 and maybe she isn’t. It doesn’t matter. She could be 35, or 40, even 50 but that’s not old. My parents are in their 60s and they still do everything they ever did. Anyway, it’s never how old you are. It’s how you live.”I have never forgotten this kindness of Barbara’s and reminded her of it at our last camp reunion which took place a full 20 years ago. She had driven from Long Island for it, together with her two older sisters, counselors themselves in their time. She was marking her fifth year cancer-free and was as busy as ever with her music and her art, maintaining her portrait studio and teaching would-be pilots how to fly.A month ago now at this latest reunion, we screened the video someone had made at that first one in 1990. Barbara’s sisters were beside me as we watched and heard again the singing we had done at the end of it. We could clearly hear Barbara’s voice, and then, as the camera panned, “There she IS!” one sister whispered excitedly to the other ... and sure enough, there Barbara was, first singing and then stepping away from the banquet table to pick up an old bugle and play Taps once more in her own slow, pitch-perfect version.She is gone now from all our tables. Shortly after that first reunion her cancer returned with metastases to the bone.“I was so angry with God for taking her,” one of her sisters wrote me recently, “But then I heard her saying something to me from wherever she is. The Irish call such an experience a ‘thin place,’ meaning a place where you can just glimpse the world beyond this world.“’Anyway, she was very definite: ‘Stop crying about me!’ she said.  ‘I'm out here flying!’”Then I could almost hear her voice as well, and hear again what she had told me as a little child in my little-child’s bed.  Because it really isn’t how old we are or get to be in life. It’s only how we live, day to day, that matters.