I had a dream last night where I was once again a day camp counselor, promising the kids that I'd remember them years down the road. When I woke up, I had that kind of temporal vertigo that people gesture at with the phrase "wanna feel old?" It's been around two decades since I was a counselor, and the little kids I was responsible for[1] are all now adults well older than I was at the time. The astonishing difference between the reality of that gulf of time and the immediate present-ness of that era in my memories—amplified by the team—sent me reeling.
I think that disconnect is really what hits us when we "feel old". We lived all those years in between our memories of younger days and the present, and we know them to be full of exactly that many years' worth of events and experiences. But vanishingly little of that time was spent in the context of those memories. I spent only a few sunscreen-scented summers as a counselor, and I wasn't there to see how the camp or the kids kept going without me, nor did I think of them all the time in the years afterwards. So when my sleeping mind guides me back to that time, it feels like now because what really counts isn't how many years passed for me or for the camp, it's how many years I spent there specifically, and that of course never changes.
Contrast with my early memories of dating my wife. We met years after I last answered to my camp name[2], but I find it much easier to intuitively reckon with the distance of those early days with her because I have memories of us together through all the intervening years. To walk back into our first years together would be to cut through the dense thicket of all the times we've spent since then, whereas there's nothing but empty space between now and the day I said goodbye to camp for the last time, and who can judge distance in empty space?
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And yes, I do remember them all—or at least the ones who came back week in and week out. ↩︎
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"Bookworm," named for my habit as a camper of always carrying a book and reading it any moment there was even a brief downtime. Although camp names were typically only used by counselors, I was one of very few campers to go almost exclusively by one even before I aged up into counseling. ↩︎