‘I heard you had breast cancer, and I meant to text’

This month, my 15-year-old son began the same ritual I began every September through my teenage years: the countdown. It was a countdown until summer, until I was boarding a big yellow bus again that would transport me to the magic of sleepaway camp, where instead of long days of classes, homework, parents breathing down my neck, and piano lessons, there was water skiing, s’mores, sailing, and evening socials replete with awkward slow-dancing to Stairway to Heaven.

It took a while to convince my husband that we should send our kids to a Canadian sleepaway camp. He also went to sleepaway camp in Canada, but perhaps because he went to a Bnei Akiva camp as opposed to my more secular B’nai Brith camp – the way he describes it, all they did was swim in the lake and pray – his memories are less fond than mine. But I finally got my wish. Right away, two out of three loved it (the oldest managed to fall down the stairs at school a hot minute before the summer and went to camp in a cast). What’s not to love? They were trading in exams and essays for wake surfing, quad biking and jumping off giant inflatables! I was also pleased to have them in a Jewish environment; living in Birmingham, I can count the number of Jewish kids the same ages as my sons on one hand. At their camp, they didn’t spend all day praying, but they did have lovely Friday night services, and every year the camp hosts a group of Israelis who have lost family members to terrorism. This year they also hosted an event that I was mad jealous about (why weren’t parents invited?): Eden Golan, Noa Kirel, Stéphane Legar, and Shahar Saul performed a concert for them.

The implicit end of her sentence, to channel my kids’ favourite Britishism, was ‘but CBA’. She couldn’t be arsed

While I no longer get to share the ritual of the countdown until summer, I did, for a while, feel that by sending my kids to camp near the place where I grew up, I could look forward to an annual reunion. After each school year ended in England, I would fly to Canada to drop off my son and run into people I had known in a completely different and distant lifetime. In 2019 and again, post-Covid, in 2022, I saw scores of old friends and bunkmates and heard endless: “Karen? Karen Skinazi?” as if I had long ago disappeared from the planet.