Camp Green Lane 100th Summer Blog Post, August 15th

Today, we have a guest blog post written by a Camp Parents, CGL alum and long term best friend with one of our Upper Staff. Enjoy! 

Dear Previous Assistant Activities Director,

You don’t know me, but I wanted to congratulate you on your new job. I know you loved camp but I also know that at some point, we need to take the leap into a full-time position that gives us all the benefits we need as adults. I can promise you, they hired the ideal candidate. Your successor, Robin Raskin, had been waiting for this opportunity for a very long time.  

Robin arrived at Camp Green Lane in 1986 and, after about five minutes, knew she’d found her place. Like so many of us, she grew up there. It’s where she became herself and where she found the friends who would stay with her for life. Over the course of four decades, we went from sending photo negatives and mix tapes to each other, to hoarding college phone minutes for a five-minute call, to attending each other’s bridal showers, weddings, baby namings, and milestone birthdays.

Adulthood brought jobs, responsibilities, and meetings that could’ve been emails. Robin spent years succeeding in positions that looked great on paper but were ultimately meaningless and mentally exhausting. Even after a brief stint working at camp when her kids were little, she knew life would eventually take her back to the corporate world and the soul-crushing pings of Slack.

But as fate would have it, this job opening was the perfect fit at the perfect time. She gave notice, bought herself some sneakers and athleisure, and headed to camp just in time for orientation. Part of me worried it was all too good to be true…that reality wouldn’t live up to the version she’d been carrying around in her head for all these years.

Alas, I was wrong.

Even with week-long heat waves, daily thunderstorms, 4,000 things needing attention at once, no comfy cooling blanket, and no curling up in her reading nook with Otis Dumbledore Raskin, every call and text sounds the same: Pure joy.

It turns out the magic of camp isn’t just for the kids. It’s also for the lucky few who get to come back, keep the traditions alive, and remind a new generation just how special it all is.

So thank you, Sarah.

Because of you, my best friend got to spend her summer exactly where she was meant to be. I got to watch her rediscover a piece of herself that had been there all along, waiting for the right moment.

You gave my best friend her happiest camp summer in decades.

And that’s a gift both of us needed.