Camp Green Lane Blog Post July 8th
The Greeks are away on their annual Greek Trip, which they’ll tell us all about when they return Thursday.
While they’re in Lake Placid, the oldest campers left in camp traditionally take over their duties in the Dining Hall, so I got to spend a lot of time in there with the Senior Boys and Girls serving the meals now.
A rite of passage, campers spend their final, Greek summers as waiters and waitresses before graduating to become counselors. The Greek experience (Alpha and Delta for the boys; Gamma and Sigma for the girls) is something younger kids in camp aspire to, and helping out in the Dining Hall is something they really look forward to when the Greeks are away this week.
Brothers want to wait on their sisters and sisters request their brother’s cabins for their assignments this week; sometimes they have a cousin in camp or some may want to try waiting on a staff table.
This role reversal is just one more thing that makes the Camp Green Lane Dining Hall a special place.
Of course, we eat all of our meals there and the new air-conditioning has added another layer of comfort on the warmest days. But the Dining Hall is really the heartbeat of camp throughout the summer.
At meals, you can read the pulse of camp by the volume of the cheers; when we’re excited for something, everyone knows it. You can feel the energy of all of camp at any of our mealtimes. When it gets close to Color War, you can feel it. When the summer starts to wind down, you can feel a tinge of sadness in there, too. Let’s not go there yet.
But in these early July days, on days like today when the grilled cheese is parading out of the kitchen and everyone is excited to have learned all their bunk cheers, and new kids get a chance to help out and feel the satisfaction of feeding someone else, the Dining Hall is very much alive.
The same can be said for the Canteen. Both buildings are decorated to the ceiling with bunk plaques and Color War art, each wallpapered with generations of names. You can spend a lot of time in there pointing up at the names and telling old camp stories.
Every afternoon, Aunt Jamie opens the Canteen for a little snack between fifth and sixth periods. Some days it’s fruit or yogurt or cheese sticks, and always a cup of Gatorade or water. Today, with the Greeks gone, the mighty Mets took over Snack Squad. They did it with such flair, they may inherit the job for the rest of the summer.
They danced and laughed and acted super-strict about not letting anyone take a second ice pop. They brought a huge speaker and turned the Canteen into a snack squad party.
Camp teaches you a lot. Today, some young boys and girls got a chance to do a job, maybe for the first time ever. They were given a little responsibility and, as you saw with the Mets, they absolutely ran with it.
By the end of sixth period, an afternoon thunderstorm sent us back to our cabins to get ready for Taco Tuesday dinner, served by none other than the Senior Girls. It’s been a great day between the arches!