How it Used to Be

remember?

Today Dylan told me he was going to Canada because when you’re nineteen there you can drink two glasses of champagne and get drunk. Dylan is eight years old but has these phrases peppered throughout his mind that were born in ones several years older; they are used as though he has an absolute knowledge when in fact he is quite painfully inexperienced in the ways of the world. I wrote a note home to his father telling him that it’s not really appropriate to call our race-diversive campers “brown kids” and that it’s probably unwise to tell the girl with her shirt pulled over her knees that it “looks like she has big boobs like that.”

Then there’s Yalet, a chubby little seven year old girl who has Spanish parents but speaks better English than any of the other kids in my cadre, enunciated perfectly like you don’t even do when you’re trying too hard to fit in. She tells me one day her favorite food is Taco Supreme, a brand name item from Taco Bell inserted into her mind inexorably like we might stick flour next to corn, there’s Taco Supreme. A proper name food item signaled not by its component ingredients but with capital letters just like on that big old menu. I wondered when she told me if they just make Taco Supreme at home or if it’s some kind of special treat or what the deal is and she says “we don’t cook dinner, we buy it.” I am instantly aware of her class, her placement among whatever colored lines set these kids off like levels on a relief map. Her hair is slick black, always pulled back on both sides and up in a big-toothed clasp. Sometimes she’s dressed like she’s going to church.

They call me mister Brandon most particularly because of mandate–it’s just how we do it at camp. I guess they figure it’s nine weeks of summer and I’m seeing them at least more than their parents or grandparents or mother and boyfriend or dad and no mother or whatever so they had ought to at least use my first name but not too friendly you know because well, it’s nine weeks and… do they realize like I do that they’re all my friends I’ll never see again?

Raul is going into fourth grade because he skipped straight through third by virtue of a test he left camp one day to take. He is the shortest one of all my group, fifteen rag-taggers bestowed by the camp the color green, and bestowed by me the group title of “Green Beans” because we need a goddamned sense of unity, right? He is the shortest Green Bean by far, the only one to get an “Under 48″” band when we go to the water park every Tuesday. In the game room he plays with Legos, builds spaceships like you’d expect, symmetrical but organic, always with hidden guns and crafty escape modules, pieces built to separate in the event of an unwanted boarding or particularly heavy fire. Except for the fact that he looks like he’s Haitian and his parents refuse to allow him to be photographed under any circumstance, he reminds me too uncomfortably of the good parts of myself at his age. Yesterday he was reading a small copy of The Wind in the Willows, a book with a sticker price of fifty cents. I read that when I was younger, I tell him. He snaps another chunk onto his cruiser.

These are our impermanent lives, one and one-half hour blocks at a time, just like big Lego structures destroyed every time we pack on and move to the next part of the day. Will they even remember me now, fifteen years later when I’m thirty-eight and they’re old enough to know better?