Real America, Unhinged

I am exhausted tonight, but in a good way. The second day of our annual summer Art Camp is over and I have been in the barn making sure the clay pieces are more than leather hard and ready for a firing tomorrow. I have put out two more 25lb hunks of red and white clay for tomorrow and located the whiffle ball bats and balls for the pool activities required for the next day. The paint brushes are clean and I have set out the materials for making flubber and various other interesting miscible solutions. We have checked out all the food stuffs we need and thought about what groups will do what, where and when tomorrow.

This week is a gift to our community from us, but mostly it is a gift to us. Each day we have had about twenty people, kids and parents, sometimes more. In this poorest of Florida communities, most folks do not know they should sign up, call, or tell us they can't come that day, or that they will come with many extras. Some parents just want to drop off their kids, and maybe or maybe not pick them up.

 These are not your Manhattan helicopter parents. They are druggies whose kids nag them into going to Ms Molly's camp and finally call an hour before the session begins.

But, yet, they help each other on car pooling, take home those kids whose parents have somehow 'forgotten' them. And they do not make judgments.

And then there are illegal Mexicans who have everything together and if only they had green cards..but still they have visions of college for their kids.
And they are the BEST! They would certainly give those NYC parents a run for their money (if only).

We have learned so much! Our family that hosts this- my husband and I and our seven year old grandson, have everything the American Dream could boast. We are Ivy league wasps, grandson named after a direct ancestor and an early American president. We are fairly prosperous, better off than our parents. We love to share our property and large swimming pool and art facilities and kitchen.

So, I hunker down in the clay studio, comfortable with the give and take of Spanish and English. These kids and parents are making some of the most beautiful clay pieces I have ever seen in a class. The kids get comfortable and range out to paint and build things from the many materials I have. We walk in the woods and collect moss and discarded owl feathers, wonder at turtle burrows.

 A group of kids cook the healthful lunches and prepare snacks. I hear my husband and his cooking group of little kids discussing how to hold a really sharp knife and why cooking from scratch is the best. Kids are swarming the vegetable garden to pick peppers and tomatoes.

Swimming is the best! The kids love Coach Joy who directs the pool. These kids do not have much opportunity to swim and they love every minute.

One child, fourteen years old, painfully shy, whom I'd met on a community clean up some weeks back, contacted me to say she'd like to come and help out. She was one of those people who are powerful in her silence (and made me feel anxious about what I perceived to be her neediness). I made every effort to include her. She was a non swimmer and had hair issues and she did not reach out to any of the other campers. Day two she asked me to teach her how to knit!
I am a terrible knitter, actually, and have only knit three things in my life (one of them an abysmal calamity). But I soldiered on, and this child, after one row, began to knit like a house on fire, row after row. Then she went up to the pool with the swimmers, put on an amazing swim cap to protect her about to be, used to be, might be, nappy hair, and proceeded to dive under water and swim! I held her up and said encouraging words. This kid will be swimming by the end of the week!

But the most astonishing thing to me was hearing some of the back stories of the Mexican parents who are still illegal. Before this I never actually knew anyone who had walked across the border from Mexico, enduring ten days of thirst and hunger and fear. I had never personally heard about the fears these people have on a daily basis, and the raw anxiety they have about their gifted kids who may not be able to go to college. I heard about these parents' quest to get a GED, and being turned down.

Also, there are the parents who are legally citizens, and they are golden!

So, here we are with our bilingual community camp, every socioeconomic class, gender, age, and color. We are the global community and we have more in common than not. On the last day we will have a pot-luck lunch for all the families and we will wear our camp tee shirts and produce an exploding volcano cake.

Maybe Romney should be here. Politicians don't get it.