The intermediary weeks between the end of administrative summer (Labor Day) and astronomical summer (Autumnal Equinox) are a seemingly perfect time to reflect on how your sense of time erodes as an adult. When you were a kid (at least in North America), ‘summer’ felt palpable because your entire school year revolved around it. Summer vacation was the epicenter of a kid’s year, and those couple of weeks after Labor Day, usually the first weeks of a new school year, were always a time when the uncertainty and (if you were lucky) excitement of a new school year were intermixed with mourning the summer that seemed to linger, even if it wasn’t the weather that really mattered.

I spent the first years of my adolescence (or, alternatively, the last years of being a “kid”) going to a sleepaway camp each summer. When I was 12 years old I went to camp for a full month for the first time, and as a result my parents switched me from going to a Mass Audubon camp which did two week sessions to YMCA Camp Becket, which only did four week sessions (this would later change, but as the two week introductory sessions were only for the youngest campers it’s not particularly relevant to the story). For three summers I would go out into the Berkshires and do summer camp things, be that learning to swim, kayak, climb, shoot rifles, or play baseball (I was bad at baseball and swimming, and better at climbing and shooting). In retrospect, what camp was about and the sorts of things camp wanted you to be doing were not really good choices for the type of kid I was; I was not particularly sporty or particularly outdoorsy, and the only things I seemed to be able to rely on each year were at least one major allergy attack and failing the swim test the first time. Still, though, camp ingrained itself in me, really burrowed in my mind and soul, enough so that I went back and worked at the camp for two summers around the end of high school and beginning of college. As it turned out, being a camp counselor and working with kids is arguably something I am worse at than baseball. That said, the fact that I wanted to go back and do this is, if nothing else, indicative of the impact camp had on me.

The culture of camp at Becket was incredibly strong, and one undercurrent in particular had a notable impact on me as a person. There’s no hiding that Becket wants to have a strong culture; one thing that is drilled into you is the sort of man implied by the eight camp mottoes, which are emblazoned high and proud in the dining hall. At nearly 40 I can’t remember all of them, but they’re good, solid foundational things: “I can and I will”, “Manners maketh the man”, “Do your best”, “Help the other fellow”. Simple moral axioms for boys, some of whom are as young as 8, and there’s nothing wrong with that. For my persuasion, though, the most important motto was “play the game”. Yes, this is about being willing to participate, not opting out because your preference wasn’t the one chosen…but it’s also about the ‘why’ of what you’re doing, especially at camp. There is no intent to send you to camp other than to have a good summer, so therefore it’s about playing the game, not losing or winning the game. There was a long running joke when I was at camp about the “Becket Tie” that so many competitions suspiciously ended with, but most games should be that good-natured. It’s just summer, after all, not a travel team or a college scout.

There were other things, though. As has been implied so far, Becket is an all-boys camp; there was an all-girls camp, Camp Chimney Corners, located on the other side of the YMCA property. I don’t have the sociological background to opine on the broader conversation about gender-segregated social environments, but for me, in this instance, I found it to be very positive. There was space to have positive role models regarding things like being emotionally expressive without it being gendered as it so often can be to young boys, and I found that made a difference for me as I was growing up that I didn’t even fully appreciate until I was older. Camp was a safe place for boys to express themselves; there was a lot of singing, always, and honestly the singing made camp unique more than the baseball or kayaks or walks in the woods. Camp also, oddly enough, taught me a lot about sanctity and ritual.

Here’s the thing about ritual: You either come up with a ritual by yourself or you’re taught it, and if you’re taught you only understand what it means insofar as what you’re told. This is the origin of Sunday School, at least in the modern sense, but religion broadly understands this. During the Jewish holiday of Passover you tell, as part of the greater retelling of the story of Exodus, the story of the four children, which describes four hypothetical children and how they ask about what these rituals mean. While it’s heavy-handed (the “wicked child” is basically getting parentally shunned, it’s rough), it is still emblematic of the core nature of religious rituals and how they are taught to the next generation. Why we do a ritual is as if not more important than how we do the ritual.

Camp Becket was always a home of simple, meaningful ritual. Every night before bed was ‘cabin chat’, which had each boy in the cabin share a highlight of their day and the answer to a discussion question chosen by one of the counselors. Each Sunday there was a chapel service in the morning. Every large group event would end with one of the more somber and contemplative camp songs, ‘Amici’. And each session would conclude with Candlelight, a ritual seemingly designed to help balance between closing out time at camp and thinking forward to being back next year. While Candlelight focused mostly on (surprise, surprise) lighting and holding candles, I will always remember how the leadup began; unsurprisingly, it began with a song. Although there were a few original songs in the camp songbook, many of them were essentially parodies of Broadway songs with the lyrics changed to reference camp activities and places. This song is just that, weirdly, but much more earnest, based on ‘Try To Remember’ from the Fantasticks. While the original song is more a paean to nostalgia in general, the camp version is about, basically, taking your camp experiences with you to school (“Try to Remember/Some time in September”). I always appreciated that ritual, even getting a chance to participate as a speaker when I was 16 and in the camp service corps (one of a couple of intermediary programs leading into staff). It seemed to acknowledge the existence of a month at camp as both a rarefied space and a liminal one, and there was always the implied moral that even if the real world doesn’t work like camp does, the things you do that make you better at camp will also make you better in the real world.

As I mentioned above, I’m not really great with kids, and my time as a camp counselor was time I struggled with. I remember vividly another counselor who was there when I was 17, and he was struggling much more than me. After that first year he did not return, but even before the end it was clear that he was just not relating to his campers and was, generally, miserable. At a staff-only event someone asked him why he even bothered applying for the job and he shrugged and said “because I love Becket.” The camper-to-aide-to-staff pipeline isn’t perfect, but it is good enough to give the sorts of experiences that consistently fill and overfill that pipeline. Even if I wasn’t the perfect counselor, I learned something about myself. Besides, I wouldn’t say I had perfect counselors when I was a kid, either. Even so, these summers will still be eternally memorable.

I do always have some reticence in waxing poetic about camp; it is an immense privilege to be able to send your kid away for a month. Indeed, the base rate for a session at Becket in 2026 is over $8,000. They are doing ‘tiered’ pricing now which allows families with lower income or balancing multiple large expenses to pay less, but they also make it clear that the $8,000+ price is the actual price, and paying at a higher tier is, in essence, requesting a bit of assistance from the camp and YMCA’s endowment. If you wanted to enroll in one of the specialty programs, that’s over $9,000. I did; I was in the Construction Cabin program when I was 14. Since my parents were going to send me to camp anyway it wasn’t a huge marginal cost, but even saying that does betray (if not precisely) that I have two parents that met working in software.

Even with the caveat, though…if you’re a parent, I want you to consider it. It might not be my specific camp, it might not be for a full month, but sending your kid away to camp means they get to exist in a weird, different world for a while, and get to grow and change and do it on their own terms. Even if I was kind of a peculiar kid to be at a sporty ‘Y’ camp, I was still at home among all the peculiar kids who were, if not playing sports and paddling boats, playing Magic and Axis and Allies and even, one memorable summer, Rifts. It’s an irreplaceable experience to be given that space, that time, and that distance from your parents, and although I’m not a parent I do get the feeling that enshrining such space and distance is even more important now in 2026 than it was in 1999 when I started going to camp for a month every summer. Because even now, even when I’m nearly forty years old, every year between Labor Day and the Equinox, what I really try to do more than anything else is Try to Remember.