One of the best things about traveling, about teaching ESL, is the things I see and the students I meet. Summer camp is a misnomer compared with North American summer camp. There are no tents, campfires, marshmallows, or canoes. There are English lessons, games, and contests.

After a day in the classroom the ESL teachers and students go for broke in an Olympic-style relay. What was lost in grace and finesse was made up for with intensity.

Teaching ESL is not an easy job. But the rewards, like seeing (and capturing) the above, are immense.

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The result of basketball on a sunny, sub-tropical afternoon. Raymond was a tad hot, as was the photographer.

To do this justice you need to view it larger. Click the image.

Captured: July 21, 2008.

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1988:

Jimmy Swaggart was defrocked after sex with a prostitute, Rush Limbaugh began his syndicated radio show, Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses amid controversy and death threats, and Meryl Streep uttered the now-famous line “A dingo! A dingo took my baby,” in the film, A Cry in the Dark.

Tom Cruise still had all his marbles back in ‘88. Rain Man was released, two years after Top Gun, and two years before one of biggest stinkers of all time, Days of Thunder. There was no couch-jumping back in the day, no Xenu-induced rants against psychiatrists. Cruise was cool, if you were a sixteen-year-old white boy that was desperately uncool. I would rather take a Royal Cruise than watch Tom Cruise.

In 1988, a young Stevo, memories of Top Gun’s coolness still fresh in his head, wore Ray Bans and worked at children’s summer camp. Can you find The Stevo in the above photo?

An old friend posted this gem on Facebook. I may fly to Canada, obtain the original (and negative) and dispose of it properly.

Average Jane is a misnomer. The prose posted on her blog are not average. If work of her caliber could be labeled as average I would be delighted: We would have an incredibly literate planet.

Her recent post, A list of never-to-do things, as well as a first-love remembrance by amuirin, got me to thinking. That is dangerous. I don’t like looking back. I fear with only a glance over my shoulder I may experience a fate similar to Lot’s wife or Orpheus,. If I turn to salt you are welcome to use my remains as seasoning.

During the summer of 1990 I fell hard. Off a motorcycle, but that was later. I am referring to one of those once-in-a-lifetime thunderclaps of love. Yes, the L-word. My life was akin to a bad Hollywood screenplay, a DVD by Touchstone Pictures that Blockbuster would happily stock. One moment I was me, the next a slobbering, moody, love-crazed 19-year-old.

We had known each other three years, co-workers at a summer camp. There had always been something between us, a chemistry that we both silently acknowledged but never acted upon. We were both involved, or were whenever the other was free. It was just beyond consciousness.

At the start of that fateful summer she and a friend, and a friend and I played a nightly game of cards. The loosing team, split along gender lines, gave the winners a massage. Yes, you can see where this is going. While something intimate and secret develops between a masseuse and patient this was only partially the case. We traded massages a time or two. Hands upon shoulders became lips against lips. Read the full story

Squinting through the sweat or sun. Camp 2007.

Co-workers consult a clipboard during a summer camp activity.