david taus

The Circle Game

music: “One Last Vesper” Cassette

We were enjoying a typical Sunday night at the 1-2 earlier: sitting around the kitchen table, listening to The Playground, and tearing through a couple artichokes and lemon-butter sauce when this song came on that really twisted my head around. It’s an old folk tune called The Circle Game done by Joni Mitchell and assorted others, a song I know incredibly well but haven’t heard in years. We used to sing it in music class in grade school, and it was the first song I ever learned on guitar (which was actually my mother’s ukelale). But one of the most vivid memories I have of “The Circle Game” is a performance of the song by a fellow leadership trainee and old friend Chris Dallman at Camp Minikani a summer evening long ago. Hearing the song for the first time in so long opened a floodgate of memories and I’ve been spending the rest of the evening picking through them, as well as old pictures, journal entries, and cassettes.

I’m caught up in my immediate reality more than I ever have been. My fond memories of past years usually consist of the past couple years, maybe college. College seems like it happened in another lifetime. I all but forget that I lived a life in Wisconsin for 18 or so years, and it was a life full of events and places and people. Of course I know that I did live in Wisconsin, and that I was a kid once (declarative), but I forgot what it was like (episodic). I had not forgotten the fact that I had been in high school once, but I had forgotten what it was like to be in high school myself. Upon hearing that song on the radio the feeling of it all, the physical and mental sensation of what it was like to be a child, came rushing back. It was incredible. I flipped through old photos, yes, actual photographs on kodak paper; I put in old cassette tapes (remember those?) that I wore down in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I took a whirlwind tour of myself as a child, and even with the primed sense memory it seemed frighteningly distant. ‘That was then, this is now,’ you can say, and yes, but there is something tragic about no longer being young like that. I realized I miss the child’s eye, the struggle with questions and ideas encountered for the first time, the complete amazement at experiencing things for the first time, the struggle to become a competent, educated, experienced human being. Part of why I thought the National Parks I visited this summer were so spectacular was because they made me feel like a child experiencing Nature for the first time again. It was wonderful. I miss that feeling.

Out of all the corners of my childhood that I visited tonight, I found myself gravitating towards camp. To those that have been there, two anize’ers included, Camp Minikani is a phenomenon that doesn’t need to be explained. To everyone else, it can’t be explained. I have camp to thank for a lot. I find myself in a profession that stems directly from my experiences as a counselor there. I point to camp as one of the primary reasons why I have such an affinity for the natural world. I am reminded almost daily of how camp has shaped my core values and philosophies. And as “The Circle Game” reminded me, camp is mostly responsible for my wanting to play guitar. To remember so clearly what it was like to be a child at camp is overwhelming. Much of that feeling has been lost in the six years I have been away from camp. And since there is no way to go home again, I can only hope to take whatever I found there and somehow find a way to make it work, here, now, as an adult, in inner-city Boston.

The end of every day at camp is marked by a vesper, a quiet time where cabins of children lie in bunk beds, blinking in candlelight, and exchange their thoughts on the universe. It generally starts with a song and a simple question: “What was your best part of the day?” Vesper, to me, was always my best part of the day. The song has continued to the present date, but the question is one that I’ve unfortunately ceased to ask myself, but one I should revisit more often. But vesper has ceased to happen. I try to sit at the end of the day with a cup of tea and process stuff, but it isn’t the same. Were I to have time at the end of the day to discuss the universe under candlelight with friends even once a month…it seems, though, that vesper is not something that happens in the adult world. Perhaps because adult life requires that sort of interpersonal exploration less. I would still welcome it. For my part, though, I have colored pieces of cloth hanging on my wall to remind me, a guitar that made its performance debut over the crackles of campfire and chirp of crickets, and presently a candle lit, a candle that probably hasn’t been lit since my last summer spent in Wisconsin, a candle approximately the shape and size of a dixie cup, a candle with flecks of Crayola scattered throughout the wax, a candle with a small rock embedded in its bottom. To those familiar, it doesn’t need explaining. Remembering where this candle came from, and more importantly that I came from the same place, was my best part of the day. Childhood. I miss it terribly.

Years move by and now the boy is twenty
though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams
maybe better dreams
and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

Posted by davidtaus at February 13, 2005 10:39 PM