SPACE CAMP
When I first heard my calling as a writer
High School Days: Installment #3
“I just extended my fingers, not for any reason, but as a gesture, just for myself to see what it felt like to be so unbridled as to not keep my fingers so close together all the time. Just this once, I would stretch them out. Just this once, I would stretch my fingers out for the fucking hell of it.”
It was called SPACE Camp because the letters in the word S.P.A.C.E. stood for things that the camp claimed it would teach you Science, P-something, Art, and so on. I went there one summer when I was ten or eleven years old. The program was run out of the miserable Middle School that I would later attend.
I took various art classes and a creative writing class. I liked my writing teacher, although I can't remember who he was or anything he said or what he looked like. One day he brought in a VHS tape of a movie that would transform what I thought it meant to be an artist. The movie was called “The Dead Poets Society.”
I don't remember the entire movie, but I will recount what I do remember.
It was about a boy's boarding school in the 1950s, somewhere that felt like New England to me, which was where I lived at the time. The boys at the school were rich and white and some of them were very handsome. They had to wear shirts and ties all the time. They took many classes and were expected to do very well in school. I asked myself, why would these boys get sent away to go to a school? Surely, there were schools close enough to their parents’ houses. The only explanation I could come up with was that rich people do not really love their children.
As someone who felt perpetually unloved, unlovable, unreachable and unreached, this moved me--the simple fact of the existence of a school where no one was loved.
But then someone new appeared at the school, and the school changed, and that someone was Robin Williams.
