My Heart Can't Afford This

You know, it’s interesting. Sometimes you go to a place to do one thing, and you end up doing another and completely forget the first thing that you went there to do. Like going to Home Depot. Home Depot is distraction central for men - the mecca of (AMADHD) adult male attention deficit disorder. You go in for the gas additive for your blower and you come out with a new weed eater, some weed & feed, light bulbs, a non-specific tool and at least one thing that requires batteries. What you don’t walk out with is the thing that you went in there to get in the first place. The good news is that you get to go back in there to get the priority item and the bad news is that you just might do it again. Rinse and repeat.

What I have learned, once again, is that sometimes you can do almost the opposite. You go somewhere to do something and you leave something behind. Then, you know that you must go back to retrieve said item, get so overwhelmed, you leave something else. The odd thing is that what you leave is never replaced, and what it served cannot be made whole again. It’s like gambling (so I am told); you put money down, lose it, bet more to get it back, and lose even more. Stay there long enough and you’ll lose the whole shebang. And this is what has taken place at camp 40.

Day three is usually one that you can depend on to be stable. It’s day three. You have not been there long enough to have an issue, and you have been there long enough to have a general idea of what is taking place. But, apparently, day three has a sneaky side; something that lies in wait along the trail, a booby-trap, a sabot (look up sabotage) something that penetrates and robs, something that hurts. A lot.

We had reversed our schedule to allow kids at camp 40 (the young camp) to have their bath day. But before the bath, they play on the beach. So we met them on the beach, literally. We arrived a little after 9 and they were heading across the road, moving like an undulating line of whities-tighties with little white bodies and the international symbol of plumbers wiggling and squiggling across the road. So cute, so innocent, and so possessive of our souls and hearts. We spent the next 90 minutes playing on the beach (not the surf) with our kids. Those that we had adopted into our hearts and those that had adopted us. Running, rolling, hearing Russian and answering in English and depending on smiles and inflection to speak louder than words.

The camp director approached and pulled me and Ishy aside. She looked ... distracted. With discomfort on her face and pain in her voice, she lanced my soul with her words. “Today must be the last day.” I couldn’t even think of a response. “What?” is a word uttered when you are looking to clarify the grocery list, not something you utter when a world is collapsing. Not “the world”, but a world. A world of love and grace. Where children love with a purity unmatched in our world. The state inspectors were coming and we couldn’t be there.

When we are with these kids, strange things happen. Time stops, reality dims, your focus sharpens. I could only imagine this is what a race car driver feels ... right before he rolls the car and gets ejected into a pile of burning glass. Honestly. My first reaction was to not fall down. My second was having to figure out how I was going to tell the team. I called for them to listen and then stared at the sand. I hoped the big robot spider from Transformers was going to jump up and kill me. He didn’t. Coward. So, I did what I am supposed to do - I told the team that this was it. They had 10 minutes. It was a hateful thing to have to say and I hated saying it and ...

They each scooped “theirs” up and began to weep. We said goodbye, watched the undie train snake back across the street and ... they were gone. So we all went our separate ways to process and then headed towards the bus to take our shattered hearts back to the hotel.

I ache. My heart, my head, my body. This team is ... wow. They are all wow, but this one has something different. We’ve had our Currahee, and now we have faced our “Day of Days.” Friday will be our Bastonge.

(((Added Thursday afternoon))) To finish the thought, we came to camp 40 to pick up what we had left last year. The year before that to do the same. But somehow, the price of admission is greater than that which is collected. I keep coming back to the table to pick up the pieces of my heart and I keep losing that bet. So if you happen to be walking along the Gulf of Finland, near where it is cool and green and the voices and laughter of children echo amongst birch and evergreen, look to the sand. Run your foot through its course grains and search hardily ... for you may find that which I long for. My heart.