CSotD: Summertime Blues, junior division
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Summer camp story arcs are generally as predictable as "bear trap in the fireplace" cartoons at Christmas, but Deflocked puts its ascerbic POV to good use today.
When my oldest was a wee lad, the Colorado Springs Parks & Rec department had a summer program they called "Tot Lot," which we laughed at because it was such an insanely frank name.
And then we sent him.
Not because we thought gluing macaroni to construction paper outdoors for two months was going to teach him anything he hadn't learned by gluing macaroni to construction paper indoors for the past 10 months, but because he was too young to be turned loose in the neighborhood on his own.
In other words, for the same reason I take the dog to the park in the afternoon: So he could run around like a maniac with his friends and be at least slightly mellow in the evening.
Besides, his little brother was literally a handful — well, "literally" an armload — at the time, and having the larger one occupied for a few hours was crucial to our own being at least slightly mellow in the evening.
Anyway, the name "Tot Lot" made the program fit nicely into one of my favorite punchlines: "We've established what you are; now we're just haggling over the price."
It wasn't very expensive and so was worth what we paid.
Later, we sent him off to a for-real, sleep-away summer camp where he learned to ride horses and shoot guns. That actually was kind of expensive, but we felt it was worth a little budgeting, and we broke even in the long run, because he later went off to a sleep-away camp in Illinois that didn't have horses but where they did teach him to shoot guns and they also took him on a lot of field trips, and that one was completely paid for by the government — yes, by your tax dollars.
His little brother went to a language camp and a couple of soccer camps and then worked as a counselor at a more traditional camp for a couple of summers and, while he isn't overly bilingual, he did become a teacher and a soccer coach, so he got something out of it. Exception that proves the rule, I guess.
For my part, I went to Camp Lord O' The Flies as a lad, an eight-week extravaganza that was as traditional a "send us a boy, we'll send you a man" setting as you could get outside of a British boarding school, and where, if they didn't have a particularly enlightened approach towards manliness, they were certainly expert at writing reassuring letters to our parents, so no hard feelings, Mom, and, as the little boy in the old joke said, "I'm so glad I'm back, I'm glad I went."
(I once had a friend try to explain that Golding's novel was a metaphorical examination of socialism or something or other, to which I said, no, it's a story about how people would likely behave if nobody stopped them, based on how little boys most certainly do behave when nobody stops them.)
To tie it into today's Deflocked, if the main thing we learned at Camp Lord O' The Flies was that you are either the hammer or the nail, we did get a few accidental lessons in empathy: Among our bunkmates were three brothers, ranging from eleven to six, who were spending the summer there after having spent the winter at a military boarding school.
Acting sympathetic towards another human being at Camp Lord O' The Flies would get you short-sheeted, noogied and wedgied in short order, but even the most callous and calloused among us were a little appalled at these poor fellows, and moreso on Parents Weekend when their perfectly coiffed mother stepped out of the Mercedes and began cooing over them and hugging them and telling them how much she had missed them.
It was like the Joan Rivers joke about being named "Beverly Hills Mother of the Year," where they line up the kids and you have to pick out the one that's yours.
She won, she explained, by getting it on the second try.
And speaking of awards …
The "In Comedy, Timing Is Everything Award" goes to Anne Gibbons for today's Six Chix panel, which –despite whatever deadline lag the strip may operate under — ties neatly into the latest chapter in the GOP's bizarre war on science and women.
And how cute is that?
Now here's your moment of zen:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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