Lightbulb Over Head Blog

[I was just looking through my computer and I discovered my chapel speech from my senior year of high school. As I read through it, I was reminded of a part of myself I'd almost forgotten. It's been forever since I felt maternal or even felt like a part of a sisterhood. It's not that I can't live without those things, but it's always interesting to reflect on how I've changed over the years and what parts of me have grown vs. what parts of me have become cloistered away. So, dear readers, I invite you to join me at the gorgeous non-denominational chapel at Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts as I give my speech. It is Fall and the wooden pews creak every so often as a student shifts uncomfortably. Light streams through the bright stained glass windows depicting Columbus, Magellan, Shakespeare, and other great learners and explorers.

Up at the front of the chapel, I am standing at the pulpit. I am 18 and I am terrified. I inhale a deep breath, taking in the sea of my teachers and my peers, and then begin.]

“You’re gonna be a camp counselor?” Matt said in disbelief.

“Yup. That’s the way it looks right now.” I shrugged.

“Where?” He asked

“Camp Seafarer. It’s in North Carolina.”

“Camp Sea-WHAT?” Matt asked skeptically.

“Seafarer.” I said.

“Ha. Anne’s gonna work at Camp SEAFAIRY this summer.” He pointed and laughed.

That was the initial reaction I received from my friends last year when I announced that I had just been asked to be the director of the musical at Camp Seafarer, for girls, in Arapahoe, N.C. They were a little doubtful to say the least. They all saw me as a hopeless cynical drama/music geek who limited herself to only black attire. As far as kids went, some of my friends had seen a faculty child use a lacrosse stick to launch a graphing calculator at me. However, from my point of view, it seemed a simple task. I had directed a one act at Tabor and I didn’t think directing a show with kids could be that much harder. I might be an only child, but I had been a babysitter since age 10 and now I lived in a dorm. I figured that taking care of a cabin full of girls and living with them every day couldn’t possibly be that tough. I had no reservations when I signed my contract. What I didn’t know, is that I had just signed away my soul to Satan for two months of the summer.

I spent most of the first two weeks wondering what crime I had committed on God’s green earth that fate chose me to be a camp counselor. Everything seemed to go wrong. Not only was I accidentally welcoming people to “Camp Seafairy” on opening day. Oh no. That was the VERY LEAST of my problems. Southern drawls whirled around me and wafted on every breeze, while my Chicago accent sliced through the air. I was an only child stuck in a world of six hundred little sisters. Out of these six hundred girls, I looked after and lived with twelve thirteen year olds, obsessed with soccer, boys, and the fifth Harry Potter book, the thought of which made me ill. I felt like it would be impossible to make a connection with any of them. No matter how hard I tried to relate to their problems and advise them, it just seemed unnatural.

I was also in charge of directing “The Secret Garden,” a musical which the Camp Director selected because it seemed like a “cute” musical for kids. She had assumed it to be a nice little story about a little girl who plants a few seeds in some forgotten garden and learns how to fit in with her new family. However, the show really turned out to be about a rich hunchback haunted by the ghost of his dead wife and a little girl hardened by the death of her parents in the cholera epidemic who has to leave India and live in his lonely colossal mansion in the middle of nowhere. The show was entirely inappropriate for kids ages seven to sixteen, calling for English and Yorkshire accents and a lyric soprano, not to mention two strong male leads which would now have to be sung by girls. I heard 109 children audition for the show. Out of 109 girls, seventy five percent sang “Tomorrow” from Annie. Suicide was starting to sound like a good option. Things were only complicated further when I was told that I would not be allowed to make cuts.  So now, not only had I ended up with 109 girls that I had to fit into a musical with only 12 roles, oh no, one of them was a 16 year old girl with turrets syndrome and was constantly screaming obscenities during rehearsal. In short, it was musical mayhem, an utter nightmare. My jaw dropped as I realized that I would be spending three hours daily in room with 109 girls trying to sing high “C’s” only to return at the end of the day to a cabin full of thirteen year old girls arguing over something so entirely trivial as speculations on who would die in the next Harry Potter book. I wanted to scream. My co-counselors and I started to replace the word “camper” with “hell-beast.” In otherwords “You look horrible, what happened last night?” “Oh, I had a run in with a hell beast.” Or “I just got a call; The hell-beasts are on the loose in the drama building, I’d better go over there and take care of the situation.”

One day, I was contemplating how bad a life sentence in prison could possibly be, when I unexpectedly had to take one of my girls to the health center. I was walking across a bridge with her and I was trying to make her laugh in an effort to distract her from her discomfort. Judging by the smile creeping across her face, it seemed like I had been relatively successful in humoring her. As we walked, she reached over and put her arm around my waste, and I put my arm around her shoulders. She looked up at me in this picture perfect moment and said, “You are so cool. You’re like a big sister, but a cool one who’s funny and doesn’t mess with my stuff.” She grinned and I laughed as I realized that in her own little thirteen-year-old way she was telling me that I had reached her, that for her, I had made a difference in just two weeks.

It became so vivid to me, then, what I had been doing wrong all this time. I had been so focused on what wasn’t going right for me that I had somehow let myself forget about these kids. Yeah, from time to time, things got hard, smiles weren’t genuine, and the hell beasts annoyed me beyond description. Those things were all distractions. I had forgotten that in signing that contract, I was agreeing to live not for myself, but for six hundred wonderfully individual girls who needed me to help them grow and learn. From that day forward, I dedicated myself to these campers who taught me so much about the importance of selflessness. Before I knew it, I felt like I wasn’t working at all.

It was around that time when I called Matt Linton to fill him in on how things had been going. I told him how the summer had begun horribly but that lately things had been going well. I told him about how my girls thought I was cool. His take on the situation was succinct and simply put. “You’re soooo going soft,” he said. I was totally opposed to that. I most certainly was not going SOFT. I was just getting… sentimental. I…cared.

Ok, Matt. I was going soft.

I hate to admit it, but I cried on the last night of camp during the candle light service. I cried and cried until there were no tears left and then I cried again after the campers left while I was packing my own things to go home as I realized that my most meaningful memories weren’t frustrating rehearsals or trying to avoid teenybopper conversations, but the look on the faces of girls who were bursting with pride as they took their final bow at the end of the play, girls who reached out to each other and supported each other at every turn, and in knowing that I was behind their successes, lessons, and confidence.

Since the end of camp, as my room-mate can attest, I receive atleast two long distance phone calls a week and innumerable instant messages from my campers.

The other day, I received an email from Betsy, one of my campers who was in the musical. She announced that she had just gotten cast in the musical at her middle school and that she couldn’t have done it without me. She called me a hero. And for the first time, I felt like one.  I was a big sister… but a cool one.

I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe in this:

Sooner or later, everyone will drop anchor in New York City.

Be it a year, a semester abroad, or a long weekend, people from all around the world will pay a visit to the place my father reverently calls “The Center of the Universe.”

I’ve said a few disparaging or disheartening things about this urban labyrinth, but I wouldn’t be living here if I didn’t love it. However, I’m not so in love with this city that I can’t recognized the misplaced overconfidence in this statement.

There is an undeniable dream-like quality that accompanies the uttering of the words “New York.” I want to be a part of it. My little home is on the 100th floor. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. It’s the city that never sleeps. Lets face it, if Amy Adams endorses New York City as the perfect place to unfold a fairy tale in her movie Enchanted, I’m inclined to believe her. She’s just so darn cute!

In my five years living here, I’ve ventured to tourist hot-spots like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve also discovered my own treasures, like the gorgeous story-book fountain by City Hall that is lit with gas lamps, their flames flickering like smoldering ballerina feet in the night. I’ve enjoyed a disparate array of cuisines from street food to five star restaurants. No matter how long I’m here, the infinite well of the city provides me with more scope for the imagination and my taste buds. Where else can you get pad thai delivered to your door at 3 AM?

I love the ability to disappear amongst the metal spires of skyscrapers and at the same time, I stand by the fact that even in this massive city, I still run into friends on the street. They vary from close friends to long lost coworkers. While this may not be everyone’s last stop, it certainly makes everyone’s “must see” list. I’ve crossed paths with almost every important person in my life while treading the metropolitan asphalt.

People always want to visit me here to get a proper tour from a “real New Yorker.” I love having them and it’s incredibly convenient and cost effective for me. Like Hermes, the Greek god of hospitality, I accept all visitors and newcomers with dutiful open arms, suggesting interesting off-the-beaten-path attractions and helping foreigners find the best subway routes- and I’m not the only one! Once, when my mom was on business here for her law firm, it was raining heavily and a man saw her without an umbrella and promptly walked her all the way back to her hotel, not taking no for an answer. When they arrived, he said, “Don’t ever let anyone tell you New Yorkers aren’t nice.” Then he promptly disappeared into the sea of passing umbrellas leaving no name and no trace.

However, I find I’m leaving the city less and less. It makes me ponder how this affects my mental health and most importantly my sense of perspective. New York might be a centrifuge for culture and commerce, but I’m not sure that it really is the center of the universe and without question, it isn’t the only place that matters inside of it.

New York sometimes feels like an inescapable womb in the process of breeding and evolving a new strain of subhuman. I shall call them:

Turtle People.

Just kidding.

But not really. Let’s take a ride, shall we?

When you decide to live in New York City, you run the risk of becoming a Turtle Person. I once stumbled up on this phenomena, and by stumbled upon I mean coined this term myself, while discussing what a battle it is to navigate the NYC subway system, pick up your morning coffee, and arrive at work unscathed and on time. I was commiserating with my friend, Pam, about how alone you can feel even in a packed subway car and how everyone moves through their day with their head inside their shell until they require food or some other service, and then they pop their heads out, blazing with this incredibly unattractive, blinding sense of entitlement. If two Turtle People pop their heads out of their shells at the same time…

The results could be disasterous.

This is the danger of letting New York trap you. which I don’t necessarily mean in a physical sense. It’s very easy to get sucked into a grueling routine. Every weekday, when I plunge down into the subway at rush hour, I begin to feel my turtle shell forming and hardening. I bend my elbows, clench my fists, and forge ahead through the flow of people towards the turn-styles. I used my shoulders defensively, protecting my iPhone like a linebacker driving the ball through a veritable phalanx of opposition. I brace myself as I weed through people rushing at me, trying just as fervently to go in the opposite direction, all of our shells thickening as we advance deeper into the underbelly of the city. I arrive at the doors of my train as they are closing. In my way: A tiny old woman who is unsure of whether or not to enter.

“MOVE!” I bellow at her, head emerging from my shell as I try desperately to make my train. I completely ignore the fact that the woman could be a tourist who doesn’t understand English and I disregard that old platitude about “respecting your elders.”

You get the picture? Turtle People. Tell your friends.

That’s the risk you run when you live here. Of course, there’s a degree of expectation that you will get used to all of the people packed into small spaces. At first its just a matter of putting on your headphones and getting to a state of Zen, but eventually, this develops into a defensiveness and a willingness to be combative. It’s a jungle out there and you have to eat or be eaten from time to time.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have also felt the immense power of communal love in New York City. Last summer, my parents and I were in a car accident on the Upper West Side. We were in a cab on our way home from my graduation from NYU. I was in a gentle slumber, leaning on my mother’s shoulder. I was full of good food and celebratory dreams when I was shaken from my sleep by the perpendicular impact of our taxi with a woman’s car that was speeding across town. I woke, crumpled against the divider. Stupidly none of us were wearing seat belts and I was completely disoriented. My mother was gasping for breath, repeating the words, “My chest is crushed.” The combined weight of me and my father had slammed into her and sharply knocked the wind out of her. As I got my bearings, I realized my father was clutching his head. I could see his head had a huge gash across his forehead. He was talking quickly and saying “I’m ok,” not to mention trying to tell a few jokes as he stumbled out onto the street. I knew he couldn’t be too badly hurt because his jokes were at the same degree of “corny” that they always are, but the blood made it look worse than it was.

I followed him, trying to help him settle on the curb when I noticed how many people were rushing out of their stores onto the street. Apparently the crash had been rather loud. People gathered around us, trying to help my dad and steadying me as I dropped my diploma and my program. They carefully began checking my face and arms for scrapes and blood.

“I have to get my mom,” I said to the woman who was leading me to the sidewalk, but when we turned towards the cab, a gentleman was already helping her, supporting her weight on his arm. As an EMT student who happened to be passing helped my dad into the neck brace he was carrying with him, a shop-owner brought out plastic chairs and bottled water for me and my mother.

The traffic on Broadway had been brought to a halt and as my senses reawakened and the pounding in my head subsided, I realized that for every person that was helping us on our side of the street, just as many were helping the female driver who had hit us on the other side.

When I looked at my dad lying on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely from his forehead, I started to lose it and began to cry. I didn’t see her approaching, but a homeless woman put her hand on my shoulder. Normally I would have glared and pulled away in disgust, but that day I didn’t. She squeezed my shoulder with her warm leathery hand and said. “He’s going to be OK, Mama.” She smiled reassuringly. I stopped crying as we locked eyes and she calmed me down with her steady, concerned gaze.

I kept dropping the papers I was holding. The woman who was looking after my mother picked them up for me. She noted the purple NYU insignia on them and smiled. “I went there. What a great school!”

“I g-graduated today.” I stammered. It was all I could think to say.

She giggled good naturedly and looked between my mom and me, taking both of our hands. “You’ll remember this day for the rest of your lives!” We all laughed.

That day was such a testament to the spirit of New York- the spirit that got this amazing city through immense tragedy and hardship during 9/11/2001, the spirit that made that Wesley Autrey Sr. leap onto the slippery tracks of the New York Subway in order to hold down 19 year old epileptic, Cameron Hellopeter, saving his life by keeping his shaking body still as the train passed over them.

So yes, we run the risk of becoming Turtle People, but being here isn’t always a battle. Sometimes it’s the greatest opportunity of your lifetime and an absolute honor to be a New Yorker.