Letters from Home: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957

Robert Cooperman

Knowing I was lost-puppy homesick,

my mother wrote every day,

breezy letters to let me know that she,

Dad, and my kid brother missed me

(about which I was dubious)

and were hoping I was enjoying myself,

(I wasn’t) and eating healthy,

delicious camp food,

which, if she were fed that slop

she’d have rescued me immediately

from that Sing-Sing.

I read her letters once, reassurance

there was still a world beyond

the metaphorical barbed wire of the camp,

and didn’t look at them again.

The one I did treasure was from my dad,

his chicken-scratch not my mom’s

pen-beautiful cursive: a man

who wrote only when figuring out

his piecework-pay for the week.

He told me how the Dodgers—

recently absconding for L.A.

like sneak thieves—were doing;

both of us wishing them rat-chattering

torment in the NL cellar, forever,

and confided he’d made a big score

on a bet, and had a surprise for me

when I was freed from that pit

of deepest hell: my reward for sticking

it out and not whining, too much.

"Letters from Home" is part of a forthcoming collection entitled A Tale of Two Summers.

Some kids love going to summer camp. I wasn’t one of them. So I cherished the letters I got from my mother, and even more, the one I got from my father since he never wrote anything except to figure out his weekly pay and to work the daily crossword puzzles. And of course I cried my little wussy eyes out with each letter.