Author: Bob Benz

Well, Chris, after long and sometimes heated discussions, your mother and I have decided to ship you off to a nice secular humanist summer camp in the Smokies. Maybe that will straighten you out. God knows, we haven’t been able to.

Which gets me waxing nostalgic (I do that a lot, don’t I?)

I remember my one brush with summer camp — Camp Rosary. A nice Catholic retreat somewhere out in the woods of Pennsylvania. My brother Steve and I were loaded on a bus and whisked away from home for the first extended time in our young lives. I still have vivid memories of that place. Raiding other cabins. Sack races. The canteen where we bought snacks. The spiffy Jesus crafts. And these strange women who played folk tunes around the campfire each night. I remember them playing “Leaving on a Jetplane” over and over and over …

It was only toward the end of camp that we found out these women were nuns. They sure didn’t act like the sinister Sister Mary Lucille of St. Anselm Grade School fame. They seemed, well, normal. Even hippiefied, in a nice, safe Catholic kinda way. More Vatican II fallout, I guess.

“Life is too short,” Jim Harrison writes in Just Before Dark, “for me to approach a meal with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute.” Having read his collection of nonfiction three times now, I’m pretty sure he means it. I said I’m pretty sure, but then I’m a Christian Humanist Isolationist Redneck Swine living just outside the shadow of the Talladega Super Speedway, not a Poet Zombie Chef and self-confessed “Food Bully” traversing the republic in a red Land Cruiser. Unfortunately, this ranks me just below a “hanging chad” in importance as a book reviewer, but I never cared for Florida’s Atlantic coast anyhow. Give me the mullet toss at the Flora-Bama any day of the week…

The headline on the previous entry should read “Fucking Southern Baptists.” I tried to judiciously use asterisks to spell the f-word, but they were edited out by the program, apparently.