Girl Meets God by Lauren F. Winner

Author:Lauren F. Winner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

EVEN IF YOU GROW UP Jewish, you learn the Lord’s Prayer—at least, if you grow up Jewish in the South. I learned it at summer camp, the July after fourth grade, at Eagle’s Nest, one of the dozens and dozens of camps in or around Brevard, North Carolina. Far enough away from home that I slept there overnight, but near enough that my parents came on visitors’ weekend, and other weekends besides, and signed me out of camp for the afternoon, and drove me to town for ice cream.

I didn’t like this camp. Renowned for turning girls and boys into rugged, muscular outdoorsmen, Eagle’s Nest offered all sorts of sporting, mountainous activities: hiking, canoeing, nature trail walking, backpacking, rapelling. In the three years I went there, I never signed up for one. I took arts and crafts, drama, Back Porch Cooking, anything to keep me inside. In drama the biggest role I won was one of fifteen nameless orphans in Oliver. In arts and crafts I made yarn-and-twigs God’s eyes, which my mother proudly displayed on bookshelves at home, and in Back Porch Cooking I learned to make bread-and-butter pickles, and Queen Anne’s lace fritters, and blackberry jam. I never did learn to like hiking. I was much happier when my parents realized I was a hopeless, happy nerd, and started sending me to academic camps instead, camps where I took poetry-writing classes and German courses and generally made the summer as indistinguishable from the classroom school year as possible.

On top of the cooking lessons, I also had my first lesson in prayer at Eagle’s Nest. Religion snuck into Eagle’s Nest only on Sunday mornings, when the camp gathered in an arc of wooden benches for folk songs and Quaker-like silences. After the fifth Joan Baez tune, we gathered around the flag pole, watched the Stars and Stripes fly up to the sky, and recited the Lord’s Prayer. There were no printed, smudged ditto sheets, like there were for the folk songs; everyone knew this prayer by heart.

After the second Sunday, I looked at Marianne, my Resident Advisor, whom I adored. She was a sturdy kind of beautiful. She had thick, shapely calves, and hair like a horse’s tail, with blonde in it that didn’t come from a bottle. They were wasting her in the grammar school cabin. She should have been with the teenage girls, so the fifteen-year-old soon-to-be-waifs could have seen they didn’t have to starve themselves to be pretty. I bet Marianne never drank Diet Coke or worried about eating dessert. The last night of camp, she told me I was her favorite, and I was thrilled, but three weeks later, my parents separated and I didn’t have any stamps and I never wrote Marianne a letter, as I had promised to do.

That Sunday morning I turned to her and whispered, “I don’t know this prayer.”

“I was beginning to notice that,” she said. “I’ll teach you.”

Later that day, during nap-time, perhaps, or maybe when we campers were

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