Frog Time
A personal essay
Sometimes when you’re looking at a moment of your life too closely, it’s difficult to see the bigger picture. It’s like staring at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and only seeing a splotch of blue, not the whole majestic thing. You miss the yellow moon and the swirls in the sky, the village below and the mountains in the distance.
I spent the summer of my fifteenth year volunteering at a summer day camp. I was what they called a blue shirt, an unpaid volunteer working simply because I loved it, and I passed five long days a week outside in the intense North Carolina heat playing with young kids. We played tag of all types—elbow, freeze, toilet, among others—in addition to many rounds of kickball, archery, soccer, and art. It was hard spending 9-hour days in the often 100-degree weather without the incentive of a modest paycheck at the end of the week. The kids complained about the sun which grinded on the gears of the counselors. Water breaks were frequent and tedious. I helped in any way I could. It was my job, as I saw it, to help make the days run smoother.
The first day of a new session was always a challenge. Some of the five- and six-year-olds were scared and reluctant to leave their mom or dad. Some were so nervous they refused to talk. Some cried. I crouched down beside them and tried to convince them that it would be okay, that their world would keep turning, that the day would get better and that, come on, let’s go meet some friends who are just as scared as we are. It worked in enough instances that I adopted it as my mantra. It lit a spark within my eyes to see them run for the swings or the monkey bars or the coveted zipline with a new friend.
Sometimes, though, I encountered challenges that were not as easily solved. Sometimes I encountered challenges that would last the whole summer long; challenges I did not yet know how to approach.
There was a boy in our huddle called Charlie*. He was taller than the others and a good bit heavier, too. His dark brown hair was a little bit too long. It sat like a mushroom top upon his head and fringed down just below his bushy eyebrows. He had two large front teeth with a fair-sized gap in the middle. As the counselors began to talk to the group of 25 6-year-olds about the rules and expectations of camp, I had suspicions that Charlie would need a little more attention than the other kids in the group. I could already see his attention span waning, his eyes wandering, his ears closing off to the world around him.
“Does anybody know what the most important rule at camp is?”
It was every counselor’s favorite thing to ask. If your kids can answer that question, then there’s a chance that perhaps, since they’re the ones telling you the rules, they will be more inclined to follow them. It never quite worked like that, but it was a beacon of hope to grasp onto, in any case.
I watched the nervous and big round eyes staring at the counselors. One attentive little girl’s hand went up, and she waited patiently to be called on before speaking.
“Keep your hands to yourself,” she said.
“Great, that is really important. We shouldn’t ever put our hands on anybody else. If you have a problem, make sure you come talk to us. Does anybody else know another important rule at camp?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Charlie push off of the ground and leave his seat, running after something only he could see. I followed after him and asked him to come sit down, come sit down, come sit down. No matter how many times I said it, he still wouldn’t listen. Selective hearing, I thought, great.
When I caught up with him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders to keep him from venturing further away from our group, I found out how strong he was. When he wanted to break free from my grasp, he did it no problem. A few seconds later he caught whatever it was he had been chasing and he stood still, juggling the small creature in his hands.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A frog.”
“Frogs are cool, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Well how about we put him back on the ground so we can go back and sit down with our friends?”
“No, he’ll run away.”
It took some coaxing, but Charlie finally placed the small frog into an area of trees free from the foot traffic that would tromp through throughout the day.
We spent many days like this, Charlie chasing frogs, me chasing Charlie. I later learned that Charlie was diagnosed with ADHD as well as a mild form of autism. Our interactions were starting to make more sense. He knew what he loved, and he loved frogs. There were days when he didn’t want to entertain lunch because he would rather be crouched in the small creek searching for frogs.
Charlie was my buddy. While the counselors I worked with wrangled the other 20-some-odd kids in the huddle, I kept an eye on Charlie. We were always on an expedition to hunt for frogs. Charlie had no qualms about leaping into the creek, soaking his shoes and his once-white mid-calf length socks. I tried my best to discourage it, but it was hard to do when he was so determined. I tried to talk to him about what else he liked to do—did he play soccer, baseball, did he like school—but his answer was always the same: “I’m gonna look for frogs.”
As his frog obsession began to cause his behavior to get more and more out of control, we decided it was only appropriate to limit the amount time we spent with frogs, which proved to be a lot more difficult than anticipated. Frog time, as we appropriately called it, was a privilege that Charlie would have to earn. He hated that. When he didn’t follow directions or when he tried to wander off, he didn’t earn frog time. Sometimes he kicked me. He yelled, he cried, and he frustrated me to the ends of the earth.
“Charlie, if you want frog time then you have to stay with the group.”
“I want frog time!”
He tried to run to the creek on a daily basis. Sometimes I could catch him, but sometimes he would twist his body and throw his weight in such a way as to break free, but not without giving me a few new bruises.
That summer was one of the most challenging I have ever had. I came home exhausted and sore, barely feeling like one night was enough to rejuvenate for the next day.
I spent six long summers at camp, and if you had told me then that I would look back to my frog-filled volunteer summer and remember it as one of my favorites, I wouldn’t have believed you. Some of the fondest memories I have of my time at camp include Charlie and crouching in the creek, searching for frogs. At the time it looked like purple bruises on my shins and muddy splotches of creek water splashed onto my clothes, but looking at it now, I see it as a truly priceless bonding experience I was lucky enough to share with a uniquely passionate and special child.
*Name changed for confidentiality.
The City Lights of San Jose
A personal essay
The importance of the scene before me would be entirely lost to me for the duration of time I spent looking at it. The city lights of San Jose would forever be burned into my memory. It’s hard to imagine just how many light bulbs lit up San Jose, Costa Rica that night. Thousands? Millions, probably. Sitting on that hill, overlooking the sparkle of the city at night, I could feel magic pulsing through me. That’s what the lights were; they were magic. Each one made me feel. If only one had burned out, would it have changed anything? Who’s to say.
The lights were like stars, ground stars, like the world had been flipped, turned upside down, like the ground was the sky and if I leaped from that hill it would have swallowed me whole, like you would imagine being consumed by the infinity of space. Everyone was cautious not to speak, for speaking would disturb the silence, and the magic would be lost to a callous ambush of imperfect words that would never be as good as the sight below. The city spoke for itself; it didn’t need our help.
I didn’t understand the feelings that consumed my heart that night. I didn’t know how to pinpoint them at the time. I felt a sense of complete and utter happiness, a sense of belonging, yet at the same time a sense of all consuming isolation. In that moment, I knew I belonged in the world, but not with the people I was with.
I didn’t understand how I could feel so alone while sitting on this hill with 18 other people who I had just spent the week doing mission work with. Wasn’t that experience supposed to unite us forever? Didn’t scrubbing graffiti off of the walls at the ACJ YMCA mean anything? Weren’t we going to be best friends for the rest of our lives? That’s what we said, anyways—friends forever. But even at 18 years old I knew there was no way to maintain a friendship with people you simply didn’t connect with—not a meaningful friendship, at any rate.
Why didn’t I connect? Other people on the hill that night seemed to. They sat next to each other and shared an unspoken appreciation for one another, engaged in a conversation that didn’t even need words. Their spirits connected, like soul mates.
The thing about soul mates is that they’re not just a romantic sentiment. A soul mate is a deeply connected friend—someone in the world you were meant to find. Once you meet that person, you feel like you’ve found the only person on Earth who understands you, I mean really understands you. You’re not afraid to tell them the most embarrassing or destructive things that swim through the twisted and obscure crevices of your mind because they get it, and they’re not going to judge you or tell anybody else just how strange you are. Your secrets are their secrets; your feelings are their feelings.
The city lights of San Jose made me feel like there was something, someone, I was missing. Like there was someone, somewhere, who could understand the way those lights made me feel; I wouldn’t even have to explain it to them because they, too, would simply feel it.
I often think back to that moment as an 18-year-old, sitting among people who were only temporary fixtures in my life, looking at one of the most beautiful sights my eyes had ever seen. I realize now that all I wanted that night was someone to share that magic with, someone who I could have entire wordless conversations with, who understood the bits of myself I kept hidden away, a real connection.
It’s been more than 10 years since that night on the hill in San Jose. I am still looking for my person. I am still trying to find that connection. And I still wonder how it’s possible that the stars can make me feel so infinite and so small at the same time.
Crescendo
Critical Preface
An excerpt from Grace’s senior thesis
…It is such a simple concept, to write the books you want to read, and it’s a philosophy that has followed me for years, begging the stories inside of me to come out in such a way that I would be willing to spend an afternoon reading them myself. There is more to writing than just the physical act of scribbling words onto a piece of paper. Writing is about storytelling, about relating to the world around me, and about sharing experiences so that I don’t feel so alone. Writing is an escape, not always an escape away from the world I know so well, but an escape into the uncharted paths of the world I live within, to the places I’ve only been able to dream about…
[One] author who influences the way I write is Jonathan Safran Foer. His words hold a particular melody within them, and the delicate way he approaches difficult subjects, like the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, is an inspiration beyond what I could ever hope to create with my own words. That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. His books encouraged me to start thinking about having moments within my own writing that transcend the confines of the book. When I write, I try to consciously stretch beyond the threshold of the pages, much like Jonathan Safran Foer does with his art. It’s a task proving difficult to master, but the simple act of trying to draw certain feelings and life lessons out of my words is one that, practice pending, will lift my own writing to a level that may one day match that of Mr. Foer’s. It’s a lofty dream, no doubt, but the task is proving an exciting challenge…
I love putting words together and forming them into interesting sentences—like the alphabet is a puzzle and I am the master of the game. The dialogue, though, is my favorite element of storytelling. Dialogue is always the most fun to write; I love the feeling of different voices emerging as each character speaks. Speaking the words aloud as I write helps develop the voices of my characters, and it helps to filter out the things that are not natural to speech. Dialogue has always been one of my strongest aspects of writing… I work to give my writing a certain musical quality. Much like a catchy song, when I write, I work to mold my words in such a way that they read with a certain and defined cadence and melody…
It’s hard to say where I will be in the next year, two years, or even five years of my life, but I believe that part of being a writer is not always knowing the next step. It’s all a matter of not letting the uncertainty scare you and simply letting things fall as they will. It’s about trying something—anything—everything—new, and using those experiences to strengthen the words on the page.
It’s fun to get a little lost every once in a while—finding your way back is the exciting part.
Besides, that’s what makes the best stories, isn’t it?