Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

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Last summer they quarantined the camp two weeks after we’d arrived.

Uncle Marvin called all us counselors into the dining room one July night and announced briefly that there was a polio scare at a nearby camp. He went on to say that whereas all of our campers had of course been vaccinated, he nonetheless felt it would be in the best interests of public safety if we voluntarily agreed not to leave the campgrounds until the threat had subsided. The words “public safety” were Uncle Marvin’s own. He was the principal of a junior high school in the Bronx, and he also happened to own Camp Marvin, which is why it was called Camp Marvin and not Camp Chippewa or Manetoga or Hiawatha. He could have called it “Camp Levine,” I suppose, Levine being his last name, but I somehow feel his choice was judicious. Besides, the name Marvin seemed to fit a camp whose owner was a man given to saying things like “public safety,” especially when he became Uncle Marvin for the summer.

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