Gone East

My youth? No. No Cub Scouts. No little league. No library book club. My youth was void of organized anythings. My mother did sponsor a Camp Fire Girls group, and each year they'd sell Russell Stove candy for their fundraiser and I would always sneak open the boxes and push my finger thru the bottom of the chocolates looking for the orange cream -- the only flavor I liked in the box. To this day, I hate chocolates. I get them often as thank you/xmas gifts from students and parents, and i always give them away to others because all I can do with them is push my fingers thru looking for that orange cream.

However, I did spend a couple of years working for the Girl Scouts of Rhode Island when I was in my early 30s as their computer expert (stop laughing -- in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King) until I took a day off and while looking for a file (no one understood my file hierarchy) they found a letter to a friend detailing how I had recently spent a summer night snorting coke with this 20 year old str8 neighbor boy who was only wearing boxer shorts at the time. The letter detailed how I spent the night wishing I could snort the lines off of his thigh instead of the mirror we were using. It seems the Girl Scouts don't find snorting cocaine off of young men's bare thighs as part of the GS oath. Geez -- that would have gotten me a merit badge in the Boy Scouts.

Sherm's mom sponsored a Camp Fire Girl's group? That explains a few things (not sure what, but it's got to explain something...). I was a Camp Fire Girl... well, first I was a Blue Bird.

I wanted to be a Blue Bird and Camp Fire Girl more than a Brownie and Girl Scout because I liked the Blue Bird and Camp Fire Girl uniforms way more than the brown Brownie and green Girl Scout uniforms. Even at seven, I knew I looked much better in blue than those earthtones the Girl Scouts wore! (If I was a "fall", I might have ended up in Girl Scouts.)

By the way, I sold those chocolate candies! They weren't Russell Stover candies, they were their own thing made for Camp Fire Girls. They were actually really good (but then, I like chocolate). I was awesome at selling those door to door (back when kids would do such things). I pretty much always sold the most of my group... it was the confidence of that blue uniform, I'm sure.

Nayopa (my Camp Fire Girl name)

ps: Rick was an Indian Guide... the boy equivalent of Camp Fire Girls! (They merged in the politically-correct days.)