S'mores and Campfires - Remembering Camping Adventures and Car Trips of a Boomer

As I sit at the cabin I look around and take an inventory of the things on the exposed shelves that were important to my parents when they built this cabin; blue/green insulators from electric poles, fishing poles and hooks, kites, garden hats, hand drawn pictures from neighbor children who now have children of their own, oyster shell ashtrays, Olympia Beer trays, a chest that was resurrected from water-logged splinters. Now there is electric heat and running water and indoor plumbing, but the memories can never be replaced. Even the bottle with barnacles on the outside has a place of honor on the driftwood mantle.

Are we all so busy now racing to our jobs and our appointments at the gym that we can't take just a moment to meander down Memory Lane? I hope not. Remember what it was like to make S'mores and tell stories around the campfire? The graham crackers ready by the side, the stick you cut just for the purpose of roasting the marshmallows, and the Hershey's chocolate bar. You had to have just the right number of squares. Then roast the marshmallows to a golden brown all over and hope it didn't just slide around on the stick instead of allowing you to turn and roast evenly. And that first bite! Is there anything better? It triggers the synapses even in adulthood and allows you to go right back to that first bite from the very first campfire. The stories were always better than what you can find on TV now, maybe because there was human contact and they were made up and handed down from generation to generation. The human connection was almost as important as the S'mores were.

Think about what a gift it would be to your children to spend a morning telling them about what you did when you were their age. Better yet, go for a drive and show them where you lived and describe what you did. Start building that bond that can be so quickly destroyed by time and distance - but it doesn't have to be if you start building it now. Tell them what you did when you were their age, where you went and... just silly things, like what you ate. They will be shocked to realize we didn't have microwaves or video games in our youth! What we had was a camp in the woods and walks on the beach and times with our friends and family where we actually talked! All in all, not a bad way to grow up.