Back on April 7, 2007, I posted about my years growing up, but inadvertently left out a description of my “summer world” as I described it when I wrote My Closet Years – Part One. I want to digress a bit and revisit that world because it was the best time of my life during those years. The summers helped me make it through life and exposed me to the first gay couple in a committed relationship that I ever met, although I did not understand the nature of their relationship at the time.
My summer world centered on our summer home on Brantingham Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The photo above is a view across the lake. Our “camp” as they are referred to in that area had been acquired by my mother’s parents when they moved back to the USA in 1938 from Panama (my mother was actually born in Honduras). It was a large four bedroom house on a beautiful lake that had been part of the summer estate of the Jay R. Monroe, the founder of Monroe Calculating Machines (actually, it had been the caretaker’s house). The property was eventually expanded by the construction of a boathouse with three bedrooms as well. Other than an interlude after my parents moved to Virginia, the camp has been in the family since 1938. Many of the homes on the lake have similar histories of being passed down through the generations.
My mother’s parents were amazing people who I unfortunately never got to really know because my grandfather died when I was 11 and my grandmother had a stroke and was an invalid for many years before her death. He was from Upstate New York and a self-made success story, having made a goodly amount of money working on the building of the Panama Canal – he received a medal from President Theodore Roosevelt – which he used to put himself through college and medical school. He was both smart and physically beautiful based on old photographs. After serving as an Army doctor in World War I, he signed on with United Fruit Company as an administrator of some of its hospitals in Honduras and Panama.
My grandmother in contrast was a New Orleans belle who must have been quite the black sheep of the family. When the US entered into World War I, she signed on as an Army nurse and traveled across much of Western Europe and spent time in Paris and Rome. Once the war ended, the idea of going back to the life of a normal southern woman in New Orleans must have been unappealing to her. Like my grandfather, she signed on as a nurse with United Fruit at the war’s end and met my grandfather in Panama. For nearly twenty years they lived an existence like something out of the British Raj, with servants, stables, and other niceties, until they moved back to Upstate New York to care for my grandfather’s aging parents. My mother still has many photos from those years and it is a time that no longer exists.
From 1938 onward, my grandparents spent the summers at the camp. As a child, we likewise spent much of each summer at Brantingham, along with other relatives. There we learned to sail, swim, canoe, and water ski. It was a magical time in a gorgeous setting. Among the relatives often at camp were my grandfather’s brother (a university professor at the University of Arizona) and his wife, Mildred. Often there would be so many people that we kids would be relegated to sleeping in a tent to make room for the adult guests. Also present were my Aunt Mildred’s brother and what I now know was his partner, who rented a small cabin each summer on an adjacent property. We children thought them as simply “confirmed bachelors” and they were included in all family events at the camp and they often hosted wonderful parties at their place next door. These two men were kind and wonderful to all of us children and, indeed, we considered them to be uncles of sorts. They died in the 1970’s after having been together for well over thirty years, the second of them dying within a short time after the first, basically of a broken heart.
In addition to introducing me unknowingly to a stable gay couple, the camp provided me with a place where I could be popular and excel in sports – I was a very good slalom water skier - unlike my existence at home where I was terrible at baseball, football and basketball. In fact, I was often among the last selected for teams in PE class. In short, I got to be someone other than the smart kid who sometimes got called faggot or sissy. Moreover, our friends at camp, especially when I was a teenager, seemed so much more dynamic than those at home. Most of them coming from all around New York and some from New Jersey, and many were the children of my mother's friends from her later teenage years at the lake. Needless to say, I had some major crushes on some of the guys. This was especially true of one friend who often stayed with us since his family’s camp was rotated in 2 week periods through various members of his extended family. His name was also Michael and I loved him so much. When he stayed with us, he and I had to share a double bed (most of the seven bedrooms had double beds) and I was in heaven lying beside him. I wonder at times if he ever knew my feelings for him, since he was long enamored with one of my sisters (the one who died in 2001).
But for the summers at camp – and to a lesser extent my skiing world – I probably would have killed myself before I ever made it to age 20. I have not been back to the camp in a number of years due to work schedule, etc., plus the fact that it’s a very long drive from Norfolk. Amazingly, one of my friends from those enchanted summers years lives in Norfolk and attends my church.
