“Vacation Bible School.”
I was reminded of this tonight while walking, and seeing a sign advertising the “Lava Lava Island” (?) vacation Bible school at a local church.
There was a church near the bank my parents used. (Equitable Trust, Ingleside Avenue, long subsumed by some other big banking company.) I remember seeing the pennant posted on its lawn and thinking: That’s just not right.
And I could spin that bank into a dozen other memories, but I have a long day tomorrow.
My folks and I have long availed ourselves of the services of Baltimore County’s independent local banks, though I can’t remember the names of most of the ones from my childhood (the 1980s). I do remember Fairfax Bank, now Susquehanna Bank of Maryland (the whole family still uses ‘em). Now I like them for the fact that the tellers and manager know us by name, the neighborhood charm of the place, and the jars of Snyder’s pretzel logs on the counters. As a kid, I liked them for the purple wrapper, mystery-flavored Dum-Dums and Life Savers the tellers gave my parents to give my brother and me.
Ah, vacation Bible school. I grew up Baptist so I have a whole repressed section in my brain file for an occassion such as this. Oddly enough though, the first thing that popped into my head when I read this was from a time I was teaching, not vacationing, and it really has nothing to do with VBS.
I was about 15 and I went with our church to a rural Amish area in Ohio and some out-in-the-sticks camp. We led VBS for the area kids and I remember this picture of me reading to a group of Amish kids and my hair is in this huge surfer pompedor and is so blonde it’s almost yellow. This was a combo of high speed blowdrying and enough Clorox to bleach a pack of hyenas.
The first night we were there, we had bible study around the bonfire and then were left to entertain ourselves until we fell asleep. Needless to say, a bunch of 15-year-old, high-energy Baptist boys away from home weren’t going to be going to bed anytime soon. Unfortunately, rural Amish camps aren’t very entertaining.
The only thing we could find were these huge wooden spools used by electric companies for winding powercords. The camp was on pretty hilly property so we took maybe three of these spools and taught ourselved how to balance on them and move them forward up and down the hill. We stayed up until almost dawn determined to ride our spools from one end of the camp to the other. My legs still ache thinking about it.
As a sub-memory to this, I also remember thinking how cool one of my friends was because he wore a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt and Polo shorts to paint in. Now that’s high class.
What wonderful memories, exactly what I hoped people would be inspired to share. The Dum-Dums sent me into a reverie about how disparaged they were as Halloween treats. I seem to recall it was considered very bad form to give out Dum-Dums alone, without chocolate, but I loved them.
And I remembered doing the same thing with spools at a retreat sponsored by my church. What was it about church camps and those spools?