Flag Raising

        Everybody up for Flag Raising!

        I hated those words from the first time I arrived at camp.  I suppose they needed some reason to get everyone out of bed at the same time each morning, and make-up application and personal grooming only worked on the girls, but I wasn ‘t getting up without a fight.  I gave my counsellor my personal opinions on the separation of church and state, pointing out that it wasn’t the Christian flag that was being raised. 

        Which reminds me; a message to my counsellors.  I am sorry now for all that I did to you.  Once I became a counsellor and understood the pressure from above to get my campers to conform, I felt bad about what I put my counsellors through.  It didn’t stop me from putting the camp director through the wringer, dumping water on the camp cook, and leaving a stuffed wetsuit in the nurse’s bed.  I never held those jobs, so I still feel pretty good about those antics, but for my counsellors I feel nothing but guilt.

        Anyway.  Flag Raising.  A hold-out from antiquity when my parents went to camp, and were expected to salute the flag, sing O Canada, and then march in straight lines into the dining hall for breakfast, cheerfully ready to drink the swamp water that passed for Kool-Aid.  Flag Raising.   It was a tradition that could have been worse, as I found out when a new camp director decided to add physical exercise to the morning regimen.  Jerks, it was to be called.  I always thought that was a proper noun referring to the leaders of the activity, rather than a common noun referring to the activity itself. 

       Eventually though, flag-raising was saved. Some of our more benevolent leaders decided to liven up the experience by adding an element of surprise and suspense to the occasion. They couldn't smuggle something into the flag bundle every morning, but they did it often enough. What would fall out of the wrapped flag when it opened?  Cheerios?  Pants?  The waterfront director’s bikini?   That was worth getting out of bed to find out.        

        My all-time favorite was one I engineered myself.  The elderly camp nurse made the mistake one day of hanging her undergarments on a clothes line behind her cabin, and a bra that had to be at least a 50 double-D was too much to resist.  I wasn’t the actual culprit in this case.  I just knew who it was.  My role was simply to add a finishing touch to the enterprise. 

        When the flag, and the bra, unfurled the next morning, the question on everyone’s mind would be the same.  Whose is it?  I simply pointed out that since there was no name on the bra, we could choose whose name to put on it.  Any female staff member would do, but the more preposterous the name on the bra the better.  Camp can be cruel.