As he prepared for his shower Monday night, my 9-year-old son briefed me on his week at Junior Naturalist Camp at Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center.
"Guess what?" he said excitedly. "Tomorrow we get to dissect owl pellets."
"What are owl pellets?" I said. "You mean, like, owl poop?"
"No, Daddy," he said confidently.
"So what are they?" I persisted.
"I don't know; ask Mommy," he said, deflecting the question. "But they are definitely not poop."
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For the record, owls expel undigested food waste through their mouths. It's kind of like eliminating through the Northern Passage.
"What does dissect mean?" I said, trying to keep the conversation afloat.
"I think you know," he said, clearly tired of being interrogated.
Camps - or more accurately, "enrichment opportunities" for children - are part of the middle-class experience in America. Whether they are for education or surrogate day care is up for grabs.
We usually let each of our boys pick one or two week-long camps to break up the summer. Someone once said, "Boys are like dogs; they need to be run every day," and camps are an institutionalized way of burning off energy.
Our two sons have been to day camps, soccer camps, lacrosse camps, church camps, even Legos camp. We live in a small mountain community, so sending the boys off to camp is sort of an experiment in geographic diversity. That said, many of the boys at camp at the Nature Center this week are my son's soccer buddies. So much for branching out.
Still, camps offer a break from routine and subtle learning opportunities. One day at work, a friend told me that her son was overcoming his aversion to denim pants while at Tennessee Aquarium Camp this summer.
Our son, meanwhile, was torn over whether to take a large backpack with a soft harness or a smaller pack with a drawstring to Junior Naturalist camp. We went back and forth for an hour before settling on drawstrings.
I remember when our older son went to his first sleep-away camp, I found my mind wandering at work: "I wonder what he's having for lunch right now?" I saw this is as practice for an eventual empty nest.
I only went to camp once as a youngster, to overnight church camp at Fall Creek Falls State Park. One of my few memories of that week 43 years ago was a camp leader watching me mop the dining hall and telling me, "I can tell you haven't done much mopping before, son."
Back home, I told my father this story, which infuriated him. A former Army sergeant, he used to conduct white-glove inspections of my housecleaning. Anyone who said his son couldn't handle a mop was sadly misinformed.
I found the controversy entertaining.
This is the point of kid camps - to step outside the mundane and begin to build a lifetime or personal anecdotes.
On the second day of nature camp, my son awoke excited about a canoe trip that day.
"So is it harder to paddle upstream or downstream?" I asked.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I wasn't paying attention when they talked about that. I'll figure it out and tell you tonight."
Ah, the joy of discovery.
Contact Mark Kennedy at 423-757-6645 or mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.