Bad Advice: Summer Camp Edition

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Fourteen summers ago, my oldest kid went to sleepaway camp for the first time, and the advice I gave them in one of my letters seems just bad enough to be worth including in this column.

Plus, publishing it buys me some time to try to come up with appropriately terrible answers for the dwindling handful of questions I have lying around.

If you haven’t submitted a question, PLEASE DO! Remember: there are no bad questions, only bad answers. (If you’ve sent me a question that I haven’t answered, I’ve failed you, and I’m sorry. This is harder than it looks. I’ll keep trying.)

In the meantime, here’s some bad advice I once mailed to an eleven-year-old:

[Mostly dull opening paragraphs redacted; they included a discussion of the camp’s policy of forcing newly arrived campers to write a two-sentence-minimum note to their parents, which was then scanned into a computer and emailed to us as proof that they were still alive.]

Candles.

I understand, unless I misread your handwriting once it was scanned into the computer, that among your activities is “candles.” I assume this refers to the making of candles and not, say, the lighting of them, which seems like it would get old in a hurry.

Now, look here: this is fine so far as it goes – you want to make some candles at summer camp, I won’t stand in your way – but I have to strongly caution you against falling too deeply in love with the candle lifestyle. Candles as a means of illumination – and, by extension, a marketable consumer product – have been obsolete for well over a century. Personally, outside of Hanukkah and birthdays, I have not used a candle since the mid-1990’s, and offhand I struggle to think of a single personal acquaintance who has not similarly switched over to electric light, usually exclusively.

What am I trying to say here? Only this, and please forgive me for being blunt: there is no future in candles, son. If you don’t believe me, do a Google search on “Top Careers in 2020,” which is approximately when you will be entering the work force. You will find “Candle Manufacturing/Sales” near the rock-bottom of the list, sharing space with such dead-end, dustbin-of-history occupations as “Blacksmithing” and “Screenwriting.”

I want you to have fun this summer. I do. And if candle-making floats your boat, have at it! Go nuts! Just don’t get too attached. Because in the long run, candles will only break your heart.

Also, I understand you can change your electives at the midway point. Do they offer accounting in the second half? Think about it. I’m just saying.

Anyway… I love you and miss you. I am also jealous of you. Not so much for the candles, but the kayaking and the sailing. And also the part where you write “the sleep situation is fine.” I wish I could say the same. Your mother can be a very trying bunkmate. And your brothers…eeesh. Don’t get me started.

Love,

Dad

Honestly, it kinda was. And my kid actually took it! Today, they’re in digital marketing. I don’t even know if that job category existed in 2011.

Although I do sometimes wonder if I didn’t deprive the world of a potentially world-class candlemaker. I mean, just look at this work and imagine what could’ve been if I hadn’t strangled the life out of my kid’s creative aspirations:

Still, the fact that I was able to dig these candles out of a box in our basement fourteen years later does seem to support the assertion that they have very little practical use beyond their aesthetic appeal.

Now, please send me more questions so I don’t have to keep selling out my family members for publishable material. Thanks in advance!