“I just received a very nice thank-you note,” she said,
“from a very nice granddaughter.”
“That’s me!” I said.
And then I had to say,
“Can you hold on a second, please?”
Because my little puppy,
Antoine,
was trying hard to climb into my lap.
His wagging tail almost knocked over
the new double picture frame on our coffee table,
with my mom’s camp picture on the left
and mine just beside her on the right.
“Careful!” I said,
lifting him up.
He licked my face,
and I set him on my lap.
“Sorry about that,”
I told Grandma Sadie.
“I’m back now.”
“I hear there’s a new member of the family,”
she said.
“And that you’re taking good care of him.”
“I’m bad about feeding him from the table,”
I said.
I had to laugh,
“Otherwise, I’m very good.”
“He must have been a wonderful surprise,”
Grandma Sadie said.
“But I gather camp wasn’t?”
I almost said, “That’s true.”
But I caught myself
and thought for a minute instead.
I thought of soaring through the air with Joplin,
and Cornelius’s brown eyes.
I thought of delicious croutons
and tetherball.
I thought of treading water the longest
and taking a camp picture of my very own.
And then I said,
“Sometimes—
not always,
but definitely sometimes—
camp was a wonderful surprise.”
Julie Sternberg is the author of Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie, which tells another of Eleanor’s stories. Formerly a public interest lawyer, Julie is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program in writing for children. Like Eleanor, she hates pickles and pickle juice, bug juice, sloppy joes, and meat loaf. Also like Eleanor, she is particularly fond of M&M’s. She lives in Brooklyn.