Gary and Mike are going to the campsite today. I'm both excited and nervous about what they'll find. I'm not joining them, too afraid of the reality, in particular, the empty space where the main house once stood. Omega without the main house is like Gone With The Wind without Tara.
Beyond the material differences, there are the ghosts. Of people we met, loved and lost. Of special times shared that are long gone. And of our former selves, when we were young and life was so much simpler.
That raises a fundamental question: Can Omega exist without Omegans.? To support this hypothesis, I offer our recent gathering. Even though we'd been spatially and temporally displaced for decades, it was as if we'd never left. Whether at Pine Grove or the Marriott, the locale was irrelevant. It was the rush of new beginnings, the countless hugs and kisses, just looking in the eyes of a long absent soul-mate and shedding tears of joy.
Omega is not a place, or a structure. It lives again wherever and whenever we are together.
This is not to say that the pictures and video that Gary and Mike will bring back from their Woodridge safari won't be interesting. Reminiscing about the camp is a way of revisiting the myriad experiences and the impact they made on us all. These feelings are with us no matter where we go. And the Omega campsite is certainly a catalyst for releasing this flood of emotions.
Yes, there are many places through which one travels on life's journey, and we carry souvenirs of them in our memories. Thomas Wolfe wrote: "You can't go home again". But I prefer Pliny the Elder's centuries-old observation: "Home is where the heart is". And Omega has a permanent home in our hearts.
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So true, so true. Art, you touched a chord deep inside of me when you said, "Yes, there are many places through which one travels on life's journey, and we carry souvenirs of them in our memories." Like all of you, I have had a myriad of experiences as an adult...some good, some bad...but none as deeply soulful and nurturing as my time at Omega. People who did not have our experience as Omegans cannot possibly understand. Most I have shared this with think that as we get older, it is only natural to want to go back and relive our more innocent times as children. To that I say, "Why have I never stopped talking about my experiences at Omega. Why have all of the memories always been in my consciousness? Why, over 40 years after my first year at Omega, are my memories of being a Ram in 1965 so vivid?" C'mon, no one can tell me that it is just fear of growing old. We were a family for eight weeks every summer and we were a family again at the Marriot reunion. And I would like to think that we will always be family, and I for one, am so happy that we all found each other again.
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