For my one-hundredth review, I knew I had to do something special, so I decided to return to the deep past and tell a funny childhood story.Once upon a time, when I approximately seven years old, I was at my Michigan grandparents' house for a week in the summer. One afternoon, my cousin Erik and I played in the backyard with our Uncle Steve, taking turns hiding and finding our flip flops and Erik's large stuffed Spongebob. This was fun for a while, but I eventually got tired of it. I saw that Erik was walking on both feet again, so I assumed he had found the shoe I had hidden. "Can we play hide and seek now?" I asked. I heard them say 'yes,' so I told one of them to count and dashed off to find a hiding place. I settled in under my grandparents' solid desk, sitting down in the opening for the chair. After a while, I got bored of waiting for them to find me, so I dashed out of my hiding place to grab this book. I read it under the desk, and liked it very much; I had never been to camp before, and even though I was terribly shy and had no interest in overnight camp, I was curious to read about it. Also, I distinctly recall liking an illustration of Jessie in a shark costume.When I had finished the novel, no one had found me, though I had heard someone calling my name once and had ignored them like the good hide and seek player I was. I figured that the others had forgotten, or maybe Grandma had waylaid them with cookies. I went around the house looking for them, but no one was there, so I went outside. Everyone was in the yard, looking around. When my mom saw me, she turned around and said in a stressed voice that I perceived as fury, "Where have you BEEN all this time?" I explained that we had been playing hide and seek. She told me that Erik's parents had arrived to take him home, and they still had not found his flip-flop from the last time I had hidden it! I was absolutely dumbfounded. The whole time I was hiding and reading an entire Boxcar Children mystery, they had been looking for his shoe? I would have felt proud of my hiding skills if everyone had not turned on me with dismay and frustration. "Do you remember where you hid it?" "We got everybody out here to look, and we kept asking where you were, but no one knew!" "We've been looking for ages!" "Where did you hide it?""I hid it in the big weed bush.""What? What 'big weed bush?'""The one by the side of the house! The big weed bush!"No one knew what I was talking about, so Mom suggested that I show them. I led the crowd around to the large, green, leafy plant by the side of the house. "In here!"There were mingled cries of "That's the rhubarb bush!" and "How will we find it in there?!" Shaken by all this attention and angst, I reached inside the plant and pulled out the grey flipflop. Everyone was enormously relieved, and Erik's parents could finally take him home. They were glad I had located the shoe with such ease, but despite the resolution and my feeling of innocence, I still got scolded. Also, Grandma was visibly affronted that I had called her rhubarb plant "a big weed bush." I was just ignorant... I didn't mean to offend her impeccable lawn care, and it upset me that she was so miffed.I recently told this story to a friend, and she giggled, "You were like, 'dishonor on me, dishonor on my cow!'" Yes. Yes. That is exactly how I felt.
What do You think about The Summer Camp Mystery (2001)?
