The World According To Chris Brewer

Sorry I was unable to post Camp memories #8 and 7 last night, but I had a good excuse. A great one, in fact…I sold my iMac in favor of some extra cash and a MacBook Pro. This thing rocks…15″ screen, 1 GB of RAM and 100 GB of hard drive space. I love it.

Anyway, on with the Camp memories…

Memory #8 - The Volleyball Serve, Junior Camp 1994

One of my favorite memories was Junior Camp 1994 — back in the early ’90s, all I can really remember about Camps was that they used to vote for a camp King and Queen (thank God they did away with that), and they had a sports competition each year in which someone would try to prove themselves the best in each competition.

They had this one event called the volleyball serve where you had to stand a certain distance away and chuck volleyballs into a trash can…you got 10 chances, and five points for each throw you got in the trash can, and one for hitting it.

Only thing I remember was me hitting four shots in a row (everyone else had a hard time hitting three), and I walked away the Camp Champ with 28.

I don’t remember much else, but I do remember it well because I kept the blue ribbon they gave me until I inadvertently lost it during a move.

Memory #7 - The Shot, Junior Camp 1995

Another sports memory here. I apologize for my memoirs being laden with sports references, but you do have to admit that the Washington State COGOP has been known to have a few good sports matchups every now and then.

One of them was our cabin of 10-year-olds going up against a cabin of the oldest Junior Campers, some of who had been harassing our guys all week. I had Lionel Bickham (who is now the children’s minister at New Horizons Church) as my group leader and he had done a great job of standing up for us all week, but we took on the “thugs” as we called them in a game of basketball without him knowing about it.

We played street rules, and it was a game to 15, win by 2. Any shot inside the arc was 1 point and outside it was 2. We ended up getting knocked down a few times but I remember Aaron Bear and Nick Wilson hitting a bunch of shots, and us winning by four or five points. I think I even hit a couple shots. I shot from the hip in those days and was horrible at basketball, so I don’t think I contributed much, but we WON and that was all that mattered.

I don’t remember the score, but either we had earned the older campers’ respect or they were so embarrassed that they lost to a bunch of small fries that they didn’t want to mess with us again. They were cool with us for the rest of the week of Camp.

We never got picked on again after that, and I never dealt with any oppression from any older campers from that point on at any camp. Amazing how something as trivial as that can have such a profound effect on the future Camp experience.