Morning Song: A Child's Story for Adults

Do you remember your first experience with camp? You're away from your family and, quite suddenly, very intimately involved with strangers; sleeping, eating, cleaning, engaging in sports and other activities, competing with the noise and motion of a cabin filled with kids and counselors who do things you could never have previously imagined. "Morning Song" by Timothy Victor Richardson explores the funny and frightening initiation rites of childhood through the eyes of a six year old boy sent to camp for the first time. Told entirely by a first person narrator exclaiming how he came to, but didn't know how he was knocked out, the explanation follows an elliptical, highly energized version of events he has both witnessed and participated in. Funny and cruel, engrossing and poignant, subjects covered range across a vast field. "We're all the same oldness" insists the narrator. Still there is a pecking order and one boy, David Folder, continually annoys both counselors and other boys.