The eight weeks of camp were cleanly bisected by Visiting Day, when parents descended on Big Hills in their Mercedes Benzes and BMW’s, unless they were still holding a grudge against Germany, in which case it was Cadillacs and Volvo Turbo Wagons.

They brought with them an obscene amount of junk food for their children in brown paper bags, wheeled suitcases and massive footlockers that needed two people to carry them. M&M’s and Hundred Thousand Dollar Bars. Jelly beans and gummi bears. Pez and candy necklaces. The entire pantheon of Hostess products, from Ring Dings to Ho Hos to the almighty Twinkies, which by that time were more than a dessert, they were a cream-filled metaphor for everything that was wrong with America.

The sheer quantity was nothing short of stupefying. Doubly so because Big Hills had a rule that parents were not allowed to bring food into the camp. But making a rule was one thing. Enforcing it was something else altogether. And the staff stood around like blue helmeted U.N. peacekeepers, watching an army’s advance across the armistice line. They knew they were powerless to prevent it from happening, and they also knew that when it was all over, they would be responsible for cleaning up the mess.

I saw my parents waving at me and I hurried to greet them. Even as a teenager, I was very fond of them, which didn’t stop me from lying to them a lot, but did make me feel bad about it.

My father was gregarious and hilariously impolitic. On this particular day, he was wearing a white straw Stetson cowboy hat to protect the plugs from his recent hair transplants. People would ask him what part of Texas he was from. He would tell them he was from the Brooklyn part.

My mother seemed warm and sweet — and she was — but she also wouldn’t hesitate to call bullshit on pretty much anybody. She had a big Diana Ross afro that seemed to increase in diameter with each passing year. They were sharing a life together, but the trajectory of their hairlines could not have been more different.

I hugged each one in turn, exchanging kisses on the cheek. Over the previous month, communication had been sparse. I wrote them short letters three times a week in my sloppy cursive and they sent me back a long one, neatly typed. We talked only once on the phone, after my Frisbee accident, where I began by uttering the six most terrifying words a parent can hear: First of all, I’m OK, but…

My mother made me stand in direct sunlight so she could examine the cuts on my face, now just fine dotted lines. She reiterated the importance of not picking at the scabs. My father made a joke about getting a bill from Big Hills for wrecking their tree with my head.

There was no real organization to Visiting Day. There was an official schedule of activities posted, with various lectures and activities and opportunities to meet with members of the staff, but like the no-candy rule, it was almost universally ignored. Instead, we wandered around leisurely, my mother catching me up on all the family news — who was divorced, who was dead, who was gay — and my father taking endless pictures with his Nikon SLR that nobody would ever see because he shot slides and it was too much of a hassle to set up the screen and projector.

We stopped at my bunk, where I introduced them to Mark, who referred to me as the secret weapon on his basketball team. We ran into Benny who said he was impressed by my... pertinaciousness. And we crossed paths with Yogi and his parents, Dr. and Dr. Baer. They had a mixed marriage: he was a psychiatrist, she was a psychologist. For some reason, they went out of their way to inform us that they did not own a television. My father offered to lend them one of ours. They politely declined.

Then we headed down a wooded dirt road towards the lake and on the way, we ran into Emily and her parents. They were both older than mine by at least ten years. Her mother was named Sonia. She was a sturdy and assertive Russian-Jewish immigrant with gray-streaked hair pulled into a tight bun. Her father, Cal, was quiet and slight, with the stooped shoulders of someone who spent all his time hunched over a desk.

“So you’re Aaron!” Sonia exclaimed, like I was the answer to a particularly vexing question. She gave Cal a knowing glance that didn’t seem to register with him, so she explained, “He’s the hero!”

Emily looked at the ground and hissed the word “Mom!” through her teeth.

“I’m sure he told you,” Sonia said to my mother, “how he saved my daughter’s life.”

“I didn’t… it wasn’t…” I stammered.

“He didn’t mention it,” my mother said pointedly. She didn’t like it when I left her out of the loop.

Sonia then went on to to tell my parents about my act of gallantry on the Fourth of July, while Emily continued to stare at the ground, moving a rock around with a sandaled foot.

Finally, Sonia concluded: “You have raised a fine boy.”

“We can’t take all the credit,” my father said. “You also have to thank his biological parents.” He let the awkwardness play for a few moments and then continued, “The ones who put him on that rocket ship and sent him to Earth.”

At this, Emily let out a small laugh, but Sonia was perplexed, missing the reference. And with her silence came an opportunity for me to change the subject. “So what do you think of our camp?”

Sonia shrugged, unimpressed. “Is OK. I don’t really understand the point of these places.”

“You know, Phyllis and I met at a camp just like this one,” my father said.

“Oh?” said Sonia, elbowing her husband. “Isn’t that interesting!”

Clearly, Sonia was thinking This is fate! While I was thinking, Shut the fuck up, Dad!

But Dad did not shut the fuck up. Instead he told them the story of when he first met my mother, at a now-closed camp in the Poconos, not too far from Big Hills. My father was a waiter at the time, information which elicited an excited, “A waiter!” from Sonia and another sidelong glance to her husband who, I realized, had yet to say a word.

My Dad saw my Mom on the tennis court — she was a gifted athlete, apparently; some things skip a generation — and he turned to his friend, Stu, and said, “See that girl? I don’t care what it takes, but some day… I’m going to feel her up!”

Of course, he hadn’t actually said that. It was just a joke that my father always slipped into the story. Sometimes it elicited gales of laughter, sometimes uncomfortable stares. He was fine with either reaction and from Emily’s parents, he received one of each.

“He’s kidding,” my mother said to Cal, who looked like he was as desperate as I was for this conversation to be over. “He actually said,” my mother continued, giving her incorrigible husband a well-worn look, straddling the line between amusement and disapproval, “that he knew he’d be spending his life with me.”

Sonia inhaled sharply. Emily looked up at me and I offered her a weak smile. Aren’t parents embarrassing? Ha-ha.

“That is so romantic!” Sonia effused.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was all that romantic. On the one hand, yes. Young love. Fate. But the one detail that they left out of the story was that, at the time, he was seventeen and she was thirteen. To me, that seemed really creepy. Whenever I told them this they explained that it was a different era. But I didn’t buy it. It wasn’t the pioneer days, for God's sake, when ninety percent of the people on your wagon train would be killed by cholera or Comanches by age twenty. They met in the 1950’s.

But creepy or not, it was now 1984 and there they were, standing side by side, still in love and holding hands as they embarrassed me in front of Emily and her parents.

“Well, who knows?” Sonia said. “Maybe one day we’ll be machatunim.”

“Maybe!” my mother agreed.

I had no idea what they were talking about.

“So we should probably get going,” I said, trying to extricate myself from this nightmare.

We said our goodbyes. I shook Sonia’s hand — she had a surprisingly firm grip — and then Cal’s. He held on for an extra beat and said, so quietly that I barely heard him, “Be nice to her.”

“Um… sure.”

We continued towards the lake and when I was confident we were out of ear shot, I asked them, “What the hell does machatin… machato… macha-whatever, mean?” 

“It’s Yiddish,” my mother explained. “Basically, it means ‘In-laws.’”

Oy.