Thomas

At the urgent behest of one of my friends and my brother, I now have a Facebook account. And I am thoroughly enjoying myself. I have found lots of friends, and a few alumni groups.

One of the alumni groups that I joined last night is the Bethelwoods Camp and Conference Center alumni group. PC alums may remember Bethelwoods as the locale of Winter Conference every year. I worked as a counselor at Camp Bethelwoods during the summer of 1990. After joining the Facebook group, I was very pleased to get an email from one of my good friends from that summer, who also happens to be the admin of the group. He brought me up to speed on some of the people we worked with.

One of those people was a counselor named Thomas. Thomas was one of those people you noticed right away. He weighed a buck twenty soaking wet. He was balding, and the hair he did have was always flying in all directions. He also had the tiniest little mustache, but he was oh so proud of it. You could say he was wiry, and he got more energy into and out of that scrawny frame of his than anyone else on staff. He was very much like a squirrel.

Thomas was a little older than the rest of us. He worked in the school system during the year, and was a counselor at Bethelwoods for many summers. He loved working with the kids. LOVED it. He used to say his dream job was working at Disney World, being in the parades and making all the kids smile. One week, he organized a pageant for our last night festivities- all the kids made their own costumes (using little more than construction paper and cotton balls) and danced around the lodge singing Under the Sea. (The Little Mermaid was the only movie the camp had a copy of and we watched it every time it rained.) Thomas played Sebastian, and was the perfect master of ceremonies.

Thomas was also the creator of such Bethelwoods hits as The Ooga Booga Mud Tribe, and the Coon Family (he was Crazy Coon). He was always coming up with zany ideas that made no sense, but they just worked. He was very sassy, in a southern way, and would pretend to be really worked up about something, but would almost always crack himself up mid-tirade. It was his cracking himself up that made me laugh the hardest.

So my email brought the news that Thomas finally did fulfill his dream and worked at Disney World for a few years, making people smile. Then he got liver cancer, and passed away about five years ago.

I haven't seen Thomas in 18 years, but the world seems a little dimmer tonight.

Goodbye, my friend. Thank you for making me smile.