A Magical Place
By Guy Lounsbury

There's a place on the hill overlooking Altamont where magic happens for all those that need it most.  It's a place where creativity and imagination are given free rein, where the sounds of laughter, excitement and joy ring uninhibited throughout the woods and fields.  In this magical place friendships based on admiration, respect, equality and the sheer pleasure of another's company are forged by those that rarely have the chance for such things.  This extraordinary place has a name; it's called the Wildwood Summer Camp for Special Needs Children.  It's here that those too often picked last are finally picked first.

Summer should be a special time for children.  The restraints of school are lifted and the warm days blend unendingly one into another.  But for a special needs child, summer can easily become a time of isolation and boredom.  Prohibitive distances between their friends, if they’ve been fortunate enough to acquire friends, along with the constraints of both parents working can change what should be a time of making lifelong memories into a daily grind of unchanging nothingness.  No child should wish for the end of summer, but a special needs child easily might.

My wife and I have a 16 year old daughter and a 12 year old son, both diagnosed with multiple handicaps.  I hear other parents complain about the phone bills their children run up.  In our home the phone rarely rings for our children and no calls are made by them.  There are no trips to the mall with friends; there is no rushing to little league or soccer practice.  The summer brings no group activities at all.  Those things that other parents consider a natural part of their children’s summer have always been missing in ours.  Loneliness is a hard thing to endure, especially when you see it in your children’s eyes day after day.

But this summer was different in our house.  My children joined the relatively lucky few that attended Wildwood Summer Camp.  From all over the region children come to this place where everyone is different and hence no one is different.  Here they’re no longer special because of some handicap but are special in the same way all children are special, because of whom they are and who they may become. 

At Wildwood Summer Camp, children, whose only hope has been to remain unnoticed in the crowd, whose idea of social acceptance is based on begrudgingly allowed proximity, suddenly find their spirits soaring to a place they've only dreamed of.  It's a world they've been able to glimpse but never to touch.  It's a place where being noticed is a good thing for all the right reasons.  It's the wonder of complete acceptance that can only be found among friends.  At Wildwood Summer Camp, loneliness leaves children's eyes. 

And during the course of this all too short six weeks, the true magic happens.  Magic that perhaps most of us take for granted.  Here, in the fields and woods, in the swimming pool and the pavilions, surrounded by companions, they find something they’ve always carried with them but never known how to see.  They find the confidence to understand and appreciate their own self-worth and the value that all human beings possess.  They learn to judge themselves not by what they see around them but by what they see within themselves.  They learn they have much to offer and that they are needed.  It's something everyone, young or old, regardless of circumstance, needs to know.

Magic happens at Wildwood Summer Camp but as with all magic it takes magicians and Wildwood has the best.  The counselors and administrators, like the campers themselves, are very special people.  These men and women do something that really matters and they do it extremely well.    They are teachers, medics, entertainers, therapists, guides and most of all friends, mentors and confidants to the children.  They can bring a smile to young lips and offer a trusted shoulder to teary eyes when needed.  They nurture imaginations and fill the air with song.  Where others might see limitations, they see potential.  They bring out the best in these kids.  I just hope they understand all the appreciation that we the parents feel toward them.

What is a dream?  A wisp of imagination that dissipates with the morning sun leaving a faint shadow of memory in its stead.  In my dreams, that place where reality takes a backseat to desires, I’ve never seen my daughter attending an Ivy League college nor my son pitching the winning game of the World Series.  Such dreams are for others.  In my dreams I just see my children freed from the shackles their handicaps have placed upon them.  Those are my dreams, but I know they’ll never come true.  This summer however, this wonderful summer, thanks to the efforts of those extraordinary people that work their magic and make Wildwood Summer Camp a reality, my dreams almost did.