waiting to reconnect

My nine year old son, Sam, is so much like me that sometimes it hurts to watch him, because I from inside myself know just how he feels when he is sad.

Our family loves Club Med for a lot of reasons. The amazing food, for one, around which I lose all self-control. And my Facebook friends already know that I love the flying trapeze school. (For the record, no, climbing up the trapeze ladder intermittently for two hours in the afternoon does NOT counteract the day's excesses at the buffet, not even when combined with 45 minutes of Zumba.) But the one thing that keeps us going back there again and again for our family vacation is that the Kids' Club staff consistently make the experience even more fun for our children than summer camp.

Sam makes friends very easily, at school, at camp, wherever he goes. But for some reason, he tends to make really good friends at Club Med, and, like his mother, he takes his true friends deeply into his heart and grieves deeply when they are separated. How he manages to make this sort of connection in just four days is pretty astounding, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's real. When we checked out of Club Med Sandpiper the day before Christmas, Sam had tears streaming down his sweet little face. Paul and I babbled on and on for a while, trying to comfort him, before Sam helped us understand that he knew vacations had to end and he knew we would return, but he was sad because he was really going to miss his friends, especially Brett, who in real life lives, rather inconveniently, in London. Yes, England.

We know that distance is not an obstacle, but merely a challenge, to sustaining a friendship nowadays. Sam is still in touch with his friend, Roarke, who he met at Sandpiper in 2006, and Roarke has since moved from Bermuda to Switzerland. However, in this case, the complete lack of contact information for Brett presents a real challenge. In Roarke's case, Paul and I had also befriended his parents, so our two familes were able to remain connected. We even hosted the five of them for a memorable weekend when they came to Cincinnati to see us en route to the dad's business trip Chicago. But tracking Brett down seemed a rather daunting task, especially without even a last name to get us started. As the tears continued to flow, I sat in the passenger seat, silently kicking myself for not having told Sam to get his friend's email address or phone number before saying goodbye.

Soon after the minivan pulled back into our garage, Sam asked me how it could be that just a few days after vacation, he missed his friend of four days more than he missed his friends from school, whom he had not seen in almost two weeks. I told him that I didn't know, but that it was just possible he had more in common, deep down inside, with Brett, than he did with the friends he has made here in town.

Two days after that, still hearing about the poignant loss of Brett, I phoned Club Med to see if we could be put in touch with his family, and was told to send my request in writing. Today, Sarah, the director of Kids' club staff wrote to tell me that she had forwarded my email to the (still nameless) family in London and hoped his mother would contact me soon. I know people lead very busy lives, but somehow I expect that she will. Here's hoping we get those kids reconnected soon.