The summer after graduating high school I volunteered at the False Creek Community Center, and they assigned me to the day camp as an assistant counselor. I was second banana to an attractive, funny, and very together young woman named Joanna.

Joanna was an old pro at day camp. She worked out a calendar for the first three weeks that was amazing in its detail. It was balanced so that we'd always go somewhere each day, but kept hours carved out for the kids to go swimming or play in the concrete water park attached to the Center. Water play is the essential ingredient of summer day camps.

The kids ranged from about 6 to 12 years old and were good kids - cool kids - for the most part. Some kids only spent a week or two with us, the rest were there for the whole summer. Because of how the sign up worked, we didn't really know until the following Monday who was going to be on the roll when we showed up. I remember being relieved when the kids I didn't like weren't there and happy to see the cool ones again.

By the end of the fourth week, the calendar was - shall we say - improvised each morning. One day our 'about town' was riding the commuter train from one end all the way to its last stop, where we got out and had a picnic on the grass. Even the youngest kids thought this was bizarre, especially those who'd been with us since the start.

But Joanna did a great job coordinating the whole thing, and she was very supportive of me. I was surprised how nervous I was on my first day, because by 18 I had already forgotten much of what it means to be a kid when you're sort of on the fence between suspicion of - and full-on belief in - things that are somewhat illusory or just plain impossible.

I see it all the time in young kids; they're steeped in a complex world that has its own mythology. They do their best to put a framework around everything, but it's with the incomplete bits they've gathered from parents, or seen on TV, and then everything else is approximated using whatever logic they've developed. So by age 6 they've created a whole world for themselves, and it all makes perfect sense, if you take time to decode it.

By the end of summer, Brad, the center's Director (and only a few years older than me) asked if I'd considered a career working with kids. He praised me, and passed along the praise the parents had shared with him. I did one of my, "wow, thanks. That's great to hear," and then said, "absolutely not." He understood. He couldn't have been more than 22 himself, and probably saw that this had been my farewell to childhood, my last summer as a kid myself, although I didn't know it at the time.

I promised myself I would return the following summer. Brad wanted me back, and the next time it would be a paying job. I thought about how much fun it would be to lead kids around again, act all silly and weird, and get paid at the same time. I told myself that there would be no way I'd find anything so important to do in the world I was about to enter that could compare to the experiences I'd had; all the cool parents who hung around after pick-up time just to chat with me, all the times all of us counselors went into the break room to crash in the ratty oversized sofas, and bullshit about the future and the past after a long day of guarding the water park or leading groups of kids on day-trips.

I was right. There was nothing out there in the big-wide-world to compare to that summer. But I didn't return. On my walks home from work the next summer and summers after that, I'd take the winding path that curved around the water park just to see the faces of counselors I didn't know, and look for kids that I knew wouldn't recognize me any more.