So I’m sitting at Starbucks minding my own business and working on my next book and I overhear a conversation that interests me. Okay, so I’m not exactly minding my own business but anyway.  I decide to walk over to this couple and introduce myself because I hear that the lady is our town librarian.  I tell her a little about myself then shamelessly take out copies of my books (which of course I carry around everywhere) and show them to her in the hopes of her accepting them for the town library.  The gentleman seated next to her looks at the cover of “That Same Summer” and says to me that he knows where that shot was taken.  He proceeds to tell me that the cover shot of my book “That Same Summer” is a rock called Elephant Rock that sits at the far end of Lake Garfield in Monterey, Massachusetts.

I look at him in utter disbelief and ask him how he could have possibly known that.  He tells me that he went to camp there roughly sixty years ago (in the 1940’s).  It ends up he went to a camp called Camp Monterey which sat on the shores of Lake Garfield not more than a couple of hundred yards from where our camp was.  But by the time our camp was running, his camp had already closed up and fallen into disrepair. The campers  at our camp liked to take boats over to that same old abandoned camp (which we called Camp Jason) and go exploring. That old abandoned camp (which I renamed Camp Abner in my books) factored heavily into the story line in both “Summer Sleep-Away” and “That Same Summer” and provided some great scenes there.

Just the idea that I could be sitting so many years later in a Starbucks in Millburn, NJ of all places and bump into a former camper of that same camp who shared the same lake and many of the same memories but so many years apart is mind boggling.  Small world, huh?