MY SUMMER IN POLAND.

As a child, I had an inexhaustible passion for junk food--at least in theory, since I was never allowed to have it. For this reason, the trip my mother and I took to Pathmark in late June of 1984, when I was nine, stands out like a meteor in an otherwise pitch-black sky. The next day, I was leaving for sleepaway camp, after a year of canvassing my parents with hand-drawn maps of an idealized camp, whose details of lake, bunks, and, of greatest personal interest, canteen I'd gleaned from my older brother.

The only summer camps in our universe were single-sex, situated in Maine, rustic to the point of deprivation, lasted eight weeks, modelled themselves on a martial tradition, and had a strict uniform of white polo shirts, shorts in the camp color, and docksiders. They also required lifelong loyalty and, you could be forgiven for thinking, identification as a Reform or Conservative Jew. After a close study of glossy pamphlets, and at least one slide show beamed onto our living-room wall by a salesperson, we settled on Camp Fernwood, in Poland, Maine.

The food my mother took me to buy that day was to serve a double purpose: sustenance on the ten-hour bus ride, and a farewell luxury before being committed for two months to a place where, as I was soon to learn, possession of any desirable foodstuff resulted in harsh disciplinary action. Foisting all-natural health food on me was practically my mother's raison d'etre. So when she unleashed me at the supermarket I took off, trotting down the aisles on legs that had recently been called Ethiopian by a boy at school, and grabbing packages of Cool Ranch Doritos, Devil Dogs, and Entenmann's doughnuts. The lunch bag my mother prepared that night was the largest, most wonderful lunch bag ever to be packed.

Which is why it remains one of the great tragedies of my childhood that, on the day of my departure, my parents, bickering in the rush to get out the door, forgot the lunch bag, whose doughnuts now, after twenty-one years, have been elevated in my mind to the Platonic ideal of the Doughnut Form. The loss was discovered only at the last minute, in the desolate Yonkers parking lot as my belongings were hurriedly transferred from the car to the bus, in which forty veteran Fernwood campers sat in wait for me. Taking my seat alone at the back, my nose stung with tears that became impossible to hold back as the bus pulled away and my father continued to ...