Wish I was there

My Facebook memories have been making me a little wistful the past couple of weeks.

From 1993 until last year, with only a few short gaps, I spent at least one week, and sometimes two, each summer at Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry (AIM) program.

At their peak, the summer AIM weeks could have nearly 100 people in attendance. But over the years, the market has shifted. AIM is still a healthy and vibrant program — in the form of long weekend events (Thursday night through Sunday morning), most of which are home repair-only.

But home repair was never my passion at AIM. During the summer AIM weeks, I would either be a volunteer for Summer Plus or Kaleidoscope, which are enrichment programs for teenagers and children, respectively, from Mountain T.O.P.’s service area. I would teach creative writing at Summer Plus, or I would just be a helper at Kaleidoscope, assisting workshop leaders as needed.

Sometimes you just have to be a dinosaur.

The attendance at the summer AIM weeks had been declining, steadily, for years. For the past several years, I expected the summer AIM weeks to be cancelled. Last fall, I found out that the AIM weeks weren’t on the schedule for the summer of 2019, and that the Kaleidoscope, Summer Plus and Quest programs were being moved to Mountain T.O.P.’s Youth Summer Ministry (YSM), which brings in teenage volunteers from across the eastern U.S. (Quest, which…