Goose Feather



“The custom of the farewell send-off was one of the nicest of camp traditions. I’ll tell you how it came about. Once we had a couple of cousins at the camp who looked so much alike that we called them the ‘pseudo-twins’. Before they had to leave, my nephew, Bear, who was the room monitor at the time, came up to me and said, ‘Mummy Eszter (that’s what he called me), these two kids are so sensational, that we’re really going to miss them when they go home. I’d like to say good-bye to them in a special way.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave that up to you.’ An hour before we had to escort them to the train, Bear called the camp together with his whistle, stood up on a footstool, and, with two beautiful goose feathers in his hands, delivered a farewell speech, which went something like: ‘You were really good friends to us, real chums, fantastic playmates. And now you are leaving and we will miss you. We are giving you these two goose feathers as a symbol of summer: its games, its happiness, its experiences – everything that summer means to us.’ I could see that the twins accepted those two goose feathers with great emotion. In fact, I felt moved myself and decided that we would bid farewell the same way to everyone who left the camp. Kids who left before the rest would be given their send-off by another camper, while at the end of the summer, I would bid farewell to the rest myself.” (Eszter Leveleki)