I love quotes. On the shelf in my living room sits a teal blue hardcover book.  Its corners are frayed; its spine softened from the many times it has been opened.  The countless moments of looking back, remembering when, reflecting on a time long ago when we were just beginning to form who we were, to see who we might become.

When I graduated from high school in 1977, we were asked to choose two representations of ourselves to sit beside our traditional formal head shot, an informal photograph and an inspirational quote.

I knew right away what quote I would use.

Beneath the now faded black and white photograph of me holding my Wilson T-2000 tennis racquet and setting up for the perfect ground stroke, is a quote from one of my all time favorite children’s books, The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  “Remember always, it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

It has long been one of my favorites.

I was a Girl Scout.  I did the whole thing, from that first moment in second grade, dressed in my brownie uniform until I became a CIT, a counselor in training at the annual summer camp at Hidden Valley in the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.  I loved being a Girl Scout.

Summer camp was the highlight of each year.  We’d board the bus early on a Saturday morning in the parking lot of a local restaurant and wind our way into the mountains for two weeks of camping, canoeing, swimming and singing crazy camp songs that still run through my head.  We made great friends at camp and as young adolescent girls just learning about our identity, we idealized the camp counselors.  They were our heroes.

We each had our favorites.  Mine was Mindy Lu, a perky blond with an engaging spirit, a twinkle in her eye and a smile that lit up her whole face.  She wasn’t a girlie girl like some of the others.  She could hold her own with an axe, carry copious amounts of weight in her backpack and would serenade us on her guitar with more camp songs than anyone has the right to know.

She was my mentor.  I looked forward to the times when I would see her, when we would meet for lunch at the mess hall or on a wooded hiking path or at the evening camp fire where we would sit and talk about life and dreams and all things philosophical.  I loved those moments and I learned a lot from her.

One afternoon I was called into the camp director’s office.  Closing the door behind me and shutting me off from the environment that I loved, she began to question my relationship with my camp counselor mentor.

Unbeknownst to me, Mindy Lu was gay.

I was young and naïve and it was my first experience with homophobia.  I didn’t understand.  What was this all about?  How could a friendship that I had come to cherish be something to be afraid of?

The screen door slammed as I walked away from the long narrow wooden building.  I was angry and hurt and confused and it was all I could do to keep from running to my friend and tell her what had happened, but I resisted.  The camp director had made it clear that there would be no more of those conversations I had come to look forward to with great anticipation.  Somehow, someway, someone had decided that this friendship that had come to mean so much to me was dangerous.

The last few days of summer camp came and went and on Friday night the entire camp gathered together for the last final campfire.  As we broke for the evening to go back to our tents to pack up for the morning’s long bus ride home, Mindy Lu handed me a book wrapped in brown paper.  It was a copy of The Little Prince.

I sat on my bunk and opened the package.  Inside the front cover was a handwritten message.

I boarded the bus on Saturday morning and waved goodbye as the camp counselors stood in a line dressed in their “dress” gear, the tears streaming down my face.  After years of coming to this place and loving every waking moment, I was leaving with a life lesson I was not prepared to learn.

People do not always see with their hearts.

The book, to this day, is one of my prized possessions.  The jacket long gone, the pages dog-eared and yellowed.  I have read it to both my boys numerous times, sitting on the floor of their bedroom in the dark, shining the flashlight on those all-important words.  “Remember always, it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

I never saw Mindy Lu again although we did exchange letters back and forth for a brief time.  The lessons I learned that summer, however, have stayed with me for a lifetime.