Catherine Zakoian, MA, NCC, LPC
January, 2025
My hurried, crooked, parking alignment, three feet from the curb confirms the rush of my excitement when I arrive to a Thanksgiving party last November hosted by old school friends and their parents. They were outside waiting for me to arrive with wide waves of welcome and a beautiful gift related to a forty-year-old inside joke born from an adolescent incident occurring one summer night when we were much younger.
Although I will not share historical specifics of our youthful merriment, I can tell you we use the phrase: O Tannenbaum! to memorialize the joke as both salutation and touchstone in many of our current day communications, and at all of our special event interactions. I am fortunate in this world to rely on a steady anchor of an inside joke fitted many summers ago, grounded in friendship, high spirits, and remembrance.
Last summer, after accepting an invitation from IEA to visit camp Yunasa West, I drove on gorgeous Colorado-in-July twisty creekside roads to tour campgrounds, hang out by the lake with Fellows, break bread with staff, and facilitate an art workshop with campers.
Several of the remarkable experiences I had at camp include: circles of children and camp counselors and Fellows together in conversation, activity, or easeful silence; children seeking out Fellows to share progress on a project or a thought process; camp counselors welcoming me with an inheritance of being former campers themselves; dialogue with a young camp counselor who made excellent suggestions to help me best serve children in my art workshop; witnessing the simultaneous kindness, precision, and flexibility of Nicole and her IEA team in developing and supporting both the structure and flow of the camp day; being let in on a camp inside joke cryptically called Peach Juice!, which is where I wish to focus for the rest of my writing today.
Although I do not have permission to share details of Peach Juice! with you, I can tell you it is a mighty, mighty inside camp joke, hatched during an ordinary moment, post Pandemic, from the same muse I suspect served me and my friends well in our O Tannenbaum! youth. Celebrity enough of an inside joke to have its own polished Peach Juice! board game, complete with a Michael Piechowski game character, unveiled this past summer by a bright and industrious camper. I hope the legacy of Peach Juice! has the fortitude and legs to thread through the Yunasa West community for the next forty years and beyond.
Human happiness within the circumstances of time, space, memory, and shared experience is perhaps one of the best ways to find some meaning in this life. O Tannenbaum! has happened. Peach Juice! has happened. I was there. You were there. I hope everyone has something like Peach Juice! in their lives to hold and carry as a personal and community talisman and (also) amulet in bright times and in dark (as I write, IEA’s Pasadena and nearby areas are on fire). I also wish I could somehow see out ahead to witness these camp friends in adulthood, reuniting for a few birthdays and holidays, arriving and parking in crooked haste in order not to miss a minute together nor the toast to the well-being and bestowal of Peach Juice!
Thank you, IEA and community of camp Yunasa West 2024, for the wonderful visit this past summer. Keep up your good and virtuous work. Stay safe and take good care. Until we meet again…Peach Juice!
Catherine Zakoian is a licensed and national board certified counselor based in Boulder, CO. For close to 25 years she has specialized in counseling gifted, profoundly gifted, and twice exceptional (2e) children, adolescents, teens, adults, families, and organizations.
Learn more about her and her practice at: https://catherinezakoian.com/
