My wife and I have the same reaction every year. Why can’t we go away to camp, too?

Tomorrow our 9-year-old gets his first taste of sleepaway camp. It’s only for a week, and it’s a baseball camp, which is catnip to the kid. The odds are good he won’t miss home (or us) too much. Our main concern is his eating habits, which fall somewhere between picky and pizza-only. We’re hopeful he learns to switch-hit before succumbing to starvation.

I haven’t bored my children with my own camp memories - I bore them enough already, heaven knows - because honestly, I don’t have that many to share. In the early 1960s, I spent a couple of summers at a coed New Hampshire camp run by two teachers from my elementary school. I remember my father sending me newspaper box scores so I could follow my favorite baseball players’ stats. Also my two maiden aunts, bless their hearts, mailing me department store “care packages’’ filled with cocktail party snacks no normal 10-year-old would consider eating in mixed company.

Otherwise, I did what most campers happily do: paddle canoes, jump off a lakeside dock, sneak comic books under the bunk covers, whittle things. Pretty tame stuff. No intramural keg parties, no bong hits behind the boathouse. Not even a full-bore panty raid on the girls’ cabins, which nowadays might involve liability lawyers and/or rifle fire. Coed canoodling would have been a popular elective, I suppose, except sex hadn’t been invented yet and would not be until later that decade. In camp, as in real life, timing is everything.

Had I paid closer attention, or taken notes under the bedcovers, I might have joined the growing pool of memoirists trafficking in Summer Camp Lit. Some do brilliant work, no question. For starters, there’s Mark Oppenheimer’s hilarious essay “At August’s End: Serving Time in Leftist Summer Camps,’’ found in the 2005 anthology “Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp,’’ edited by Eric Simonoff. (Other A-list contributors include James Atlas, David Sedaris, and Andrea Lee.)

“When I was eight years old, my father sent me to a nudist camp,’’ begins Oppenheimer, recalling summer at a clothing-optional Quaker camp in Vermont where he once spied a group of counselors square-dancing in the buff. He later spent summers at a leafy, lefty Berkshires camp where his dorm was named for Eugene V. Debs, every team game ended in a tie, and campers were urged to write their congressmen, protesting the embargo of Cuba. “It seemed odd that Debs had suffered imprisonment - spoken out against the Great War and been jailed for his speech - so that I might be mocked for wearing velour,’’ writes a deliciously disillusioned Oppenheimer. Great stuff.

Deeper in the remaindered-book bin, meanwhile, lies Michael D. Eisner’s “Camp,’’ a memoir by the former Disney Co. CEO of his many summers at Vermont’s Camp Keewaydin.

Miraculously, “Camp’’ manages to combine the worst features of two insufferable literary genres, the happy-childhood memoir and celebrity business-management manual. “Memories of the trip up are hazy,’’ begins Eisner (a camper after my own heart!), who should have stopped right there and thrown in the towel. Alas, he keeps paddling earnestly upstream, laboring mightily, if banally, to make the case that everything he distilled about running a multinational media company (“Help the other fellow.’’ “Avoid crabbing’’) he first learned at Keewaydin. Apparently that’s an old Native American term meaning “annihilate Jeffrey Katzenberg.’’

Notwithstanding a full-court media blitz, Eisner’s book sank faster than a leaky canoe in a thunderstorm. There’s a lesson to be learned there, too, I guess. My own take-away is that summer camp is an optimal time to enjoy life unplugged, however temporary, and focus less upon what the experience might mean down the road. Anyway, that’s the attitude my wife and I plan to adopt as soon as we drop off the second kid at sleepaway camp.

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.