Somehow I ended up thinking about boys...
When I was 13 I visited the United States with my parents, and we went on a long roadtrip up and down the two coasts. We never made it across the middle, although I remember going as far as Lake Erie. It was supposed to be a camping trip, and we carried a tent and various gear in the back of the rental car, but somehow we always ended up staying in motels. This was a little disappointing for me as, at the time, I enjoyed camping. So I got in the habit of lighting the campstove in the motel rooms and toasting corn over it. In retrospect, I wonder why my parents allowed me to do this. Perhaps they were too busy arguing to notice, they seemed to do that a lot. Somebody must have been buying the corn cobs, though. I think I cooked corn for my brother, too. We did this until we accidentally set off the smoke alarms somewhere in Southern California. Even the sprinklers went on, gluing my hand with a shock of electric current to the airconditioning unit I was leaning on, barefoot in my rainbow colored swimsuit. Another part of the ritual was swimming in the little pools of these motels, hoping to be noticed by boys.
One of the reasons I wanted to camp was that I had read in a book, perhaps A Wrinkle in Time or its sequel, about a girl meeting a boy on a family camping trip across the middle of America. The boy was an intellectual, as well as being beautiful, and he taught her about the constellations, the Milky Way and the universe.
I'm still waiting to meet that boy.
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