Maybe it was that she smiled in a particularly nonhostile way at a time when boy-girl relations were still perilous?
I wore special boots at a time when boys wore shorts.
But Tewksbury, in those days, was still balancing on the edge of innocence, a time when boys "sipped beer" and people left their doors unlocked.
Remorseless cheerleading for female stories can take you back to a time when boys were denied dollies and pink wallpaper was compulsory for girls.
But for truly dangerous pastimes, the modern boy will be forced to go back to books written at a time when boys really were boys, and afraid of nothing.
Maybe because I grew up on Long Island at a time when boys picked you up for the prom wearing tuxedos and sneakers, I've always yearned for the opposite: guys with polish and panache, a kind of macho dandy.
Surely, if we stopped being judged and slut-shamed and put into good girl/bad girl boxes all the rest of the year, then Halloween could just be about "dressing up as stuff" rather than a time when boys get to dress up as stuff and girls get to dress up as sexy stuff.
I have a boy, now a man, and I can't remember a time when that boy's "being a boy" included slamming another kid's head to the ground, making repugnant sexual comments about a teammate's sister, shooting strangers over loud music, spewing racial epithets, or demanding political support with threats of reprisal.
At a time when the boy kings of Silicon Valley are making the worst possible names for themselves, the original boy king, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan are setting a good example with a $120 million donation to Bay Area schools.
One squalid afternoon, Clinton McKenzie saved his beloved son from the dark end of a coma in a grubby hotel room in south London, at a time when his boy, a fallen Premier League striker, was dedicated to death.
