I was a lucky boy.

I was born at the best time. My siblings were Elvis and television, and the three of us glowed together in the grassy splendor of the Great Plains.

I came of age as America came of age, I saw what America suddenly saw, I learned what America finally learned: that created equal was hard and necessary work, that beloved must also be respected, that we are splendid beasts, not meant for heavy harness.

That we are meant to spin like musical toys, and when we lie together we can look each other in the eye and feel everything.

I was a lucky boy. I was able to run out of that stillborn house, whose white painted face was powder under my fingers, where blood was on the dishtowels and hell was to pay, and run into the blue forever of wheat fields and bike tracks and forts in the trees, where snakes laced the ryegrass and boys read aloud to cohorts, under torn sheets pinned to fleets of clouds.

My body changed and all of America, all of the free world, changed to suit.

As a boy I marveled at what was under the crinoline. I too dreamed about Maidenform. And just as I could touch, un-clasp, perhaps peek inside, when my ridged fingertips might brush against some unseen tip, suddenly all the girls I knew, then everyone, everywhere, peeled off the rubber architecture, abandoned the stays and stiff second skins. Burned it in the streets.

Flesh, once controlled for effect, rolls enlisted, swells mustered, all under dull cream and blase white, to always point to men, to salute our attention, to reward our lowering gaze, to curve just so under the shape of men's hands, were liberated, a million citadels overflowing suddenly with joy and bouquets.

Women, their protected and secret parts, were suddenly just...there.

Under diaphanous Asian cotton, striding all around me in halls and on the streets, at rest against ribs that at last breathed easy, jiggling painted nails in open-toed display, freed from leathery and upright prisons. Beneath skirts -- mere belts -- legs were suddeny akimbo, spread to distribute weight, bending like my boy legs bent, strutting, jumping; no more knee-knock, and tug-tug and rub-rub, no more "don't look!".

The girls that were my girls, my age, and then in what seemed minutes ALL ages, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and strangers on the Zenith, stopped being swirlable music box figurines. Now they bent when they danced, abandoned all bones, tried every hinge and valve. The music was suddenly like hot spattering butter poured over tom-toms,  and we were all about movement.

Hair that was all tease and pins and careful parts was now long, was longing itself, the wind itself. And girls were happy.

I was the luckiest of boys.

Girls fell into me, fell away, everything on us and in us fell away. When I was a boy it was forever the itchypants anticipation of Christmas Eve, everything always wrapped up just so, shiny, beribboned, taped tight, boxes in boxes. Then -- when my body started to change, when my family disintegrated and I was left to fend -- it was 1966, and for the next two years it was forever Christmas Morning. We, everyone Young and Ready,  lived in the eternal presence, the now of forever opening, the mess of abandoned cover-up and torn-up strictures. Never again the forevermore cringe of "wait, silly". Nevermore the Wait, Don't, Stop, Be Patient.

We lived instead in our own New Thing, in our own torn-paper psychedelic trash. We banged our salvation drums and poured into the streets, with the toys and gifts of all the clucking Parents before us. Their Toils became our Spoils. We pinwheeled against each other, on the pavement and in the deep green. We hovered in the abandoned, aged beauty of the ornate and old Before, the Way Before, the Great Grand Before, in magnificent houses discarded by our foolish suburban MomDads. We owned parks. We claimed it all.

Never to return, never again to be boxed and kept for later. For two years we lived like medieval children in the Vaucluse, always summer under the hay and the stars, laughing as we ran lightly over the crumbling stones of the ancien regime, feet bare, flowers in our wake.

We were light itself, light was a fire in us, like hot powder from the sun, breathed upon each other, blessings from our holy lungs. We glowed. We flouresced.

I was the luckiest of boys. At 11 years old, in 1966, too old to go back, too young to know what might happen, as all of this bloomed around me, just for me, I succumbed. Because I was a brilliant boy, and had no real home anymore, because the skies had opened and the circus of circuses beckoned, I did the splendid, dreadful thing.

I ran away.