During the 7 years it takes to get from age 10 to age 16, a lot of things change in a person's life--so much more than changes in any given 7-year period of adulthood, or at least that's how it seems. One big thing that changed for me was my attitude, as well as those of the boys around me, towards girls. The first summer I went to camp, when I was 10 years old, the boys in my campsite and I presented a united front: girls were annoying and we wanted little to do with them. This was an easy stance to take, and in my own prepubescent infinite wisdom, I never imagined that I'd change my mind about it.

The first year I was at camp, when I was 10, my campsite (Luke II) staged a raid on a girls' campsite. This involved all of us waking up in the dead of night--probably really only at midnight or thereabouts, which seems incredibly early to me now, but would have been insanely late by the standards of an 10 year old with a 9 PM bedtime when he was at home. We then snuck down the path past the bathhouse, very quietly and with no flashlights at all. Once we arrived in the girls' campsite  continue reading »