In 1968 I was ten. That was the year that saw the end of the world as I knew it, but that was around Christmastime. Before that, maybe in the spring, I learned a new skill.

In the Sixties, boobs were different. There were none of those gussied up silicone bazookas everyone seems to have now. All the women had burned their bras, and boobs were kind of soft and sloping pear shapes, like melty candle wax globules. I didn't look at real boobs to know this, but they were kind of everywhere if you cared to look. There were lots in magasines, in fashion drawings, and short story illustrations. I don't know why they so fascinated me, but they did. Maybe I was in a kind of latent Lesbian phase, I don't know.

But this one time, there was a great picture of a lady, and I think she may have been wearing a floppy straw hat, and she looked sort of languid. She had long elegant hands, and she was turned slightly sideways, with one boob in profile, in a gentle arabesque, and the other was rounded, and curved down from her underarm with a round nipple, right in the middle, like a bullseye. But the best bit was the little shadow under the round boob, because that's what made it look real.

I copied that picture, and got really good at it. I drew a lot of boobs around that time. I drew them at home, I drew them at school, I drew them at friends houses. It made me feel sophisticated, like some kind of coming of age. When a few years later I was impatient for my own boobs to appear, my Mother
said, " Your time will come dear." She lied.