ABSTRACT
I still think of it as my perfect day; some day whose date I can’t remember now, in June 1980. I was a few weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday and had blown every last cent of my savings to get myself to Europe, to spend the summer back-packing around to “find myself.” For the first time in my life I was entirely outside the contexts of family and friends, away from everybody who had any expectations of who I was or what I was supposed to be.
