When I was seven years old, a new family moved into the
house next door. They had an older
daughter, a son, and a brand-new baby.
The son was my age, and we hit it off immediately. That was back before people connected through
electronic devices, so our time together consisted of playing outside, spying
on the neighbors, and harassing our siblings.
CC was an odd kid back then. I
don’t think there was ever day that I saw him that he didn’t have long pants
on, even in the sweltering Texas summers.
When I asked him about it one day, he said that he was embarrassed at
how white his legs were. I told him that
he would never get a tan wearing long pants, but every day he busted out the
long pants. Nowadays, it’s hard to get
him to wear long pants. He even got a
job as a PE teacher, so he could be in shorts all the time! But I digress.
CC’s dad built him a fort in the back yard out of landscape
timbers. In reality, it was just a box
with a door and no roof, but to us, it was a fort…our base of operations, from
which we planned all of our spy missions, launched our assaults, and went to
get out of the summer heat. We drug some
plywood over the top to give us some shade, and we even built a little
refrigerator in it out of bricks. I
suppose you could say it was like a real-life Minecraft. The refrigerator was a brilliant idea. We cooled the bricks and then stacked them up
in the darkest part of the fort. Since
bricks take a long time to heat up and a long time to cool down, they would
stay cold practically all day. We could
put drinks and candy in there, go do our thing, and come back to cold
refreshments. Brilliant!
We spent almost every day in the fort, until a family of
hornets decided that it looked like a good spot to make a home. It was never quite the same after that. Not to mention that over the years, we got
too big to fit inside and our interests generally changed. We cared less and less about planning
make-believe spy missions, and more and more about girls and basketball. But it was a good fort, and much more than
most boys have as children.
