Holding Down the Fort

One result stemming from our wet and cool spring has been the ever-present challenge to entertain the kiddies indoors. My attention span is far too short to consider board games; I was forty before I learned that they weren’t spelled “bored” games. Indoor soccer is incompatible with a houseful of “chotchkies” (a Yiddish word for “fragile junk”). You can only dress the dog up in a “Who Let the Dogs Out” t-shirt so many times before the elusive charm of it wears off. What’s left?

Indoor “forts” are left. Admittedly, outdoor forts are a warm-weather diversion; the indoor variety can be a year-round activity.

I use the word ‘fort’ guardedly. To sidestep becoming aligned one way or the other with our militaristic pre-occupation of these recent days, I revert back to the late 1950’s meaning of the word, which was interchangeable with “hideout”. A hideout was somewhere we went to avoid being hassled by parents, who were forever bothering us about things like lunch and washing our hands. The very essence of a ‘hideout’ was that parents might have suspected where it was, but they didn’t know for sure.

A “hideout” became a fort when our parents discovered where we had built it, and intended to lay siege until we agreed to break for a tuna-fish sandwich and a glass of milk. Who knew about mercury back then; I’ve always felt that my own resistance was a matter of principle and not self-preservation.

Anyway, forts were one of the few remaining cards in my tattered parental miracle deck. And then it rained. And rained. And my wife Julie had some sort of meeting. And it was still raining. The kids, four-year old Sam and seven-year old Lily, kept looking at me with those “Daddy, I’m bored and I can’t entertain myself” eyes. I felt cornered; my resolve buckling.

So I told them to scour the house for blankets, and bring down sundry and un-sundry pillows. I moved the piano chair into the center of the living room, and as the rain beat a martial tune against the windows, I moved a chair from the dining room so that it was back to back with the piano chair. A few artfully arranged blankets, some rubber bands to secure the blankets, and we created a two-room hideout, with a small common area.

The kids were delighted. They spread some pillows inside, each bringing a book to read by flashlight and several trusted toys. As for me, I put the CD player on shuffle, stretched out on the couch, opened a book and sighed. I never read a page.

“You’re on my side!”

“Am not. And you have my toy!”

“Do not! You gave it me!”

“To play with, not to keep. Give it to me!”

I’m something of a connoisseur of pointless arguing, being on the School Committee, so I listened with some interest. The two siblings went on like this for a short while, and I waited anxiously for one or the other to toss out the ‘tie-breaker.’

It was Sam this time.

“Daddy, Lily is sitting on my side!”

Now, there are a number of ways a parent can respond to this sort of dilemma. Some would take down the fort and send the squabblers to their rooms. Some might hand them raincoats and ask them to play in the compost. Still others might find it a teachable moment, and work with them to resolve the conflict peacefully.

Then there is me. I moved five more chairs into the room, pulled comforters out of storage, and expanded their humble fort into a virtual condominium. They each ended up with three rooms, and a small common area. My living room looked like Bed and Bathroom Shop that had exploded, creating a multi-colored panorama of textiles, down, and sheets haphazardly arrayed.

I was pleased. So were the kids. For about fifteen minutes, we were both pleased. Then, they decided to watch thirty minutes of their allotted television time. Arthur trumps the berserk and unfettered creativity of desperate Dad. Happens all the time.

So I was left alone to consider what had transpired. I realized that I had, in a microcosm, built my own little 40B project, my own sprawling uber-development. I had filled all the available space, on speculation. Not for money, but in the hope that my kids would stay entertained… for at least a chapter or two. Something better than money.

Unlike the results of speculative development, though, I was able to clean up, and restore my living room to its original, if cluttered, presentation. And in the den, my kids watched Arthur, subconsciously trusting that there will always be natural places nearby for them to explore, and understand, and experience. I know that probably won’t be the case and that we are literally losing ground every day because of greed and apathy, and a profound loss of communal reverence. Once the land is gone, it is gone; what happens is a sort of modern day alchemy that turns land into gold for a few, creates a municipal burden for the rest, and sheds the natural history of the area, bird by bird, bush by bush, acre by acre.

It’s a lot harder to hold the fort than it used to be, I guess. Still, that sounds like a lousy excuse to give my kids when they ask me these kinds of questions in a few years.