I HAD LEARNED that the best time to bring such things up was over dinner, preferably late in the meal. I knew, too, that I had to be careful not to give the whole plan away at once, since my father had noticed—and on occasion had pointed out to me—the fact that some of the projects I undertook didn’t turn out quite as I had advertised them before I began. It would be best, I reasoned, not to announce my intention to build a lighthouse, especially since lighthouses were a touchy subject in my family. I’d once hoped that my father would build one for me, right through the center of our house. He’d started, but in the middle of the project he’d thought better of it—though I certainly wouldn’t have put it that way—and abandoned the project. It would be best, then, to claim that I had something else in mind, something more modest. I asked permission to build a shack.
“A shack?” said my father.
From something in his voice, and from the way he stopped his fork on its way to his mouth and looked at me over it, I realized that I had chosen the wrong word.
“Well,” I said, “not a shack, a hut.”
“A hut?”
Wrong again, apparently. “A fort,” I tried.
“A fort? What kind of fort?”
Apparently, that wasn’t going to work either. “More like a clubhouse,” I said.
“Oh!” he said. “A clubhouse. Sure. Why not?”
At last. “Great,” I said. “Thanks.”
I SUSPECT that my father didn’t have much faith in my ability to build a clubhouse or a fort or a hut, or even a shack for that matter, and that he expected me to build, no matter what I called it, an eyesore, because he allowed me to build it only if I built it at the top of the hill, where my failure would be hidden by the grove of bamboo.
[to be continued]
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🎧 572: I had learned ...