One Saturday after the Great Dirt Clod Fight, Fred used an expression that even stumped Jordy. We were sitting in the big oak tree in the backyard trying to figure out how to build a tree fort. We had agreed that the tree in our yard was best, because our mom made the best cookies in the neighborhood. We had already agreed that the higher we built the fort the better, for both defensive and offensive reasons: Defensively, invaders would have farther to throw their clods and farther to climb. Offensively, a high fort would give us a view over rooftops, allowing us to spy on potential enemies and plan our attacks more effectively. At least those were our speculations prior to actually climbing. Who the enemy was, we had some idea, but only a vague one. In the first place, another street like ours ran parallel to it just to the east; there might be a band of kids there too. From the car, we had seen big kids around houses over by the airport. But the problem at hand was that no matter how high we climbed the oak, we could never achieve more than a tunnel view out across the neighborhood—it was too broad. Although we had tried to explore the tree with a scouting party of three—Jordy, Fred, and me—Benny and Howie complained that, because they were older than Jordy, they should be the ones to climb the tree instead. Before long, every kid in the neighborhood was up in the tree. The size and severe angle of the branches made our various perches uncomfortable and our hands and forearms were covered with sticky pitch. Jordy, who had climbed to where the branches narrowed to twigs and thin air, calleddown.

“Wouldn’t do to build this high, even if you could.”

“Jordy,” I called as qui