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My two youngest sons, Finn and Jack, love the online game Fortnite. The 10- and 8-year-old brothers would play it long enough to grow roots through the floor if my wife and I let them. The pull of the game is that strong.
I feel sorry for them, but not because Fortnite doesn’t seem fun. It just can’t be as entertaining as the real thing.
By real thing I don’t mean the combat featured in the game. I mean a memorable activity from the summer of 1980, when I was 9. I mean, quite literally, “fort night.”
Friday evenings that summer often found me sleeping over at my friend John’s house. Our routine didn’t vary, for why mess with perfection? First, we rode our bikes to 7-Eleven for Slurpees. I preferred straight
while John blended all flavors together into a vile concoction we called a “suicide.”
Our thirsts slaked, we mounted our two-wheeled steeds and raced home for dinner. There weren’t many rules at John’s house—hence its popularity for sleepovers—but never being late to dinner was one of them.
The road to John’s abode was bicycle-unfriendly, but we saddled up and witlessly rode home. As the saying has it, God has a special providence for fools. We survived.
After dinner the real fun began. John and I would push the couches in his family room together, spreading a bedsheet over the top as a makeshift roof. For the pièce de résistance John would wedge a broom behind the seat cushions, with the wooden handle extending heavenward from the prow of our beige-upholstered redoubt.
From this mast John would hang his favorite T-shirt, for as every boy knew then, a fort is not a fort until it has a flag. Then we’d let our imaginations run. No longer were we footsteps away from a well-stocked refrigerator, or one floor below John’s slumbering parents. We weren’t even John and Mike anymore. We were Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, brothers in arms, bloodied, outgunned and outnumbered, making our last stand at the Alamo. It was more vivid than any video game, more memorable than any television show.
With nothing but a couch, a bedsheet, a broom and a T-shirt, we reveled in the wonder of boyhood. Our joy was pure because it flowed directly from the indispensable and most precious thing a child possesses: imagination.
It’s a simple reminiscence, but one that delights me more the older I get. We adults, in a failure of imagination, have forgotten how to build forts.
I hope my boys never lose sight of life’s simple joys. I hope someday they have their own stories to tell and look back as fondly on their childhood as I do on mine. But for that to happen they’ll need to play less Fortnite this summer, and more fort night.
Mr. Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, N.C.
