My then-shaggy boys in the Mojave desert where I grew up, December 2014 Sometimes I fear that I'm doing my kids' childhood all wrong. Not enough forts, for instance. When I was a kid, we had a corner of the living room devoted frequently to forts. There was a living and a family room. Plenty of space for forts. Our house here in Berkeley is little. We make forts, though we haven't made one in a while. The giant camo blanket, lightweight with strings sewn into the edges, is perfect for fort-making. We tie the strings to chairs and the iron handles on the heavy bench that used to be the shoe bench and now is the coffee table. I'm sure my mother worried sometimes that she was not doing our childhood right. It must have been so different from how she grew up, in a small town just outside Newark, shouting distance from the airport I've been flying into since childhood. She and my dad both grew up in the same town, Hillside, one mile square. I was born in upstate New York, land of gray sky, and then they moved to the desert ... more