The Perfect Clubhouse
When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with building a clubhouse. In my imagination, nothing would beat having a private place to hang out with my friends, complete with a “NO GIRLS ALLOWED!” sign hanging next to the door.
I really can’t recall how many summer months I spent gathering scrap wood and trying to fit it together into the clubhouse of my dreams. I wish I could report that my obsessive quest eventually paid off with the construction of an exemplary structure that ultimately inspired me to become a world-renowned architect.
Alas, that never happened.
One summer, I told my new best friend Bob about my clubhouse dream. I guess I was really good at selling my clubhouse scheme, because I was always able to enlist friends and neighborhood kids into my failed efforts.
One day we were at Bob’s house talking about my clubhouse dream. As was always the case, the biggest obstacle was getting hold of sufficient lumber and other building material for the project. Bob’s father sat nearby, listening to our excited discussion of what fun we could have with a clubhouse of our own.
I went home that day, my thoughts filled with little boy bliss.
For some reason, I didn’t have a chance to see Bob for some time after that. Maybe I went off with my family somewhere on vacation or something. Then, one day, the phone rang. It was Bob.
“Hey, man. You gotta come over.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“I gotta show you something.”
“What?”
“I gotta show you.”
So I jumped on my trusty bike and took off to Bob’s house, wondering what it was he wanted to show me. A new model plane? Some bug or frog? His father’s Playboy collection?
As I turned the final corner before Bob’s house, the sight that greeted me took my breath away.
In the empty lot next to Bob’s house, there was Bob, waving excitedly, his sweating father standing beside him holding an electric power saw. Next to them was a big, perfectly constructed clubhouse.
It was beautiful. Much nicer than anything even I, in my wildest clubhouse fantasies, could ever have conceived. All of its lines were straight, its angles true. The sides were made of store-bought planks of uniform width, cut to length and secured in place by perfectly aligned nails of the same type. The roof was shingled and slanted towards the back to allow for runoff.
There was none of the scrap lumber and fastener mashups that I always tried to cobble together for my never-completed backyard projects.
It was wonderful. It was a thing of beauty. It was perfect.
It was too perfect.
It had been built by a grownup. With their power tools, money, superior knowledge, and experience, it is easy for grownups to be perfect.
The point wasn’t just to have a clubhouse. It was to build a clubhouse. A clubhouse built with such little effort using grownup resources didn’t fulfill the dream, it killed it.
Besides, this beautiful structure before me was Bob’s clubhouse. Not mine.
I spent a little time with Bob and his father as they showed off their handiwork. I did my best to make small talk, but my emotions were churning inside.
I don’t know how well I did at hiding my feelings, but I imagine that after I left, one of them probably turned to the other and said, “What’s eating him?”
After some time, I made up some excuse and went back home. I vowed in my heart that someday I would build a clubhouse in my backyard that would be bigger, better, and more perfect than anything Bob and his father could ever build.
It never happened.
What did happen was I started avoiding Bob after that, and we drifted apart.
No longer best friends, no longer friends at all.
I wonder what happened to that clubhouse…
