The smartest thing my parents did when they bought their dream house in 1974 was to dedicate a single room in the basement to their three sons. “Here,” they said, “if you’re going to do anything bad in the house, do it in this room. You’re free to do whatever you want in here.” And they meant it, too. We wrote on the walls, broke light fixtures, and left that room looking like a tornado had hit the Mattel corporation, and they never said a word. Not even when my older brother, during a furiously contested game of indoor basketball, threw me through the drywall and into an entirely different room. I’m sure there were limits to the immunity they had granted us. I mean, it’s not like we could start doing needle drugs and hookers down there (we had a different room for that), but any of your garden-variety male offspring destructiveness was accepted with a shrug, just as long as it never left that room. Continue reading