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without television while using toilet paper one sheet at a time.
    â€œWe had a tent like this in Germany,” my dad said, entering the canvas accommodation I shared with a panicky kid whose delicate gastrointestinal tract never adjusted to fried Spam or Old Trapper jerky.
    â€œYou got a dog in here?” my dad asked, which made me giggle, and I pointed in the direction of my roommate, who was outside showing his parents the tomahawk he’d gotten stuck thirty feet high in a cottonwood tree which he had to either retrieve or replace.
    My father was quick to notice that I seemed to be the only kid at the entire camporee without a cot. I’d never asked my parents for one because they’d already bought me a new sleeping bag that year, and I didn’t want them spending more money on me.
    â€œI’m fine. I’ll be home in six days,” I told my parents as they climbed back into their Galaxy 500 and went home. That night I developed an excruciating stiff neck for the sixth night in a row, so I wrapped my mess kit in a shirt and used it as an improvised pillow.
    Early the next day we learned how to start a campfire without matches, and later we were exploding beetles with a magnifying glass when somebody called me out because I had a visitor. Walking to my tent, I wondered who it was—all of my friends were on the campout already. I pulled the canvas door back, and there, sitting down, was my father. Uh-oh, somebody was dead.
    â€œSears was open,” he said as he swept his hand Carol Merrill–style the length of my new cot. “I got you the last one.” The fact that he had spent thirty of his hard-earned bucks on this made me feel special but a little selfish because that meant somebody at home was going without something.
    â€œDad, you didn’t have to—”
    â€œStephen”—he always called me that—“I couldn’t sleep last night knowing you had your head on dirt while your roommate, Sir Gas-a-lot, had a cot.”
    My dad made a joke that accidentally rhymed. I gave him a hug, and as he walked back to his car, I suddenly felt like I’d drawn the card in Monopoly that said “Bank Error in Your Favor.” That night for the first time I was elevated from the rock-hard prairie floor on my brand-new cot, but now I had something new to deal with: the overwhelming smell of canvas. I now had the freaky sensation that I was trapped in a circus tent. The noxious fumes worked their magic on me and knocked me out about the time the coyotes stopped howling.
    Those are the things I remember most vividly about my years in uniform. When in the second grade my son, Peter, brought home a note from school about joining a Cub Scout den, I insisted he try it. Pete loved the idea of having a uniform and eating out of little cans of potted meat, but as I learned shortly, much had changed in the thirty years since I’d worn the neckerchief. Let’s start with his den leader, a wonderful woman whom we shall call “Mrs. Cuomo” because it was her name. She was a warm and engaging woman. But she was not a man . Sure, she could sauté and puree various traditional Italian family recipes and sew curtains with impossibly straight seams, but whatcould she possibly teach these young men about ax handling and fish gutting?
    â€œDad, she’s real nice,” Peter told me as I bit my tongue, knowing from personal experience that if a mother was present, no boy would ever take part in a longest, most disgusting belch contest. Mrs. Cuomo wasn’t the only one. There were other nonmen.
    â€œNobody carves a pumpkin,” a volunteer mom warned us, “until every father signs a waiver.” She had prepared a quasi-legal document, handwritten on college-ruled three-ring-binder paper. It clearly stated that any injury incurred at her home would be the fault of the person with the knife, and not of the mother who made those knives available from