At least he claims he helped plant it although he was only two years old at the time, and, as I recall, his main contribution was to drape grass clippings on its bare branches. No matter. In my mind at least, it will always be Carter’s and my tree and we even have an official photo, taken by his mother, to commemorate the occasion and refresh our memory. In the photo the tree is just about as tall as I am and Carter comes about to my knees. They have both grown in the two years since and, I’m sure they will both sprout up more this summer while, it seems, I continue to shrink.

I have always had a thing for trees ever since I was a boy myself in those seemingly more innocence days before World War II when there was a sprawling woods between Tenafly and Bergenfield where I grew up. I recall how we kids would pretend it was an impenetrable jungle in deepest Africa, climbing its giant trees and swinging from branch to branch like Tarzan. That woods, with its skunk cabbage and jack-in-the-pulpits and secret paths, is, of course, now long gone; replaced by paved streets and houses and neatly maintained lawns. I sometimes wonder where little boys go these days when they want to escape into their own world of make believe.

I have known many trees – slender birch that bent toward the ground with my weight as I climbed, wild cherry that yielded tiny, bitter tasting fruit when ripe and pellets for our pea shooters when green, spreading maple that served as an umbrella from the summer sun – but among them all there is one that stands out most in memory. That’s the oak that stood in the backyard where I grew up.

It was, as all oaks tend to be, a majestic tree, straight as an arrow and it towered above our house. It’s lowest branches, one of which spread over our garage roof, were well above our reach and to climb it you had to shimmy up its thick trunk like a steeplejack until you could grab hold of the limb that was nearest to the ground and then pull yourself up. After that you could either swing hand-over-hand on the branch that led to the garage roof or use the other branches like a stairway, climbing upwards until the trunk grew thin and the tree would sway at the slightest stirring of the wind.

There was a sense of accomplishment about reaching the top of that tree, or at least going as high as you dared go; the feeling that you had reached a point where no one else had ever gone like a mountaineer who had conquered some previously unreachable peak.

I still recall how from the top of that tree you could see all the way to the steeple of a distant church and I would imagine that I was a lookout atop the mast of a man-of-war on the alert for an enemy ship or Buck Rogers in a space ship on his way to the moon.

That oak became my own private tree and I never invited anyone else to climb it, not even Mickey, my closest friend. There was, I recall, a place about halfway up where one of the branches seemed to form a natural bench where it met the trunk and I had dropped a long rope from that point to the ground with a basket attached so I could pull up supplies, an orange or some cookies for a snack and even a comic book to read, and I’d sit there with my legs dangling in my own secret retreat.

And one day, somewhere near the top of that tree, I carved my initials. It was my way of claiming that tree for my own and at that moment I imagined that I was planting my nation’s flag in some newly discovered land like Magellan or Cabot or one or the other explorers we had learned about in school.

I wonder if that tree is still standing and if it is has anyone else ever climbed it? All the way the way to the top? And if they have, did they find my initials up there or has the tree erased them, closing over them with new bark the way a human limb heals a wound?

But most of all, as I look out my window at the tree Carter and I planted, I wonder how many years will it take until it, too, is tall enough to climb.

And when it is will Carter climb it?

And if he does, will he think of me?