What’s a guy gotta do for a moment of solitude?

DON’T KNOW about you, but I can’t even sit in an easy chair without a couple of kids and a dog crawling aboard, scratching me with their dried-out Band-Aids and their scraggly toe nails. Even as they’re hurting me, they’ll feel my forehead for fever and check my tongue for signs of smallpox.

“Say ahhhhh,” they’ll order.

“Ahhhhh.”

“Hmmmm,” they’ll say. “Interesting.”

My easy chair is the only place I can go for a physical and an audit at the same time. They’ll put their sticky little fingers in my ears looking for nickels and dimes. Or pat my pockets for lottery tickets -- as if I’d dare dream of much more than this.

Last week, the new puppy spent five minutes licking milkshake from the corner of my mouth. It bordered on foreplay. By the time he was done, I’d sent him flowers and a nice card. Then he started on the dried blood on my knee. Talk about heaven. Talk about puppy love.

Point is, most parents don’t have a spot to call their own.

“I’d just like three minutes in the bathroom,” one mother complains. “Alone.”

My desk, theoretically my own private spot, is buried in other people’s stuff. There’s a “Cat in the Hat” book, a hair scrunchee and a Lizzie McGuire DVD. There is also a baby’s cup, a broken piggy bank and the stem of a pickle.

Kids get their own rooms. Even pets have their corners. Possums and wrens have the run of the attic. What does a parent get? A pillow, that’s all. Our personal space is as public as a park.

“I just need a little space,” I tell my wife.

“Try Mars,” she suggests.

Mars is nice, but the connecting flights can be brutal. Call me old-fashioned, but Earth is the only planet for me.

“How about the backyard?” my wife suggests.

Now there’s a thought. Of all the things that are nice about our house -- and there are two -- the backyard is one of them. A thick grove of olive trees keeps it cool.

On summer nights, the static sound of a Dodger game crackles like a warm fire. That’s our backyard: God’s country, 50 yards from the freeway.

“Over here, I’ll put the hammock,” I tell the sparrows. “Over there, maybe a nice fountain. “

I am walking the backyard, planning my private retreat. Everything else nests back here, why not me? I have an ax on my shoulder. It’s a sign to everyone that I mean business. I will use the ax to fell trees and chase the neighbors. I am like Lincoln about logs.

I soon discover that a sharp ax may not be enough for this backyard makeover. I may need something even more destructive.

A garden catalog.

Now, as we all know, the American appetite for catalogs is insatiable. At our house, there are always 300 to 400 lying around. Plow & Hearth. Scat & Squirrel. We study them like porn. Why? Because everything you see in a catalog looks better than what you already have.

“Look at the bas-relief on these stepping stones,” you say.

Or, “Honey, how about a solar-lighted frog?”

Of course, the trouble with catalogs is that when the item arrives, it is always three-quarters the size of what you expected. Doesn’t matter if you measured. It’s still three-quarter size.

Jockeys can buy from catalogs. Bob Costas, too. The rest of us need to be more careful. But like relationships and fatherhood, I keep trying. After 47 troubled years, perseverance is about all I have left.

“What are you planning back here?” my wife asks, excited that I’m finally upgrading the yard.

“A nice bass pond,” I tell her.

“Your second choice?” she asks.

“A working coal mine.”

“Um, isn’t everyone doing that?” she asks.

So I guess I’ll just start with the hammock. I’ll suspend it 15 feet in the air. They say every garden needs a focal point. What could be better than me lying in a hammock, reading a comic book?

Besides, at 15 feet, at least the puppy can’t reach it. I’ll climb up into its soft netting, kick away the ladder and wait for the kids to arrive. It should take only 20 minutes for them to shimmy up the downspout, hop the roof, then trampoline down upon my belly.

But that’s 20 good minutes. How much better would life be if every day you could give yourself 20 good minutes?

Lots.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.