Here was the answer, Thanks guys for your support.
Create a page, title it whatever you like but I titled my example “Forum”. Put “[bbp-forum-index]” including the brackets as the content of the page and publish it.
I did this, but the menu tab does not seem to get the “current_page_parent” (or similar) class, to use to highlight the tab when in the forum.
i’ve been looking for this simple answer for 4 hours straight. google, bing, wordpress, plug in INSTALLATION NOTES… no place is it found. THANK YOU!