Nine months ago (just enough time for a child to be born), I found myself, alone, in the basement of the home I had owned for the past 26 years in Woodstock, New York. It has come to this -- the time to empty it out and get ready for the new owners, nice people from Brooklyn who paid cash and, apparently, had no need for five broken CD players, eight boxes of National Geographic magazines, and more than two and a half decades of stuff that should have long ago been taken to the dump.

The basement was very familiar to me. Very. I had been in it many times before, me the furnace-adjustment guy, the sump-pump dude, the dead mouse finder, the humidifier man, not to mention stasher of too many things that had seen much better days.

Evelyne, God bless her, was in Mexico, Jesse in San Francisco and Mimi in Massachusetts -- our super dog, Chili (such a gooood boy!) gone too soon, which left you know who in the basement poking through boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff that seemed to go on forever.

When I got to the 20th box, I saw something I will never forget, one of those permanently etched-in-the-mind moments that might have made a good hieroglyphic -- something future archeologists would never be able to decipher. There, at the bottom of the box, one filled with missing winter socks, staplers, cassette tapes, paper clips, post-it pads, and instruction manuals from kitchen appliances we no longer owned, was WOLFIE -- one of my kids' favorite puppets -- an oversized, extremely furry puppet who had entertained my kids for what seemed like forever.

"WOLFIE! DUDE! MY MAN!" How did it come to this -- that you would now be sideways at the bottom of a box, 15 years on your own, hearing nothing but footsteps overhead and MAYBE some James Taylor from the living room?

"Wolfie! Wolfie! I am so sorry, bro" -- and with that, I reached in and pulled him out, none the worse for wear, it seemed, just a little bit damp and, from what I could tell, somewhat lonelier than I had remembered him to be. Unable to contain myself, I found that perfect place where a father's hand belongs and held him high overhead so he might breathe and survey the room before the show went on.

My wife and kids were thousands of miles away. My plan for the day was gone. There were no birthday parties upstairs, no birthday hats, no candles, no cake, just me and Wolfie in the basement. Wolfie and me. Just the two of us. I was so glad to see him, as I found my Wolfie voice and performed a 5-minute puppet show, my eyes filling with tears, my voice quavering, the great play of life taking one more turn towards home.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at August 15, 2021 01:26 PM

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