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On Finding My Kids’ Favorite Puppet in the Basement After They Grew Up & Moved Away
His name was “Wolfie” and it was good to see him again
Two years ago, I found myself, in the basement of the home I’d owned for 26 years and was now getting ready to sell – my kids having grown up, my marriage having ended.
Yes, it had come to this — the time no one talks about at the wedding — the time to empty out the house: the broken CD players… the boxes of National Geographics… the paint cans… and the almost infinite number of manuals from kitchen appliances we no longer owned.
Ah, the basement — the flourescent-lit subsconscious of life!
I had been there hundreds of times before in the past 26 years – me the sump-pump guy, the dead mouse disposer, the furnace-checker, the humidifier emptier, and the oh so familiar stasher of stuff.
It was just me in the basement today. Evelyne was in Mexico, Jesse in San Francisco, and Mimi in Massachusetts. Just me, a bunch of trash bags and a whole lot of sighing.
When I finally made it to the 20th box – another 80 still to go — I saw something I will never forget, not in this lifetime and not in the next. There, at the dark bottom, poking his nose through a pile of socks, cassette tapes, staplers…
