Wolfie Was Waiting for Me in the Basement
Selling my house meant saying goodbye to a lifetime of possessions — until one old puppet reminded me that some things are never really…
Wolfie Was Waiting for Me in the Basement
Selling my house meant saying goodbye to a lifetime of possessions — until one old puppet reminded me that some things are never really packed away.
Wolfie!
Five years ago, I found myself alone in the basement of the home I had owned with my former wife, Evelyne, for the past 26 years in Woodstock, New York.
It had come to this — the unglorious moment of emptying it out 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 Geographics, 14 moldy pillows, and more than two and a half decades of stuff that should have been thrown away a long time ago.
Being in the basement
This was very familiar territory, having been down here many times before — me the the sump-pump dude, furnace-adjustment guy, dead mice finder, and humidifier man, not to mention stasher of way too many things that had seen much better days.
Evelyne, God bless her, was in Mexico, the kids were out of town, our super dog, Chili (such a gooood boy!), gone too soon — which left you know who poking through boxes and boxes of stuff that seemed to go on forever.
Evelyne and me one floor up from the basement, five years before the big move
When I got to the 20th box, I saw something I will never forget — not in this lifetime and not in the next — one of those permanently etched-in-the-mind moments that would have made a good hieroglyphic — something future archeologists would have no clue how to decipher.
There at the bottom of the box filled with single socks, staplers, cassette tapes, post-it pads, scotch tape dispensers, and instruction manuals for kitchen appliances we no longer owned, was Wolfie, my kids’ favorite puppet — an oversized creature who had entertained Jesse and Mimi for their entire childhood.
“Wolfie, dude!” I exclaimed. “So good to see you!”
How had it come to this — that he would now be sideways at the bottom of a box, 10 years on his own, hearing nothing but muffled footsteps overhead and maybe, just maybe, some James Taylor from the living room?
“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, a tad lonelier than I remembered him to be.
Unable to contain myself, I found the perfect place where a father’s hand belongs, reached in and held him high overhead so he could survey the room one more time before the final puppet show began.
Mimi and Jesse, my two extraordinary kids, now 29 and 32
Only the low hum of the furnace could be heard. There were no other sounds — no birthday parties upstairs, no birthday hats, no candles, no cake, no laughter — just me and Wolfie in the basement three weeks before a complete stranger owned the house.
I took a breath, found my trusty Wolfie voice and the puppet show began. Time stopped. My eyes filled with tears.
Wolfie lives!
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The Wolfie story is excerpted from my 2018 book
Storytelling for the Revolution: Making Way for the Ultimate Uprising of Insight, Wisdom and Love
More stories for your reflection
The Four Finger Snaps that Changed My Life
Come see me on Substack
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