I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement

Last night I went down to the basement to put a load of laundry in the washer and fold the clothes that were waiting on top of the dryer. Nancy was upstairs with the kids. Suddenly, I got this feeling that something was wrong, or that I was being approached from behind. All of my basement-related nightmares started coming back to me. I turned around but saw nothing and nobody.

And then she appeared, smiling ever so slightly as she descended the last treacherous step and put her bare foot down on the very hard concrete floor of the basement.

Trinity: the girl who, not more than a year ago fell ALL THE WAY DOWN the much longer staircase from the bedrooms upstairs to the main floor of the house (and did so without getting a scratch, I should add, but a singularly terrifying moment, nonetheless). She knows she's not supposed to get on the stairs by herself, especially descending.

So, I swept her up and marched her back upstairs.

And then it hit me: I had the feeling that someone was approaching me before she was down the stairs. And with the washer running, there's no way I could have heard her footfalls. I didn't hear her approaching...I felt her approaching.

Nancy says she had many instances during her teenage years when she would suddenly think of a meal while she was at school only to find out upon returning home that they were having that very meal for dinner.

There's something to be said for being so in tune with someone, or so alert to a situation, that you can anticipate future actions. But then there are those experiences that can't be explained by mere coincidence -- those moments when you have to at least entertain the notion that there's something else going on: something mysterious and uncanny.

Here are a couple of my favorites.

Back in the early '90s,when Nancy and I had an apartment in Portland, ME, my parents had come to visit. At this time, Nancy was cultivating an interest in growing her own herbs. Being apartment dwellers, however, we didn't have any garden space. So, my father offered to build Nancy a big table on which she could construct a mini garden lot, and over which we could hang a grow-light (no, she wasn't growing pot in her closet). As we began to prepare for the construction, we realized that we needed a long extension cord for the circular saw. I didn't have one and so Dad and I took off for the nearest hardware store, which was within walking distance, down the hill and on Commercial Street. As we started to descend the hill toward the store, we noticed a scraggly looking fellow coming up the hill toward us. As we got near to him, he stopped and asked us the following question:

"You guys interested in an extension cord?"

He produced exactly the thing we were on our way to get, albeit not a new one. But still...

Without hesitating, or really even breaking stride, both my father and I replied, simply, "No, thanks."

When we got a few steps farther, we both started laughing, perhaps a little nervously. I always wonder what would have happened had we taken that extension cord from him.

A couple of years before that incident, Nancy and I had taken a leave from responsible living, and set out across the U.S. on an open-ended road trip. We worked in Yellowstone for a few months, went to San Francisco to see old friends of mine (attended Beth and Hugh's wedding!), visited my folks in San Diego, went to Graceland, etc. When we got back to Maine we were, of course, unemployed so we lived for a few months with Nancy's folks and worked temp jobs as a way to save some money for the security deposit on an apartment down in Portland.

One of these temp jobs was a two-week gig at an L.L. Bean overstock sale. Bean's rented a huge abandoned shell of a department store (formerly an Ames, I think) in Bangor, trained a couple dozen of us in the ways of the Bean, and stuffed the gigantic space with everything they had been unable to sell otherwise (plus some nice things, too).

Early on in the two week run, I contracted a nasty flu bug: bad cough, horrible aches, and a fever over 102. I was out for a few days until the fever broke. When I came back, I was still a bit shaky on my pegs, so they told me to just work the floor, replacing items that had been abandoned on the ground and helping people who had questions.

At one point, I was in the middle of the store and saw a man who looked just like Redd Foxx. Now in Bangor, ME, you don't see a lot of older African-American men hanging around the L.L. Bean sale; it's just a demographic reality. The fact that he looked just like Redd Foxx made me go get Nancy to show her that there was a celebrity among us. I was gone about a minute. When I came back to the spot with Nancy, he was gone. Not just in another area. Gone. There's no way he could have navigated the clusters of clothes racks to get from the middle of that enormous space to the doors and out in the time that I took to get Nancy.

"Weird," I thought. "I wonder if I just imagined that in some still fever-addled part of my brain."

Nancy went back to work.

When we got home that night, I turned on the 11:00 news. A few stories in, the anchor said something like the following:

"And sad news out of Hollywood tonight. Comedian and actor, Redd Foxx passed away today."

I looked at Nancy, she looked at me. "Now, that's creepy," she said.

Frankly, I'm kind of flattered by the thought that Redd Foxx might have chosen to reveal himself to me in the afterlife.

Just so long as he stays out of my basement.