I’ll spare you the story about how I – a reasonably functional 41 year-old with a decent job – came to live in a suburban townhouse with my teenage son and septuagenarian father.

It’s a riveting tale, involving a boat, a condemned mobile home, tomato sauce, and a general lack of early childhood screening for development disorders among post WWII baby boomers. But it’s not really important for what’s happening now.

What’s happening now is I, like about a billion other people on this planet (as of March 23 2020), am on lockdown. But unlike perhaps 999,999,998 of those billion (because, honestly, with a number that size there must be someone else in the same position) I am locked in my home with both a badger and a koala.

I’m being zoologically metaphorical, of course. I’m not in some Netflix “Life of Pi” knockoff. (Although, in a world this big, there probably is someone trapped, right now, in his or her home with an actual badger and an actual koala, and to that person I say: ‘wanna trade?’)

My son is the badger: so named for his generally surly disposition, nocturnal foraging, and total imperviousness to either bathing or consequences.

Now, I have to be completely honest…my son is a badger in part because of his resemblance in temperament to a badger, and in part owing to my desire to maintain allegorical symmetry – because my father is, completely and entirely, a koala. A koala in saggy pants. Who shops at Aldi (more on that later.) If you met him, you would realize I am not trying to be evocative or witty. You would realize that I am simply reporting facts on the ground. You would search your pockets for eucalyptus.

It is not a normal thing, you know, for a man to realize his father is a koala. I remember the exact moment I realized it. I was 25, in the bathroom of my small apartment, staring at a pair of foggy grey Fruit-of-the-Loom briefs hanging from what had been my shower rod. Below it (in what had been my bathtub) was a red Coleman cooler full of soupy, equally grey liquid.

More underwear. They rotated slowly in the limp brine like the contents of a foul and be-cursed Magic 8 Ball.

He shakes the  Underwear Cooler: “is this what my life is now?”

 “Buckle-up, asshole,” says the cooler…

This was the work of my father : a man who, despite being independently wealthy, lived nevertheless like he was on the run from Nazis – which was strange seeing as how we are, not only not Jewish, but actually extremely, extremely Christian German.

 What kind of man washes their underwear in a cooler typically reserved for beer and salami when there is a perfectly good washer/dryer room on this floor?  

And that, dear reader, was when it hit me: no man. No man at all.

A koala. A koala in a man suit, raised among humans and doing his best to fit in while knowing that his real home is somewhere out there….away from pesky nonverbal subtext and tricky, inscrutable social norms.

From that point-of-view, he hadn’t done too badly for himself. For me, on the other…for me it was just beginning…