Best Buddy Goofeef

Here we go: Another child has grown up and is ready to get his first adult passport.

Yedidia, Hebrew for 'God's Best Buddy', who is also known as Didi and, within our family's closest circle of trust as "Goofeef", completed his 18th year of being favorably connected to his heavenly creator via an exclusive hot line enabling him after nerve racking incubation periods to suddenly surprise us by mastering impossible quests we long thought lost.

On the evening before this significant birthday Yedidia still had second thoughts about growing up. He wanted to remain forever in Neverland as his infantile alter-ego Goofeef, bumbling about the salon in his unique diaper-slayed walk, two gawky arms balancing like plane wings on both sides, smiling his most radiant, wide-eyed smile (which he sports under his red cap on a picture as a three year old) and babbling happily in a high-pitched toddler's voice. This routine is to mimic the same historical walk he displayed on his first birthday, when he suddenly let go of all supportive furniture and came tumbling recklessly towards me in a heroic sprint across the living room carpet.
Now this charade is regularly performed to amuse us and to elegantly distract me from my rage about scattered clothes, food rotting in his room and smelly socks standing upright in even smellier sneakers left in various locations around the house.

Didi's 'schizophrenic' touch is a strict family secret which only once escaped to the public, when he called me at work as Goofeef and someone else answered my mobile in my absence. "We didn't know your son is so little?" I was notified upon my return. "We told him his mommy will be back in a second". "He's 16 now and suffers from some mysterious chronic Dissociative Identity Disorder" was my stoic reply and everybody fell silent upon my resigned revelation.

After this juicy embarrassment, Didi's goofy alter-ego came to life strictly within the privacy of our home, chasing and patting clumsily the frightened cats, innocently irritating his 'big' brother Daniel and constantly being on the loose in a careless state of merry incompetence. You wouldn't seriously burden such a light-hearted three year old with washing dishes, scrubbing the bathroom or mowing the lawn.

Besides Goofeef there is Didi's better half 'Yedidushka', so called by his miraculous violin teacher Motti, who tirelessly suffered through all of Didi's lazy high-school years in order to gloriously produce, thanks to a prolonged teacher strike and the above mentioned hot line to God Almighty, a talented and achieved musician.
Transcended are the days when his first instructor in her Russsian fury compared the intimidated sounds he released on the "Devil's Intrument' to scratching a limed wall with a rusty nail.
Yedidushka now studies at the Jerusalem Music Academy while simultaneously very soon serving his country in army uniform.
With a little help of his celestial friend and Motti's unshaken stamina and optimistic nature, Julliard will be the next stop straight up the road.
And what will happen to Goofeef?
Hopefully he will continue to stumble joyfully along this road with Yedidushka, make us laugh and remind us of the little baby-faced boy with the red cap, looking up bright-eyed from his tiny faded portrait, laughing jauntily into an equally bright future.