There is a picture in that old brown photo album that Nan keeps tucked away in the bottom drawer of her dresser of Ernie and me sitting on the back steps of that old house on Annis Street.
I am two years old and Ernie and me are about the same size. I’m grinning madly, shielding my eyes from the sun with a tiny hand. The other arm is wrapped in a strangle hold around Ernie’s neck. It was early that summer Mom left me at Nan’s house.

I don’t blame her; she was young. She went away for a weekend, met up with a drummer from some long forgotten boogie band, and hit the road. But then I missed her the way Bambi missed his mother.
During those hot summer days while Pop slept off night shifts at the truck plant, Nan would take me shopping. She was rolling my stroller down the weirdly lit isles of Woolworths to the strains of “Girl from Impanema” when I first laid eyes on him; dressed in blue jeans and that blue and red striped shirt, with a tuft of black hair sticking up violently up form his head, he was smiling down at me from high on a shelf.
“Nee. Nee. Nee,” I shouted.

How could my poor Grandmother understand?
“Nee. Nee. Nee!” I implored: still no dice, the train kept a rollin’. My shouts turned into cries and my cries became hysterical screams.

Nan likes to say that she bought me that “dammed thing to shut me up”. But as I remember, it was with a great measure of kindness that she reached up on the shelf and pulled Ernie down.
That summer, Ernie was my best friend; he was as real to me as Casey was to Mr. Dress Up.  Once when Nan found me behind the sofa feeding Ernie chocolate chip cookies and marshmallows, I screamed and swiped like a momma coon protecting her kits as she pried him out of my sticking little fingers to run him through the wash.
Ernie and me sat in the taxi and waited while Mom argued with the grandparents the day she came back to pick me up. And that first night in my strange new room in that hi-rise apartment on Garden Street, I held him tight as I cried myself to sleep.

Day and night,  a pack of crazed children ran rampant in the playground outside my new home.  Mom would take Ernie and me to the park, and I’d hold Ernie protectively aloft every time one of those wild-eyed children came sniffing around.

By the next summer I’d joined ranks with those feral kids.  Mom keeps a faded Polaroid of a group us near the playground. Me, I am off to the side sitting on a borrowed Big Wheel, armed with a toy pistol, and proudly sporting skinned knees on little legs tanned velour brown by the late 70's sun.

As time passed, I had less in common with my little friend from Sesame Street. I grew up, but Ernie did not. While I ran wild in the streets, he'd lay neglected in the closet or under the bed, only to be found and then again forgotten, like so many childhood notions at the bottom of an overflowing toy chest.

Words by: Lonny Knapp