The man with the ladder was walking home from work one day.
He had almost reached his house when he encountered the most wondrous creature he had ever seen. It was not only wondrous, it was a creature whose likes he had never seen before, meaning, he told himself, "I have never seen anything like this creature before."
Just to make sure he wasn't fooling himself, he reviewed in his mind the creatures from science fiction movies he had seen recently, and the unusual imaginary beasts and real creatures that he had encountered on his trips to the zoo. This review left him certain that he had never seen anything like this creature before. He told himself this as a reminder to play close attention to it.
He found himself trying to explain his surprise to himself. "If I were in New Jersey I would not be surprised at all," he said. "If I were uptown I am sure my excitement would be have been reduced to a tickle. Even," he heard himself say, "even if I were downtown, which I am much more familiar with than uptown or New Jersey, I would hardly have noticed this thing. But seeing something so strange, so close to home, is very exciting and very unusual."
The MWL put down his ladder and stood and stared at the creature as it half cavorted, half trotted, half tangoed by. He stood for a while, stunned by the strangeness of what he had seen, then he lifted his ladder onto his back again and resumed walking home.
But his amazement and wonderment was to much for routine walking and he set the ladder down and talked to himself about this wondrous thing.
There are experiences whose reality can only be preserved by making them public in an intimate way, that is, by talking about them to a friend. The MWL happened to be very lucky because, as he set his ladder down for the fifth time, who should turn the corner but his old friend, Reb Dunzel.
"I've seen the most wondrous creature," he blurted out, catching the Rebbe unawares. He set his ladder down and, grabbing his friend by the lapels of his coat, pulled him close. "It was a wonderment. I've never seen anything like it."
"Well, what was it?" the Rebbe inquired.
"It was an animal, I think. It wasn't a poem or a vegetable, that I'm sure of."
The Rebbe waited patiently for a more rational and detailed description.
"It was like a fish but it didn't have fins or scales." And then he thought for a moment; "Like a walrus, only it didn't have flippers or tusks."
Reb Dunzel fidgeted, waiting impatiently while the MWL continued to expand the bestiary.
"It was like a bird only it lacked feathers," he continued."It was like an elephant too, only without a trunk and missing a tail," he blurted out after thinking about it for a while.
This was more than the usually quiet, soft-spoken Rebbe could handle. "That's the most absurd description I've ever heard," he yelled at the MWL. "I've heard some meaningless descriptions but this one is beyond the book. You might as well say, you might as well say," he repeated, his frustration getting the best of him, "you might as well say that it was like an ostrich with a snout and a horn."
Instead of having the effect the Rebbe intended, which was to stop MWL's wild enthusiasm dead in its track by pointing up the absurdity of his description, his statement refueled it and caused his friend's wild joy to flare up. It was Reb Dunzel who was taken aback when he heard the MWL say joyously, "Oh, you saw it, too."
There was an instant in which it seemed that their friendship, hurtling down the single track of confusion and impatience, would derail and end up as a mass of tangled, impossibly bent scrap. But, without warning, the wondrous creature passed by again, coming up behind the MWL, skirting the ladder and, half cavorting, half break dancing, half skipping, showed Reb Dunzel his front end, his rear end and his other end, in rapid succession, but in no particular order.
And when the creature had passed, the Reb turned to his friend and in a small and subdued voice said quietly, "you know it was like a fish without fins or scales," then, after a pause, "and like a walrus without flippers or tusks." And the two of them walked home, mostly silent, holding reality between them, gently but firmly as only two friends can.