In my house there are few rooms, and many boxes. (Sorry, John.)
At some point in my life, I became enamored of boxes, so much so that I have added them to the list of things that my children will wonder about after I’m gone: “Why did Dad have this rock? Why did Dad not write in this old notebook? Why did Dad keep his tax records from 1992? Why did Dad have these boxes?”
As I sit here in my living room, typing this submission for the newspaper, I am surrounded by at least a dozen containers of varying sizes and shapes. The smallest is a plain 2” x 2” ceramic cube; it has a picture of a camera on the lid. The largest is an ornately engraved wooden box, 12” long, 7 ½” wide and 2” deep; it has two birds carved onto the lid. In the ceramic box there is a single tiny key. The wooden box has three sheets of what appear to be handmade paper, and a yellowed newspaper ad from The Louisville Courier-Journal: “The CJ. Everyday.” Another small wooden box sits atop this large one, and it contains many thumb drives, as well as memory cards for my digital camera. There is no practical reason for these boxes, though they have things in them that I value and sometimes need. The thumb drives and memory cards can be stored in a more reasonable place, but hey: I like the looks of that box. And therein may lie the reason for my compulsive collecting: I like that box, and I cannot lie. (Sorry, Sir Mix-a-Lot.)
I need to clarify my statement about being a “box man,” for not all my containers are boxes. On my mantel sit two containers that are round. They are covered in a leather-like material, and they are designed to nest. I believe that there may have been three of them at one time, but only two survive. The smallest one is empty, and the larger one has two pair of eclipse-viewing sunglasses, two small plastic cylinders that appear to have held glitter, and a large orange luggage tag, branded with the logo of a bar/restaurant that I frequented when I visited with my friend in Clearwater Beach, Florida. (She went to work, and I went to shoot pool at Frenchy’s.) And for reasons that may forever mystify my survivors, I have a case of empty six-packs of what was Rolling Rock beer. (Q: “Why would Dad keep EMPTY BOTTLES of beer?” A: The same reason he kept a 40-year-old newspaper ad.) In housing, there is a growing trend in what are called “container homes.” These are large shipping containers that are converted into dwellings. The boxes and containers that I have acquired over the years have all been converted into affordable housing for the dust and detritus of my long life.
I’ve written before of my need to organize my junk in a way that will make some sense to my children, but every time I start to take on that task, I find something that I’ve not seen in ten years, and will sit down to admire it, reminisce about it, or wonder why I have it. Any one of those things is enough to put me off-task, and I am soon wandering around the room, looking for other containers. But: Luckily for a mead-making friend, I kept the vintage wine bottles that I found in the basement of an old house near Fountain Square that I rented in the late 1980s.
The box man may soon get mead.
cjon3acd@att.net