Boxes

I once knew a fellow who had this box that he saved stuff in. When we were in fourth grade, he fished it out of his parents’ trash and cleaned it off. In the beginning, he just had a birthday card from his favorite grandmother and a 5×7 group photo of his family in that box. But as the years went on, he added all kinds of oddities, like his dead father’s pocketknife and his mother’s expired driver’s license.

He had green toy army men, and a wrinkled-up Superman comic book, and one of those little class pictures of some mousy girl he liked in sixth grade. The next time I saw that box open, it was 1969 and he had a baggy full of weed hidden in it. By then, the old box was starting to fade, and cracks were forming around the folds

My friend said he liked to sit and look at the stuff he’d saved in the box and think about his dad and that sixth-grade girlfriend and all the stuff we got into as kids. My friend was kind of sentimental and melancholy like that. I never went for holding onto anything I didn’t think I could sell later.

When we were in high school, my friend, who had smoked a bit too much weed by then, discovered a nest of copperhead snakes out in the woods behind his house. Once he killed the big ones, he dug around in the grass where they’d been living and found half a dozen baby copperheads, only a couple inches long.

You can guess where those babies went. Yep, everything in the box got stuffed into his dresser drawer and my friend’s box became those baby snake’s new home, snugly stored beneath my friend’s bed. He actually used to reach in and pluck one out by the tail and hold it up for everyone to see. They just hung there, slack with what we perceived to be contentment and ease with my friend’s presence. Later, we learned the error of our ways — at least my friend learned.

One of those little buggars had matured to a point where it could curl back around and bite my friend on the fat part of his hand at the base of his thumb. More important, someone naïve enough to keep a shoebox bull of baby snakes, proved delusional to the point he assumed they hadn’t yet developed working venom glands. He learned different. My friend just ignored the festering wound until enough of his palm had rotted away that his mother noticed it. Thank God for moms!

My friend ended up in the local hospital — and I’m not making this up — with what was left of his rotted palm sewn to his inner thigh until a skin graft could take. If you think a bunch of high school boys visiting their friend in a room with his hand sewn to his crotch didn’t turn into a riot, you’ve never known teenage boys. Finally, a nasty old nurse told us to leave and not return.

Back at home, my friend’s older brother had extracted the box from under the bed only to discover the still small but growing snakes had chewed a hole in the corner and at least two had escaped inside my friend’s bedroom. While most of us boys saw the hilarity in the situation, my friend’s parents and older brother did not agree.

Eventually, the box was burned along with the menacing residents. My friend had to find a new box to hold all his historical treasures, one of which was a baggie holding a foul-smelling bandage which had been around his hand for some time.

I never had a box like that, but I do still have a small tin tucked away in my closet with a few trinkets from my childhood. At least I never kept anything living — venomous or not — in that can. But it does give me pause to think about all the crap from our childhoods, we’re all keeping in those boxes in our heads.

Some of it is every bit as deadly as those growing copperheads and some of it is benign but it’s all taking up brain space and warping the way we interpret the present. I’ve got friends my age who are still trying to prove they’re not their parents, while other friends are still idolizing their long-dead parents. Some of my friends are victims of genuine childhood mistreatment while others are still obsessing about mistreatment of their ancestors whom they never even met.

How do we ever burn those boxes along with their anchors to the past and learn how to live in the here and now? Just pondering that makes me feel like there are snakes in my head. What’s in your box?

A meeting of great minds who think alike