The Boxes

After Dad died a question that came up a lot was, had we found "the boxes"? "The boxes" were something Dad talked a lot about over the years and everyone, both intimate and casual, knew about them. They were infamous but no one had ever seen them, only heard about them. What "the boxes" were suppose to be were mini treasure chests of memories for each of us kids. There were four, one for each of us, and contained in each were going to be special mementos or memories for us. Dad was supposedly adding to them over the years and were being saved for us to look at after he died.

He often mentioned them. It was an endearing thing to hear about: a father keeping mementos he had gathered of his children to share with them after he was gone. Any women in his life most certainly knew about them, and each in their own time asked us after he died if we found them yet, and how they'd like to see them when we did. Every so often he'd tell one of us kids something he intended to put in our boxes. I often joked with him about things that should go in the boxes. The last time we talked about the boxes was only a few months before he died, but after Eric had died. He said to me we'd have to share what was in Eric's box since he was gone and I remember how sad that made me. It is only because of a conversation he and I had many years ago about those boxes that I even recognized them when we finally found them. 

The truth of it is, Dad's entire estate has been a maddening, heart wrenching, humorous, and endless treasure hunt. He always said we'd need to go through everything carefully, that there was some "good stuff" to be found mixed in with everything. I don't think any of us had any idea just how much so though. Everything I found in my box I would have found anyway, since it became clear that Dad never threw anything away. And I mean anything and everything. Mixed in with everything else, the valuable and the not was every scrap of anything we had ever sent or made for Dad. All the kid art, all the letters or cards, it is all there mixed in with everything else he seemed to treasure. Really, the entire mess of it was our treasure box to go through and in the end we all realized those boxes he had for us, he had started, but they had been outgrown many times over.

I first learned about the boxes when I was in my late teens. The fall after high school I went to Europe with a friend for what was suppose to be six weeks or longer. The trip was something of a disaster. My friend and I were not on the same page at all but were stuck with each other. He wanted to stay up and drink all night and sleep all day, with us being threatened to get kicked out of every hostel for breaking curfews. I wanted to get up early and walk the cities endlessly, going to museums and walking through parks. He insisted on leading the way but had no sense of direction and would never ask for help so we spent much of each day lost. We both desperately missed our respective partners, having a girlfriend and boyfriend back home. Neither of us spoke another language fluently. I spoke the most Spanish out of the two of us and it was lousy, we each spoke only bits and pieces of French and Italian. We had no money, having planned the trip on a $12 $20 a day budget, so quite literally survived off bread and cheese. I was terrified of the public transportation that I had never used before and was using for the first time in languages I couldn't read, in cities bigger than I had ever been to. I was almost mugged by an old lady and three small children in Rome when he rushed ahead to catch a train leaving me behind. They pressed me up against a brick wall while their little hands tugged and pushed at all my pockets, the old women directing them in some gypsy language I did not recognize. I had to literally shove them and smack their little hands away to escape, something I feel still terrible about till this day, rushing to catch the train he had abandoned me for, the foursome behind me shouting obscenities. Later I was successfully mugged by two other old women in Barcelona. However their theft was so skilled and almost like magic (and is another long story) that I carried away more respect than anger or fear or guilt, though hurting for that $60. All of this could have been enough to unsettle any 18 year old away from home for the first time, but to compound the horror and mishaps of the trip was the fact my debit card did not work.

While researching the trip I was advised that it was safest to carry as little cash as possible while in Europe. All the books I read said debit cards where best. They were easy to hide in a pocket sewn inside your clothes, and you could take out money at the best exchange rate directly from a bank in whatever country you were in as you needed it. As a back up some travels checks were suggested, to be used only in an emergency. So that's what I did. I have a few hundred dollars in travelers checks, some French currency to get me started, and my debit card when I landed in France that fall. A couple days into the trip I discovered my grave mistake.

At that time the United States had not standardized debit card numbers. My bank (Wells Fargo) would let me pick a number between four and twelve digits long. So I had picked eight. I thought that had been a reasonable middle of the road pick. Well, what none of the guide books I had read said was that Europe had early on standardized all debit passwords to being only four digits long. Which meant my debit card was worthless. It would not work in any bank in Europe. Had I banked with an international bank things might have been different, but Wells Fargo was unheard of, it was a strictly an United States bank, and only on the West coast to boot.

Needless to say, I flipped the fuck out (to put it mildly but frankly). I had a plane ticket that was six weeks out and about 300 dollars to my name and a travel partner that was more adept at grunting and taking shots of whiskey than comforting a hysterical girl. So I called Dad collect. I had been calling Dad collect every Sunday since my mother died when I was 15, so this was not unusual, except for the fact I was calling him from about 5,000 miles or more away, 12 or so hours ahead of him. After a lot of sobbing and hysteria Dad agreed to wire me money from a savings account that was in my name anyway. Our western bumbling continued however as Dad wired money to a Western Union which while existed in Europe was practically unheard of. So much so that it was not even listed in the Florence phone book at my hostel. No one I asked knew what I was asking for, they would just say "American Express". Had I been a more seasoned traveler I would have known that Dad should have wired the money to an American Express office. In Europe at the time the American Express office was better than going to an embasy, but neither Dad or I knew that. It took three days and two phone calls (always collect) a day to track down where the money actually had been wired, which turned out to be a five minute walk from my hostel down a street that was more a glorified walkway between buildings. The only reason we ever found it is because the Western Union Dad had used tracked down the address for him which he had relayed to me.

The Europe story goes on and is now a funny one though I returned three weeks early from that trip thoroughly traumatized at the time. A month later Dad had informed me that the phone bill from that week of freak out had been so impressive that it was going to make the box. He wouldn't tell me how much it had been, he'd save it for me and one day I'd find it in my box. And that is when he explained what the boxes were, or intended to be. It is something I had always wanted to know and had stuck with me. Without that I don't think we'd have known we found the boxes when we did.

Dad was obsessed with containers. Hundreds of small boxes, metal, cigar, holiday, and more contained other little boxes and nicknack's. In side some were true treasures, things of value or little pretties, some were time capsules, containing receipts, tickets, pictures from an event or period of time. Others were quite literally junk boxes. Ones where you swipe everything off a surface in a hurry at the end of a move, swearing to yourself you'll go through it later but never do. Our boxes looked just the same as the rest. Little bits of sentiment, obviously with a memory or meaning attached but without the back story were just things, objects and pieces of paper. At times those things had meaning to one of us too and we'd go "Ah-ha - I know why he kept this" but more often we'd shake out head and groan, "Oh Dad, Why!?!". For example, during one of the early trips place in the "go" pile was a crooked ill made yellow box with a hinged lid. Obviously trash to almost all except me, who gasped in shock, and grabbed it out of the pile - it was the first thing I had ever built with my father. Somewhere there is a picture of me holding the box in pride asa young girl. I had spent a whole afternoon on it when I was probably five or so using the scrap wood in Dad's yard. I had smashed my thumb with a small hammer making that box. Dad had helped me with the hinges. He had kept it. Like so many other things we found, it made me cry and I put it in the keep pile.

We did not find the boxes the first trip to Eastern Oregon to sort through Dad's things. It might not have been the second either. When we did it was me that recognized them but only because of that phone bill. We had all but given up finding them since at that point we had gone through almost every box, at least for a quick look and evaluation and nothing had screamed "we're the boxes!" to us. We had looked in the trunk before, but had quickly decided it was a "keep and go through later item". We had a whole room full of such things. They were the items we knew we wanted, or had been looking for, but also the all those boxes and tins that were  packed full and to hard to acess if they were a keep or go, but had to be saved for a time when we had more to spare since each trip to Oregon was always a short one, just a few days to get so much done.

The day we discovered them was late in the afternoon. We had worked all day in the dark and dirty house and I remember we were all cranky. We decided to go through the trunk since we remembered it looked like more of a treasure box than a junk box. Inside were tons of other little boxes, and what we started to realize were bits and pieces of kids things. Old sunglasses, and toys from vending machines, a teddy bear, mugs with Krista and Eric on them. There were also several cigar boxes. Each contained little bits of paper and pictures and other odds and ends. There were more than four of them, but three that we finally identified as being dedicated to Krista, Eric and myself. Rhea's was harder to identify but one seemed more likely than the others. I knew without a doubt mine was mine when I saw it, but only because it contained along with pictures, several letters from me, my high school graduation invitation, the phone bill from when I called him collect from Italy all those years ago.

 Finding the boxes was bitter sweet since after going through everything we had till that point they did not look much different than any of the other boxes we had sorted through. We had become fully aware just how sentimental Dad had been. What we each wanted more than anything was to know the story behind each thing that had made it into the box. We started to think the entire trunk was our box, a collective one when the little cigar boxes had been outgrown. We also started to think that Dad had probably meant to make bigger boxes, had thought he;d have time, and that the trunk was a collection of what would go in them. Instead he died much sooner than anyone ever expected and like so many other projects of his, had been left half complete. Out of everyone my box had the most meaning to me. Maybe only because I had talked to him so often so knew the back story of some of the things I found in it, though I also found many other things with as much meaning in his stuff, such at that funky yellow box. In my box along with what I already listed was a clay sail boat I had made from a cookie cutter. Dad and I had sailed together when I was a tweener which I had always relished along with my fishing expeditions with him. There was also a small clay head, part of a trio I had made as a toddler and that I'll share more about later. Inside were also pictures I had taken of the house my mother died in, of her bedroom and of the front steps that Dad and I had a shared memory of the last time we saw her, her body, being taken away by the mortuary worker. Even now I keep the contents of my box intact, except for the clay head I had displayed. When I go through it my eyes brim with tears.

While "the boxes" did not exist in the grand and impressive way that everyone expected, and in all honesty were a bit anticlimactic for most of us, we were relieved to find them no matter what form they took. I think like much of Dad, it was the thought that counted. The fact he treasured us so much that he kept literally anything we touched, everything we did, while with him. And while I have other ways of showing my love, I hope that I am always as successful as conveying it to the people that matter. And for the record that phone bill was pretty impressive.