Boxes

Those who know me are aware of my container love. Some are tins. But most are old boxes. Wooden ones especially. But shell encrusted, fabric covered, and painted ones find their way into the collection as well. Perhaps it’s a sense of mystery surrounding any enclosed object that draws me to them. Like stumbling upon a secret room or an overgrown path in the woods. What does it contain? What was it’s purpose? Who used it?

Boxes have histories. They tell stories. Some are muffled, some clear.

A collar box covered in swirly apricot mohair sits on my dresser. Uncle Lou picked it up at an antique store. A natty dresser once kept it on his bureau. He’d open it in the mornings as he prepared for his workday, looking at himself in the mirror as he knotted his tie and fished around for cufflinks and arm garters. He’d give a final glance to make sure his hair was perfectly parted and slicked down before he left.

On the living room mantle a thumb length oxblood colored hinged box sits. It looks a bit like a mouse sized violin case, but it’s velvet lined interior once housed a pipe’s mouth piece. I don’t know who owned it, but it was in my dad’s things after he died. Why did he keep it? I wonder if it belonged to his father. Who could even venture a guess at this point? But it was empty. No mouth piece with bite marks or pristine one without. A mute vacant box.

Several shell encrusted souvenir boxes grace my grandmom’s old vanity. “Nassau” and “Bahamas” are their names. Thrift store purchases. Places I doubt I’ll ever see. Who gathered all the makings from sandy beaches? What agile hands carefully glued each shell in place? Who sold them to tourists as they poured out of busses blinking in bright sunlight? What vendors pressed them upon reluctant buyers in makeshift markets? How did the seller’s meager earnings cover household expenses? Or did it? And when tourist season ended what did the sellers do? Go into their small homes to craft more boxes.

Each piece carries a bit of the persons who touched them. Like the thumb print of God on what He made. Listen, listen hard, to the stories told.

It All Fits

I’ve been revisiting a high school passion, Fibonacci numbers. “Huh?”

OK here’s an explanation from Wikipedia, “In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144...By definition, the first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each remaining number is the sum of the previous two”. Fibonacci numbers show up in the proportions of a snail shell spiral and the curved patterns in a sunflower head’s seeds even though they were invented by man. “Strange”, you say. Bear with me a bit. Thinking about these numbers lead to some mental wanderings. Sort of brain ping pong. Keep your eye on the bouncing ball.

There is an exquisite order in the universe. We know it exists intuitively. It’s here before we arrive. We seek to make sense of the world from our earliest interactions, to understand patterns and categories because we know they’re already in place. To decipher language, interpret facial expressions, decide whether we prefer strained peas to mashed banana, we develop filing systems for the bits and pieces. Even language reflects our heart of hearts knowledge of pre-existing order. We say “circulatory system”, “logic”, “cause and effect”, “singing off-key”, “proportion”, “laws of nature”.

The double helix is both beautiful and simple. Envision the cell division dance enabling reproduction. Amazing. Chromosomes. Microscopic codes, blueprints for life. Why someone has one blue eye and one brown. Why your kid gestures like your dad. Why identical twins look alike. Why some tomatoes are nematode resistant. Or certain flowers come in certain colors.

And yet for all our gathering and filing we can’t get to the One Thing Holding It All Together. It is outside our experience and capacity. Too big and way before our time. So we go into default mode. If I can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell it, it doesn’t exist. Very unsatisfying. It’s the little kid playing peek a boo, “I can’t see you”, when he knows you’re there.

Then we ask, where does creativity come from? Or love? Or hope? “From within ourselves”, we answer. That’s quite a stretch. Sort of like the geocentric theory of the solar system. You have to explain away a lot of irregular orbits. Unless of course planets revolve around the Sun. Then it all makes sense.