John Treat

The big cardboard box had begun to wear at the corners long ago. Now the seams were coming apart. Jeff reminded himself he had been using it for storing odds and ends since college. Ten-plus years of loading it onto trucks, buses, airplanes, cars, friends’ cars and one Red Flyer wagon as he moved from place to place had taken its toll. As Jeff carefully slid it off the edge of the topmost shelf of his bedroom closet using his upturned palms and one shoulder, he noticed his name written in bold letters with a blue Magic Marker over the logo of a New England egg farm. His handwriting then was different than it is now. Big. Angular. Adolescent. That told plenty when compared with his current cursive script. The box was old.

Jeff swung around one hundred and eighty degrees, took two steps and lowered the box onto the bed. He threw a brown sweater off the brown bedspread and onto the floor. Having cleared room to unpack, he pulled the top flaps apart and looked at the top layer of its randomly crammed contents. He saw mainly bundles of warped and yellowed snapshots held together with rubber bands of various widths and colors. There was a shoehorn, two high school yearbooks with protective plastic covers, a Japanese ink stone, a small folded American flag, manila envelopes with papers and newspaper cuttings inside. These were all things he vaguely remembered owning and wanting to save. All of it, with the possible exception of the shoehorn, was of no value other than the sentimental.

He reached down, threw these things onto the bed and reached deeper. A hammer, a spool of wire, two screwdrivers, a wad of sandpaper and a green tennis ball. Ah hah, he’d reached the useful layer. As he added to the separate pile he had begun with the shoehorn, he thought that once he returned the contents to the box after finding what he was looking for, he’d be sure to put the really useful things on the top layer where he could easily retrieve them next time. They were the things, after all, that helped him do other things. As he reached in further and withdrew two glass paperweights and a framed self-portrait of himself taken in high school, Jeff reflected on how practical the weights were and how impractical the photo was. The two piles on the bed were now roughly equal size. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe memories would be useful tools, too, and that is why he’d dragged this and his other boxes with him all the way across the country. He continued to take inventory.

Halfway through the box, still searching for what he wanted, Jeff happened to look up at the window that stretched nearly the entire length of the bedroom wall opposite the closet and above the bed. Though only five in the afternoon it had already been dark for an hour, and the view from his apartment revealed the hundred of lights dotting the north side of the hill he lived on. During the day the hill was covered with dreary bungalows and badly ageing low-rise apartment buildings with epic names like The Iliad and The Ramayana dating back to the days of Seattle’s World’s Fair. Now there were only points of light hovering in blackness without known addresses. Above everything, it being December, one of the three tall radio towers atop the hill was decorated with colorful holiday lights, the blinking red beacon at its summit the only feature it shared with its two neighbors: a huge steel Christmas tree for everyone.

Jeff looked back down across the bed and then peered into the remaining contents of his old cardboard box. Half-emptied of its stuff, useful and otherwise, it made visible what Jeff was looking for. Amid the QSL cards from his amateur radio days, there was the jockstrap and padlock rescued from some past gym, certificates of old honors, plastic bags filled with foreign coins, a Cub Scout cap and kerchief, a purple plastic bong with rolling papers stuffed down the tube, electrical extension cords, a box of sandalwood incense that had given the entire box and its things a pungent scent, a Phi Beta Kappa key and other, unidentifiable clumps from an earlier Jeff. He reached down and grasped the envelopes bound several inches thick with twine: here, at this moment, was the most valuable useless clutter in his life.

Christmas cards, dozens of them, saved over the years from family and friends. He got fewer of them nowadays, since he never sent any himself. Cards from people he’d gone to high school and college with; cards from aunts, his sister and his brother’s wife; cards from old boyfriends and, going way back, even from old girlfriends; cards from people he didn’t quite remember who they’d been; cards from his car insurance agent, his old guidance counselor. Some had snapshots in them from summer vacations or of newborn babies. Others had mimeographed letters of what the family had been up to over the past year. Most were store bought, though a few were handmade out of construction paper and colored pens, or decorated with collage. But they all shared one thing in common, which is that they came from parts of the country no further west than Chicago, and mostly from the northeast between Washington and Boston. Flat, two-dimensional messages from his life before this, before the geographical shift as far northwest as one could go in the continental U.S. before Canada. Some were cards from people who, since Jeff had decided to send cards this year for the first time in a long time, he had to figure out were dead or alive. Or just let the post office deal with it.

Leaving the two piles on his bed, Jeff took the bundles of cards into the barely furnished living room and laid them out in a rectangular grid on the floor between the black-and-white TV and the futon sofa. That would be enough progress for one night. He went back into the bedroom and started to pack the box, with all the memorabilia arranged in its new logical order: the helter-skelter alphabet of his life, the A to the Z without much in-between, was he at the start of his life now or at its end, who knew who cared who gave a fuck. When he hoisted the old box back onto that topmost closet shelf he stretched himself as far as he could and thought, oh gee I’ll need either a friend or a chair to do this next time. Then he returned to the living room and, forming a right angle with his body bent at the waist, lay down on the carpeted floor along the upper-right corner of his Christmas card grid, a living postage stamp postmarked and cancelled.