just enough light

It’s a crude wooden box, something you might find in a junk store. Not an antique store, a junk store. Measuring 16” wide, 11” deep, and 9” tall, it has a hinged top and a metal hasp to keep it shut. There may have been a small padlock on it sometime in the past. Made of various thicknesses of wood nailed together, it has been painted many times with oil-based white paint. It does not seem sturdy at first glance, but it has held together and held stuff for more than 80 years.

My dad built this box when he was a teenager. It held his baseball cards from the 1930s. He told he had lots of cards including Dizzy Dean, the Gashouse Gang, and Babe Ruth. It’s hard for me to imagine him at that age, eagerly collecting and thumbing through his cards, comparing them and trading them with friends in the South St. Louis neighborhood. When the time came for him to leave home for college, he put all his worldly belongings he could not fit in his suitcase into this box, along with is baseball cards, and put it in the attic. Years later he found the box in his parents’ house. It was empty.

I helped Dad move from his home in St. Louis in 2019. As we were sorting through his things, deciding what to move with us to Texas, and what to give away, he came across this box and asked if I wanted it. I am a sucker for old boxes. “Sure,” I said. Then I got curious and asked him about it. He told me the story. That settled it. I took it.

Three years later, just a few months before Dad died, I took his old box back to him. I thought he might like having things around him that had some personal history. That morning, I knocked twice, opened the door, and walked in saying loudly, “Hey, dad.” From around the corner I heard his reply from his recliner in the living room, “Come in, son!”

When I rounded the corner, I was holding to box in front of me. When he saw the box, his eyes widened and he blurted, “Did you find my baseball cards?” He had forgotten that he gave me the box, but he had not forgotten what the box meant and what the box had once held.

The box stayed with him until he died. Now the box is in my closet. It holds Dad’s papers; family documents, news clippings, legal papers, some pictures. But it will always be the box built by the young teenager to hold his baseball cards, one of the few things he could call his own when he was growing up.