Ode to a Cardboard Box

There's a poem - either ode to or reflections on - where some floppy haired type looks at a flower and is inspired to a number of observations, possibly regarding some woman or other. I'm unable to be more specific than that but it sprung to mind - albeit without anything you could call clarity - upon the occasion of my discovering a cardboard box in the garage.

Having passed the age of fifty, I am now a person who cleans out the garage every once in a while, which itself constitutes a revelation of a sort. I also mow the lawn. I never really expected to become this person, although frankly it's a massive relief to me that I have.

It was becoming increasingly difficult finding anything in the garage. The garage contains washing machine, dryer, three bikes, an assortment of lawnmowers of which one is functional, and a workbench with associated tools by which I occasionally nail bits of wood together. It also contains everything else, but objects coming under the heading of everything else are usually stored using a methodology amounting to just chucking it in there. Inevitably we have now reached the point at which the flaws inherent to this methodology have at last revealed themselves, and so I'm sorting out the garage. I've been doing a bit each day, just five minutes of moving one object to a different place or picking something up and wondering why it hasn't been chucked. This way the job gets done without ever becoming some exhausting mammoth undertaking crammed into a single afternoon which probably won't get finished because by eleven in the evening I will have had enough.

Over the last couple of weeks I've reclaimed about seven or eight feet of territory east of the door, rationalised some shelving, thrown out garbage, and built a rack by which to organise an assortment of garden tools meaning they no longer resemble the throne of King's Landing.

Today I encounter a cardboard box. The box itself was originally supplied by Britannia Movers International back in November 2012, and it's been in my garage since February, 2013, one of forty boxes containing whatever I'd had shipped over from England when I first came to Texas. Once unpacked, I reused this particular box. It has therefore spent almost all of its life here - eight years so far - as a container for my wife's running trophies and a selection of her grandfather's pipes. Now, with just this one last hunk of cardboard remaining, it somehow feels as though we've been through a lot together, obliging me to at least take a photograph before I fold it up and chuck it. The memories and associations it provokes are numerous and often incongruous in combination with one another.

The dominant association is the most annoying - which is probably just how my brain works - dating from before I'd even had the boxes. The deal was that Britannia delivered a stack of cardboard which, once assembled, would amount to forty largish boxes such as are recommended for international shipping. Then I'd fill these boxes with all my shit, pay the money, and a bloke in a van would turn up to take them away. In the days following my having signed up with Britannia, still waiting for those boxes to arrive so I could get on with the packing, I floated some abstract question relating to the same on facebook. Timothy responded because I hadn't got around to blocking him. His wife's nephew worked at some shipping company other than Britannia, and he'd be happy to pass my phone number onto young Darren if I wanted to ask about their rates - a smashing lad, he was, young Darren. I felt I could see inside Timothy's head as I read these words, and I could see his conception of the two of us enjoying a glass of port after a jolly good game of golf, having a bit of a natter like the grown men we were, grown men of the world, grown mature men helping each other out, as one does. You scratch my back, and so on and so forth.

Yet I already had it all worked out and paid for. I didn't actually require the services of a completely different shipping company, much less one whose business was apparently conducted by a random phone call to some bloke who drives one of their trucks, and much much less as an imagined favour from some fucking pillock manchild with whom I should have severed all ties at least two decades before and who hadn't even bothered to take in the details of my original question.

Back in the present day, the box is kind of knackered and we have others, so I transfer the contents to something in better condition. The contents are mostly trophies my wife won back when she was a runner. They're mostly slightly crappy plastic figurines on wooden bases, but my wife was apparently pretty amazing as a runner so there are a lot of them - actually too many to store in a single box, and I eventually fill three others as more and more of her trophies emerge from the depths of the garage. There are too many of them to display, practically speaking, but they represent a considerable achievement, so I carefully swathe them in bubble wrap and store them back in the new box in more orderly fashion.

Most of them were won from the mid to late eighties, back when I first knew Timothy on a different continent five-thousand miles away, and probably back when I first read some of the books or listened to the records which ended up in the Britannia box. All of these imaginary strands somehow came together as this moment, a future which would have seemed inconceivable back as the various dominoes were first tipped over.

I'm married to a former runner whose favourite band is Queen, and living in Texas with a stepson whose principal means of communication seems to be long, long lists of statistics concerning marine life. I've released records and CDs which no-one seems to have heard, and I've written books which have been published and sold to people I don't actually know, and whose enthusiasm I have failed to understand for the most part.

It was never anything I could have predicted and it seems incredible that I should have ended up here, but I'm glad that I did.