A Herd of Boxen

Dearest Rachel –

Being the grammar maven that you were, you might look at that title and get a little puzzled. What the heck are ‘boxen’?, you might ask. Then again, you were the one who introduced me to Richard Lederer, and his books on grammar and the English language. You might remember his parodical essay about the fellow who only spoke in irregular plurals. If the plural of ‘ox’ is ‘oxen,’ he reasoned, then naturally the plural of ‘box’ should be ‘boxen,’ and so forth. And boy, do I have a herd of boxen to deal with!

You see, the thing about retail therapy – especially when it involves shopping from Amazon or some other mail order outfit – is that everything arrives in a box. That’s not a complaint, mind you – just an observation. It’s just a fact of modern life. The thing is, for whatever reason, these deliveries often take place just after garbage day, so I’m left having to deal with the box until the next one. And I can’t just have it lying around in the house; I’ve got to put it somewhere in the meantime where it’s out of the way.  So, I toss it in the garage – and promptly forget about it completely. 

And thanks to having made a few, shall we say, sizable purchases recently – particularly the chair and the computer, but there have made a few, smaller purchases among those as well – that pile has gotten pretty large, not just in number, but the size of the individual boxes (boxen?) as well. But once they’ve been tossed into the garage, I don’t give it a moment’s thought after that, so they never wind up out by the curb.

However, as I was walking to the gym this morning, I observed how everybody else on the block has their bins out, this being garbage day. Now, we’ve been keeping up with that just fine, honey; we may not always drag both of our bins out every week, but this time around, we certainly had more than our fair share to make it worthwhile to do so…

But more than just the garbage and recycling bins, there were several houses that I passed by that had some large boxes out on their aprons, waiting to be picked up by our waste management system. Nothing spectacular, mind you – the odd big-screen TV here, a chair or some other major durable good there, the usual trappings of suburban prosperity – but it was enough to serve as a reminder that, once I got back to the house, I would need to drag those boxes out of the garage today, so that they would finally be taken off of our hands.

The nice thing about such a reminder is that it isn’t a one-time thing. While it may occur to me to make a mental note while I’m on the way to the gym, the fact that I would be passing by them a second time on my return trip meant that the mental note wasn’t altogether necessary (and indeed, over the course of the hour or so spent pushing weights around and walking on the treadmill, it was essentially forgotten all over again, as I basically emptied my mind to focus on the task at hand); I’d get a second reminder as I walked home. Moreover, with the reminder fresh in my head, I could easily resolve to not actually set foot in the house proper until these things were taken care of.

You wouldn’t recognize the garage much at this point, honey, as most of what occupied the space is long gone (and I honestly don’t know how you would have reacted to that; but we’ve been all over that already, now, haven’t we?). But I’m pleased to be able to get rid of another collection of things that we don’t need to be hanging onto – we’re not about to be moving out any time soon, so we don’t need to be saving boxes for anything like that – and get it out to the curb.

I haven’t turned into any sort of neat freak, honey – at least, I don’t think I have; if you were willing to have your spirit visit us at some point, you could check out the bedroom to confirm that – but I will admit that getting everything out to be picked up, especially after having neglected to do so for several weeks, gives one a real sense of satisfaction.

I found myself thinking of the second verse of a song my grandmother would sing when I was a little kid; it sounded like something she must have learned when she was a child, given the simplicity of the tune (not that I can transcribe it here and now, that I know of):

If I were a garbage boy
I would do my work with joy
And if someone would hurt me sore
I’d try to love them all the more
(Chorus)
And I’d do it all for Jesus
Oh, I’d do it all for Jesus
Yes, I’d do it all for Jesus
For He’s coming very soon.

Of course, He has yet to do so, so I guess I’m stuck in finding the satisfaction of this job, well… done for now. Until He does decide to make His return visit, honey, just continue to keep an eye on me (and if you’d be willing to drop by and check out the bedroom like I suggested earlier, that would be great, too), and wish me luck. I’m sure I’m going to need it.