Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2011

Day 1100: in which Bob predates hipsters.

Another fine specimen of a Bob box. This Pabst Blue Ribbon box recently found its way to me from my stepmother's basement. Its contents are mysterious: loose diodes and transistors, carefully wrapped in socks and rubber bands, several books on Calculus, a slide rule, and a half dozen of empty pill bottles with their labels ripped off. Ingrained in my memory, this solidly-constructed box has carried varying possessions of Bob's since the 1970s!

Day 1099: in which a good box is hard to find.

Between 1974, when I was born, and 1992, when I graduated from high school, I lived in, at least, 20 different houses. Though we resided, for the most part, in Columbia County , so that I could remain in the same school through graduation, continuity where it counts being of importance to my father, we often relocated to different rentals in the area. Whenever we moved into a new house, Bob would initially discuss decorating the house but it rarely moved past the theoretical. The boxes containing our belongings would often double as our furniture. Several stacked Xerox boxes would become the TV stand. Bed sheets tacked up would become our curtains, if there were curtains hung at all. Bob had dreams of me sewing curtains out of burlap , a material he found both sturdy and practical, but my ambition to sew was low, so they never came to fruition. XEROX boxes worked the best. Xerox boxes worked the best, and easy to come by, at the Internal Revenue Service offices in Albany,