The Infinity Box

Newsletter 2024-03-17

What’s in the box?! Anything and everything. A single six-sided cardboard container can focus the infinite power of children’s imaginations to create all the wonders of the universe. That brown cube enthralls kids’ minds in a way no other form of technology ever could. We have six video game consoles, seven TVs, and an undetermined number of phones and tablets, yet my girls cast everything aside when the delivery driver showed up this week. He arrived with a storage footstool my wife Lola ordered on the internet. There was nothing particularly exciting about the furniture itself—except to anyone who appreciates good decor, which hardly counts—but it came in a box. My daughters went wild. You would have thought the delivery guy showed up with Taylor Swift tickets. The kids rummaged through drawers to find tape, markers, and scissors. In the wrong hands, those implements are weapons of mass destruction, but that day, they were the tools of creation. Together, my crew would craft a functional masterpiece and destroy the living room in the process. It kept them quiet for a few hours, so I was okay with it—until the screaming started.

Boxes have always been a hot commodity in our house. Even the adults here treasure them. In the lead-up to Christmas, we have to remember to hold on to a fraction of the dozens of Amazon boxes we receive each day so that we can package things up and give them to various family members, who will also give their gifts to us in similar Amazon boxes. If Jeff Bezos started shipping everything in plastic bags rather than cardboard cubes, he could ruin Christmas more effectively than the Grinch. More recently, the brown boxes have been an important building material for school projects. There’s nothing I loathe more than when my kids give me a list of craft materials they need, usually at the last minute, for some creative endeavor that could have been replaced by a worksheet and a lecture. Requiring my kids to break out scissors and glue doesn’t increase the learning, but it exponentially expands my frustration. The only thing “creative” about a school project is the drama it creates in my life. My eleven-year-old, Mae, had to build a custom musical instrument last week. I say “last week,” but it was probably assigned two months ago. Last week is when she finally got around to it. It’s for the best that she had to pump it out in a compressed time period given how loud the process was. It was awfully nice of her teacher to give her a graded excuse to make more noise. For days, we all got to listen to her blow on straws cut to various lengths and angles to make a broad spectrum of tones. She encased the straws in a cardboard shell delivered by our friendly neighborhood mega corporation. Without a regular supply of boxes, the school project industry would collapse overnight. I can dream.

Most of the boxes we get are small and thus of little interest to my kids. To spark their imaginations, the cardboard structure has to be at least big enough to fit over someone’s head. That’s when we enter the danger zone. Instead of acting as an armored helmet, such boxes function as a blindfold that’s sure to lead to more injuries inside the house. My only two rules for my offspring are still pick up your stuff and don’t touch each other. Every time I hear one of the kids shout, “OW,” I know that one or both of those rules has been violated. Most likely, someone attacked someone else, but it’s also possible a kid merely tripped over or stepped on something they left on the floor. Both scenarios occur much more frequently when said child has a box over their head. Cardboard boxes should come with perforated eye holes that are easy to punch out as a safety feature. Feel free to use that idea, Mr. Bezos. All I ask is that you send me a ten percent commission on every box.

The footstool package was in a league of its own. My kids were intrigued by it from the moment it showed up. I didn’t notice when the delivery driver lugged the thing up my front stairs. I was at my computer busily working from home—or busily not working from home. Both states are equally distracting. When Betsy and Mae got home from school, they threw open the door and told me about the giant parcel. It was too heavy for them to lift, which isn’t saying much. I’m raising wonderful, capable young women who are also severely lacking in upper body strength. They get that from me. The girls wanted to know what was inside the package. I had no idea. There are two adults on our Amazon account, but that didn’t prove Lola was to blame. I’m often surprised by what shows up on our porch even when I’m the one who clicked on it. You can’t expect me to remember everything I ordered the day before or even earlier that morning. This time, though, the package really was Lola’s doing. We don’t have a rule about discussing purchases before we make them. Granted, we still clear big things with each other, like a seven-foot-tall taxidermy bear or a six-foot-long stuffed mountain lion. Now that I write that out, it occurs to me that I buy more dead animals as gifts than the average person. Average people need to step it up. The footstool was well within the price range where Lola wouldn’t check with me first. I couldn’t tell my kids what was in the box because it was a mystery to me, too. Then I looked at the outside of it, which was clearly labeled, “storage footstool.” No one ever accused my kids of being detectives—unless they’re sniffing out where I hid the snacks I was saving just for me. Then they’re Sherlock Holmes combined with Inspector Gadget. Go Go Gadget Legs to reach the top shelf.

Lola had been on the hunt for a good storage ottoman for months. The pigs ate the last one. It had a wicker outer shell that the older swine, Gilly, found irresistible. She didn’t swallow the pieces she tore off. She simply destroyed the footstool because she was bored. Some pigs just want to see the world burn. It began looking pretty sad, even compared to the rest of our heavily damaged furniture. When you have this many kids, the only decorating theme you can pull off is post-apocalypse chic. I put the partially destroyed footstool on the curb, where it disappeared almost immediately. It’s now a key piece of furniture for someone who has even more kids than me. In the meantime, we were left without a space to stash our living room blankets. We live in an old, drafty house. You have to layer up with quilts and afghans if you want to watch TV downstairs without freezing to death. The mystery box was Lola’s solution to that problem. The kids couldn’t care less about our blanket struggles. They just wanted the box.

Later that night, Lola assembled the footstool. It’s one of her greatest joys in life. She treats all IKEA projects as adult Legos. This one was disappointingly simple. All she had to do was screw on the legs. The finished product left an empty cardboard husk in its wake. The kids were all over it like ants on a cake. It was big enough to hide an entire child. They took turns laying down inside it and closing the lid. They called it their coffin. Lola was less than thrilled with that terminology. Why do moms hate raising vampires? The kids redesignated it as their clubhouse. That’s when construction began.

Lola and I went up to our room to watch a movie. The kids got to work. They cut out windows on the short ends of the box and covered them with thin Styrofoam sheets to make curtains. They cut another hole on the broad side of the box, popped out the cardboard, and bridged the gap with clear packing tape to make a bay window. Next came the rules. You can’t have a box house society without a clear set of laws and statutes. They wrote those on another piece of cardboard, which they proudly taped to the side of their house like Moses posting the Ten Commandments. The most important rule was no boys or adults. I was double excluded. The other rules were harder to decipher. I mean that because of the handwriting, not the legal complexity. I had to have Mae interpret the last one for me. It said no hitting the gritty inside the box. I thought perhaps the kids were writing in another language. It turns out they were. They were speaking YouTube. The gritty is a dance, which my nine-year-old, Lucy, did while standing in the box. It was promptly banned forever. Apparently it didn’t go well. She also gets her sense of rhythm from me.

With the structure fully assembled, all that was left to do was fight about it. While multiple kids could sit inside the box with the lid open, it was far more fun to lie down with the lid closed. That meant only one girl could be in there at a time, giving them an exclusive privilege denied to the other three. That’s what they all wanted. They took turns lying in the box and watching TV through the windows. It was in such demand that they had to set a timer and establish a rotation. That should have eliminated all conflict, but it increased it. What is time, anyway? You can’t live your life by such an amorphous metaphysical fiction. Turns are dictated by feelings, not a clock.

I expected the allure of the box would wear off quickly. That wasn’t the case at all. The next day, when Lucy and my eight-year-old, Waffle, got home from school, they walked in the front door mid-fight. Of course it was about who’s turn it was to use the box. They had big dreams for their cardboard fortress. Lucy was planning a movie night with the box as prime seating. Coincidentally, Taylor Swift’s new concert had come out on Disney Plus a few days before. Rather than paying three thousand dollars per ticket to see the event in-person, we waited until it was available on the fifteen-dollar-a-month streaming service we already paid for. That wasn’t the same as going to the concert; it was a million times better. Here, the kids could watch it from inside a cardboard box. Everyone who paid their life savings for premium stadium seating must have been seething with jealousy.

We didn’t get around to the movie night until Saturday afternoon. First, we had a multitude of chores to do. That’s the eternal condition. Mundane household tasks don’t end until you die, and even then, they keep going if you end up in the bad place. Gasp in horror at Satan’s to-do list. Betsy left with Lola to go out to eat with her great uncles, and Mae had a scout hiking trip. That left me and the two little girls to keep the house in order. I did spring yard prep work while the little girls did just enough chores to always stop one step short. They picked up their room but not the toy room, and then the toy room but not the toy room closet. Unless I specified the exact area, it didn’t get done. I admire their malicious compliance. Finally, the house was in a state that even Lola wouldn’t be able to find fault with. It was time for T-Swift and box seat glory.

Lucy and Waffle popped movie-style buttery popcorn and made hot chocolate. Then they settled into their favorite box fort. They made it halfway through the epic musical event before they got bored. It was for the best that we didn’t go to the concert. If I paid thousands of dollars for tickets only for the kids to ask to go home early, it would have ended us as a family. Even if the kids were done with that particular show, they weren’t done with the box. It’s still in the middle of our living room, where the children pop into it from time to time while browsing their phones or playing video games. It appears to be a permanent part of our decor—until Lola gets sick of it and throws it out. Having standards is a burden.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James