Boxing It Up

The carnage lay everywhere, the kitchen, the bathroom, the family room. It appeared as though enraged madmen had torn through the house, wreaking havoc and leaving destruction in their wake.

The perpetrators? The male members of my family. The victims? Boxes.

You heard me. Boxes. Between my husband and my son, the box doesn’t exist that they’re not holding some sort personal grudge against. At least that’s what it looks like by the time they’re done mauling the box in question.

“What happened to the cereal box?” I asked.

“What cereal box?” my son grunted.

“This cereal box. The one that looks like it’s been attacked by a rabid dog.”

“Oh. It was a new box. It was a little hard to open.”

“It’s made out of cardboard. How hard could it be?”

“I dunno. They must use a lot of glue on those things or something. It was taking too long to open, so I just kind of tore it open.”

“It took too long to open? Exactly how hungry were you?"

“Geez, it’s just a stupid box. What’s the big deal?”

I turned my attention to the cream cheese box, bashed and beaten into submission, staring forlornly up at me from the table.

“Who pummeled the cream cheese box?”

“Don’t look at me; Dad’s the one eating a bagel,” my son said, ratting out his father without a second thought. Dave looked up and stopped eating in mid-bite.

“Thanks for that, David. I owe you one,” he muttered in our son’s direction.

“Hey, it took the heat off of me. You would have done the same thing,” David tossed back, chomping down a spoonful of cereal.

“Never mind,” I injected. “What did you do to this cream cheese box? I know for a fact that this was already opened because I opened it myself—without destroying it, I might add—yesterday.”

“Opening it wasn’t the problem,” Dave said. “When I went to put the cream cheese back in the box, it didn’t fit right since the cream cheese wasn’t a perfect rectangle anymore, so I ripped the box a little trying to make it fit the cream cheese.”

“The box isn’t supposed to fit the cream cheese, the cream cheese is supposed to fit inside the box,” I said.

“Well, the box was too confining,” he countered.

“It’s supposed to be confining; it’s a box! That’s the whole point of a box, to confine the thing inside of it!” I yelped.

“I still don’t see what the big deal is,” my son said.

“The big deal is that when I try to put things away, nothing ever fits right in the cabinets and whatever is inside of the box is always falling out!” I said.

“I never have any trouble fitting stuff in the cabinet,” David said. “If there’s not enough room, you just shove the boxes to the back and it all fits fine.”

“Wrecking more boxes in the process and compounding the problem,” I said. Met with a puzzled stare, I stalked out of the room only to find a torn FedEx box divesting itself of its contents in the family room and a bathroom cups spilling from a ripped box in the bathroom.

I sighed, defeated. They are men. Wrecking things is in their nature. And it could be worse.

They could be trying to fix things instead.

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