Boxes

One of the things I like about G+ is the "sparks" feature... which allows you to specify interests and then gives you a daily list of articles from around these inner-nets that fall into the category or categories you've defined.  I've defined a few interests, all of them obvious, like cigars, beer, and single-malts.  Here's a few grafs from a lil sumthin' in the Beaumont, Tejas local paper that popped up in the "cigars" category yesterday:

Cigar boxes are no longer a part of childhood. In an office supply store last week I saw a display of plastic boxes for children for use in school, for storing pens and pencils and glue and scissors and all the other easily-misplaced little impedimenta of very young artists.

Once upon a time, children employed wooden cigars boxes for such purposes; if one's father didn't smoke cigars then someone else's did, and so nice little wooden boxes were as common as 1943 steel pennies. I suppose that if now a child were to carry his art supplies to school in a cigar box he would be sent for therapy and his parents filed on with some state agency for Not Thinking Correctly.

The plastic boxes for sale now contain only air, and to a father that's disappointing; wooden cigar boxes came filled with, well, cigars, so everyone was happy. Contemporary boxes are filled with nothing more than the chemical aromas of Shanghai, and no one ever celebrated an accomplishment or a birth by lighting up a victory Chinese air molecule.

In another time-space dimension, the birth of a child was celebrated by the proud father handing out cigars to his pals. Upon retrospect one realizes that the young mother probably needed a cigar more than anyone, but such an image would not make an appropriately-sentimental greeting card. One wonders if somewhere there is at least one mother who smokes cigars while holding her infant, in Newton County, perhaps.

The article goes on at some length and it's quite a good reminiscence.  I do relate to the first few thoughts expressed above... I kept my childhood treasures in Dutch Masters boxes that were handed down from the Ol' Man.  My friends all had cigar boxes, too.  We kept our baseball cards in 'em, our marble collections (yeah, I shot marbles as a kid... do you know ANY kid that does that today?), and, for me, my model airplane paraphernalia... paint brushes, glue, small bottles of Testors paint, not to mention scads and scads of leftover decals.  I had more than a few cigar boxes.

I still have more than a few cigar boxes (see right), even after I've "gifted" ("pawned off" would be more descriptive) more than a few of 'em to grandson Sean and even some friends.  I find it hard to throw away these small objects of beauty, as I struggle to find some sort of use for 'em.  They only take up valuable and limited space right now, even considering the fact a couple o' boxes hold my Small Treasures, even today.

So... we have boxes.  If you have a child you want to indulge with a nostalgic sort of gift, drop me a line.  I've been known to ship, gratis.  And I have a few boxes on hand.