There was a cardboard storage box in the garage of my childhood filled with 1950s prom dresses, smashed wool fedoras from the sixties, satin and tulle dance costumes that grew smaller and smaller, narrow-toed and kitten-heeled pumps and odd bits of clothing and accessories culled from dresser drawers.
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Note: the bolded line is ranked #42 in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie quotations in American cinema.
Cardboard boxes dominated my childhood. Plastic bins arrived with puberty.
From March through October I played outside- and in the attached 1 ½ car garage of the mid-1960s split level childhood home on a cul-de-sac in a Midwestern city whose periphery has been spilling further into the surrounding fields since 1945.
Those first ten years there were many kids on the court.
From the cardboard box filled with cast offs we played dress up.
One summer day I got the bright idea to move the mustard yellow GE stereo record player I’d recently inherited from my father who had replaced it with a quadraphonic, 8-track-record playing-radio wooden cased combi piece of furniture that I was constantly stubbing my bare toes against as I ran around the house -purchased with his quarter of the inheritance left after my grandfather’s death, out onto our back patio along with the cardboard boxes of LPs -movie soundtracks, original Broadway cast recordings, The Beatles, Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy- and my mom’s little carry box of 1950s 45s -Rockin’ Robin, At the Hop, and everything from Ricky Nelson.
We put on the dresses, made up our faces with the tiny Avon lipstick samples that arrived every other week with my mom’s latest perfume order, and performed along to the songs blasting from that yellow box on the patio.
In the evening the player and boxes were returned to the garage.
Towards the end, in the age of Xanadu we put on our white-boot, metal wheeled roller skates along with the prom dresses, and took our show to the front driveway. Singing and skating for the ice cream man -the driver a throwback from 1973 who’d found favor with the teenagers that summer.
Leaving clothing in cardboard boxes in a midwestern garage over many winters and summers means today the only remnants are the images in my head, often brought forth when I smell the mixture of dampness and oil that rises from the floor of the 1930s wooden, detached two-car garage belonging to the house in which I now reside. Or when I see a moth, or a chewed on piece of fabric.
There are no clothes stored in cardboard boxes in my garage.
My sons played ‘dress up’ with masks and felt resembling animals found at the craft store and stored in pop-up, brightly colored baskets from the blue and yellow flat pack foundry. The older one was terrified by the contents of the basket.
The younger one still plays dress-up, not limiting himself to the contents of a basket, or to ‘playtime’. He digs into the drawer where the LPs of my childhood and teen-years... those that survived the warping heat, the scratches of the metal roller skate wheels and the rough brick, concrete and asphalt driveway… lays them onto the new- old 1980s retro-stereo style player with radio and USB port, and creates his own performances, alone in our living room. When he isn’t playing Dr. Who and James Bond with the neighbors grandson - in suspenders, a t-shirt, clip on tie, sports coat and Chuck Taylors. But mostly the music he sings and dances to is streamed through his father's iPhone...Monstercat and Dub. He doesn’t tap, jazz, ballet and Martha Graham...his dance are the moves he’s picked up Saturday’s in his hip-hop class.
Remnants of their childhood are stored in plastic bins with tight fitting lids in the attic and basement.
In my parent’s basement there is one plastic bin containing the final bits of my life in Ohio.