Curious Case of the Wooden Box

After years of not being inside of my Pappap’s house, I’ve been over there every day since Wednesday. My brother Corey and I were standing in one of the game rooms when we spotted this crazy ornamental box thing on a fireplace mantel.

“Oh my god, that looks like it belongs in your house!” Corey said.

I asked him if it would be weird if I took it and he was just like, no don’t be dumb. So I did. Because it calling to me. 

I started rooting through it later that night and it’s mostly full of old curlers, Bobby pins, matchbooks, receipts (mostly Sharon’s—things like dry cleaning, etc) but there was also a doctors appointment card in there with my birth dad’s name on it, which was kind of jarring to see.

We were over there again yesterday and uncovered a photo album in the living room. When I was little, I was OBSESSED with paging through tomes and tomes of photos.

I loved asking my grandma, “And who is this? And this?” But I had never seen this photo album before in my life. It appears that it belongs to my Aunt Sharon and it’s full of Polaroids from a party she must have had there in the 70s. At first, it made me feel so depressed, but then Corey admitted that seeing pictures of the house being so alive made him feel happy. And he’s right. The party years were over by the time I came onto the scene, but I used to hear stories about the epic parties held in that house, and it was pretty awesome to see pictures of Sharon looking so happy, hosting a party for her friends. There’s even a photo of her with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, and we never knew she ever smoked!

I feel like my grandparents must have been on vacation at this time because I have a hard time believing my grandma was OK with randoms traipsing through her master bathroom, lol.

Anyway, in one of the photos, that box is sitting on a table in the game room!!!!

I’ve never noticed this thing before in my life, and now it’s punching me in the face twice in 4 days.

My grandma used to babysit me when I was super little. My friend Amy’s grandparents lived next door, so she would always come over and we would spend a ton of time in that game room playing at the bar. One of the waitresses at Blue Flame had given me an order pad thing and we would use that to take each other’s bar orders, because that’s what 5-year-olds do when their playroom is essentially an adult’s playroom. We’d go back and forth between that and the slot machines.

And in high school, this is where L.A.M.E. had all of their “meetings” and where we would film a lot of our English class videos. Yet I don’t even recall seeing that box. It’s so bizarre to me!

So many puzzle pieces.