Thinking Outside the Box

When I was in middle school, which now seems like sometime around the Paleozoic era, boys were forced to take industrial arts down in the basement and girls were kept upstairs and shuffled off somewhere to take home economics.  The idea was that boys would learn things dealing primarily with woodworking and metal-shop and girls would learn how to cook and sew.  Times have changed.

Entering the third and final year of middle school industrial arts I had already built two of the suggestions that were typically constructed as what was essentially considered a rite of passage by almost all of the boys in my town.  One of these projects was a birdhouse.  The other was a wooden hanging notepad, or as old buddy Pete Dutcher recently described it, “a note dispenser where the notepaper came on a roll.”  This project was built to hang on the wall next to the family telephone to record messages for recipients who were not home or not willing to take a call at the time. (This was when each household usually had only one telephone in the house.  If you were born during the current century you might need to, um, Google that.)  

Every boy who attended the middle school in my town completed at least one of these two projects and if they didn’t they probably failed to receive an eventual diploma.  I am willing to bet that virtually every house in my hometown still has a hanging wooden notepad somewhere within it and there must be thousands of identical birdhouses that were constructed at the town’s middle school.  Suffice it to say, housing for birds has never been a problem in my town.  If I recall correctly, each of these projects would take roughly an entire school year to make, even though in reality they should both take no longer than 30 minutes each.  To the ears of a middle school student, the entire process was rather methodical and laborious.  You had to choose the wood, measure the wood, cut the wood, sand the wood, put together your project, then stain and finish it.  It was months in the making, especially since it was completed during classes that were sometimes weeks apart.

Entering the eighth grade year of industrial arts I wanted to use my time wisely.  After all, this would probably be the final year of this class unless I was to continue it as an elective at our high school (which I would not) and with the minimal skills I had already developed I could crank out birdhouses and hanging notepads with the best of them.  I needed to make something that was useful.  After much thought, I decided I would make a box.  A box was something that I could actually use (at least that was my hope at the time).  A simple box would be relatively easy to make, different from what was normally made in this class, and it was completely utilitarian.  I had no idea at the time what I might put in this box or if I would even complete such a project, but it seemed like an idea that was swimming in practicality.  

Our teacher that year was a man named Mr. McCusker, and he quickly endorsed the idea of the box, although I got the idea that he might have been less than enthused that I wanted to branch off (no pun intended) from building either a birdhouse or another hanging notepad.  After all, creating a box would require him to actually devise a whole new plan on paper about how I was going to accomplish this task rather than put the standard middle school blueprints into action.  But together we began the process and set out to work in the fall of my eighth grade year.  Each class that I came in I would return to the job of constructing this box.  I think that our classes were probably about 40 minutes long and our industrial arts class met so sporadically that it was hard to gain momentum.  The length of the class period left just enough time for me to take out the materials I needed, stare at them for a few minutes contemplating what I had to do, catch up with my friends instead of working on the box, and then put the materials away until the next time I had industrial arts.  But over time, my box did begin to take shape, and by the end of the year I had built a box.  It was not exactly what I had originally envisioned.  Mr. McCusker’s plan had resulted in a much fancier top than I had dreamed up at the beginning of the school year.  His top had two hinges on it with a flap that left about three inches of solid surface at the back end of the box.   Although aesthetically more advanced, I recognized the design of the top as a potential problem.  I wouldn’t be able to remove the top and put things into the box as I had planned.  Instead, I would need to actually fit them into the box after lifting up the more limiting lid of the fancier top.  I would have to find a way to work with it.  After all, the box was complete and at year’s end I was happy to be able to take something home with me that was not another birdhouse or hanging notepad. 

Not long after I graduated from high school, my mother decided to sell our family house and I took very few items with me.  One of the items that I did take was the box that I had built while in middle school, primarily because at the time it held a rather sizable collection of cassette tapes that I had accrued over the years.  I have since lived in various parts of New England including the Massachusetts locations of Gloucester, Boston, Somerville, Marshfield, and Scituate, as well as a year in New Boston, New Hampshire.  The box has come with me to each of these locations and is, ironically, still being used.  My cassettes are, sadly, long gone.  When the music world went digital, I finally dumped them into a cardboard box and left them out with the trash on the sidewalk while living in the North End of Boston.  They were quickly gone, some passerby scoring a pretty good find while dumpster diving, as they say.  The box has since held various resume materials (although even that term is now dated) and is now holding, somewhat appropriately, historical writings related to the seaside town of Scituate where the box is currently located.  

The box is far more weathered than when I first took it out of that wood shop at the end of the eighth grade sporting a water stain or two from years of remaining unfinished, but it has proven to be predictably reliable while withstanding the test of time.  And while the box I built has served me well for the purpose for which it was designed roughly 42 years ago, I am willing to bet that most of the birdhouses that were constructed during that same year are by this time, well, for the birds.