Ominous Stories

The Little Wooden Box

It was your standard blue collar work day-in at 9, work for eight hours, out by 5. My dad was on his way home to have a standard blue collar evening when something not-so-standard happened. Driving home from work, his car was hit by some douchebag pickup truck driver on the freeway trying to merge into the fast lane-he merged into my dad, instead. My dad's car was sandwiched between this big-ass pickup truck and the concrete divider-it came out of the accident looking like a Picasso rendering of a meat grinder. My dad fared only slightly better: he broke several ribs, and his left arm looked like it had been run through said cubist meat grinder-the surgeons couldn't save it. The doctor said my dad was lucky to have lost his left arm, since he's right-handed. Lucky, the doctor said. How is it they all have such God-awful bedside manner?
My dad had to stay in the hospital a good two months-long enough to rack up a breathtaking amount of debt in the form of medical bills. When my dad finally got out, he was nowhere close to functional-he had a long road of physical therapy and routine hospital visits ahead of him before he could go back to work, assuming there'd even be a job left for him when he'd recovered. He was next to useless around the house; you'd never guess how much you have to use your off hand for, well, damn near everything. What this amounted to was a giant crock of shit for me, my mom, and my sister to deal with on a daily basis, to say nothing of how my dad must have felt: useless. Powerless. A burden to our family.
I'm not telling you all this to get sympathy-my family and I have had our fill of that, and it doesn't do much for anyone. I'm telling you this so you understand why we were so grateful for it at first-the little wooden box.

My dad started seeing a psychiatrist about a month after being released from the hospital. He's not much for getting mental help-one of those guys that seems to think people get fixed the same way cars do, and doesn't understand why someone can't just take a look under the hood and fix it themselves. But as he put it, he'd felt too shitty for too long, and had to do something about it. His doctor recommended the psychiatrist to him-about the only useful thing that doctor did. The psychiatrist, this dweeby guy with an equally dweeby Dr. Freud goatee, diagnosed my dad with "post-operative depression." Not that terms like that tell you jack shit about what the person's going through.
After a couple unproductive sessions, the psychiatrist decides to try something "unorthodox." The psychiatrist takes out this little box made of cedar, pine, or some other light wood. It's small-you could fit a dime-store book in there, but not much else-and mostly plain: some modest scrollwork in the corners, but little else in the way of decoration.
"Whenever you feel angry, or sad, or frustrated," the psychiatrist says, "I want you to take some time to yourself, all right? What you're going to do then is take this box, open it up, and stuff all the bad feelings inside. You keep doing that until you get all that icky stuff out, and when you've done that, you're going to close that box, put it away, and you're going to focus on getting better until you need the box again."
My dad spent a good hour stomping and swearing when he got home from that session-lots of talk about pretentious medical professionals, wasted money, and some creative ideas for alternate places the psychiatrist could put his little wooden box. I half-expected my dad to take out his frustration on the box, and break it in two; once he was done ranting and raving, however, he just set it on a shelf in my parents' room.

A week and a half after my dad got the little wooden box, my dad's boss called the house. He told my dad that he had to let my dad go, and replace him-in plain terms, my dad was fired. Time is money, as the saying goes, and my dad was taking too much of both to recover. There was no screaming and cursing this time-getting fired took the fight right out of him.
After hanging up the phone, my dad locked himself in my parents' room. My mom and sister tried to get him to come out and talk, but he was having none of it. I almost decided to help, but I figured my dad might have needed a little time to himself. It turns out I was right-after three hours, my dad comes out of there with the biggest smile I've ever seen, and starts making mac and cheese for dinner. It was an absolute mess-he got flour and dry pasta on every flat surface of the kitchen, and the sauce was full of cheese chunks that he hadn't been able to cut properly-but that smile never once left his face. And I'll tell you what, that shitty mac and cheese was the best dinner I've ever had.
It was all thanks to that box-my dad sat down with that thing for three hours, dumped all his frustration into it, and came out of my parents' room a changed man. After using the box, he wouldn't get discouraged when his missing arm stopped him from doing something-he'd just come back at it with twice the effort, and eventually he'd get done what he wanted to get done. He went to therapy with a smile, and came back exhausted, but still smiling. When things got rough-when his job search wasn't going well, or the medical bills got too expensive, even if he just had a hard time brushing his teeth-he locked himself in my parents' room with that little box, and came out a couple hours later ready to take on the world again.
My family and I were grateful for that little wooden box. It was a godsend, when we needed one most. It's not the nature of things to just magically get better, though-miracle wooden boxes aside.