The Box of Ghosts

There is a certain subset of stagehands who spend at least a little bit of time in and out of different venues and vendor warehouses and who require a road box or two for their personal gear. They're pretty utilitarian, the road boxes, mostly made of wood or some composite with metal edging to protect them as they get forklifted on and off of trucks, or up and down lift gates, lining hallways or lobbies or stashed somewhere offstage for the run of a show.

These road boxes often act like a kind of office on the go, and can be as sophisticated or as simple as the needs of the owner. It might be a home away from home or just a cabinet of supplies and doodads necessary to run a show. It’s not unusual to see someone pop open their box to reveal lights, a printer, built in monitor(s), a fridge, coffee maker. Collections of bobbleheads. Magnets. Bumper stickers or union bugs from dozens of different locals. I’ve seen more than one with a wet bar. You name it, some stagehand somewhere has done it.

They're part of our culture, our sacred spaces, occasionally subject to fuckery. I've personally sat down and spent an hour or two figuring out someone's combination to steal back an entire's show worth of expendibles and replace them with IOUs, or to stuff every single nook and cranny with confetti, or to replace all the tools with sandbags and stageweights.

It’s also not unusual to see purely functional boxes as well…just drawers of tools or bits and bobs, perhaps separated by category. Roll it off the truck to wherever it will wind up in the house, open it up and get going.

My father, being a “shop guy” who pretty much stayed put, didn’t need most of those. His, rather, speaks to his mindset…a guy who preferred antique tools, who did things by hand as much as possible, without machines. He eschewed computers and calculators, always encouraging people to do it “the old way,” knowing that there was a deep knowledge there that was in very real danger of being lost. He had a separate locker for his things, his lunch and whatnot, and there was a fridge in the shop, so he didn’t need to have a snack drawer or a minifridge. 

Knowing all this, and looking through it when I started photographing his tools, I was still struck by the little deeply personal things I found…on the outside of a drawer one of my college dorm room phone numbers along with that of my grandmother, hers still written in the old “numbering plan” style. As I took out the drawers and opened little boxes, I found an old tobacco tin with a rosary from his mother along with baby and school photos of my sister, who killed herself shortly before he retired. In another drawer, Fathers’ Day notes from her that accompanied whatever gifts she’d given him each year. In another drawer, a polaroid of he and his shop partner, also named Eddie. In the bottom-most one, a LIRR train schedule, the time period bookending his retirement date. 

Now, as I’m entering a time in my career where I might start contemplating a road box of my own, do I think about using his? Of course. It would be practical enough, save me a few hundred or thousand bucks, and I would definitely make good use of it. The fact that it’s handmade by him, not some plywood contraption anonymously cobbled together in a random shop is incredibly appealing. There’s history there, and legacy. Tradition. All kinds of things that mean so much to me, to a lot of us. In this time of social media and AI and in a moment when almost everything is ethereal, existing in the cloud and able to be wiped out with a mouse click, physical objects - things you can hold - matter more than ever. Being blue collar and existing in a world of reality, of ropes that get pulled by human hands and sets that are built and lit by teams of men and women in actual space matters now. It's capital-I Important. We build things and make things, and those things have increasing significance in a world that seems to grow more ephemeral and nonsensical by the hour.

Then I realize that even though I’ve almost completely disassembled it several times, moved it into different rooms to work with it and photograph it and figure out how to light it and whatever else, I’m still very reluctant to disturb it any more than that.

I've had a lot of loss in my life. Consequently, I've learned that when someone dies, it’s not unusual for mundane objects to suddenly assume a kind of holiness; an aura, a little magic that only you know about.

Your parent in the other room when you’re a teenager has a lifetime of grocery lists ahead of them, so any one you might come across has no value. But after they're gone, finding a grocery list tucked into a book they might not have even finished reading is an unexpected relic…were they making something in particular? Shopping for a trip? Was it the handwriting you remembered, strong and hurried from your teenage years? Or the slower, shakier, more hesitant handwriting of their older years?

Which of those grocery lists was the last one they wrote? Which of them will be the last one you ever find? What little scrap that you fight yourself about tossing is the last scrap of their handwriting? Each occasion is one less possibility down the road that you'll have a next one. The mundanity is eclipsed by the scarcity.

In this road box of my father's I have a lockable rolling case of these, a time capsule of the end of my father’s career, when I was in and out of working as a stagehand myself, unsure about a business that at the time seemed to have no place for me. His daughter recently dead and consequently his world as he then knew it blown apart and resettling around him. His first house of 20+ years where his two kids were raised - now sold. At that time, he was done with the train rides, the politics, the garbage projects, the worrying about how the business was changing. He was stressing about getting it home...it was heavy, bulky and needed to ride on its wheels. We didn't own a car that could accommodate it, so it required a truck. Sure he could rent one, but he didn't want to drive in the city. Endless complications. And then it would need to move into the new house in Connecticut. How would it get into and then back out of the house in New York? It couldn't live in the garage, all the stuff he'd worked to remove and keep rust off of would be in danger of it.

Then he was in and out of it for years, doing his little projects in the new house in New England, but it never moved again out of that room. And surely it was never examined in the manner I went through it, 20 years later. So now how do I remove all that stuff, file it all away somewhere else, give it a new home somewhere, maybe have it live in a lighting warehouse in New Jersery somewhere while I hustle up my next gig?

Where do I put everything? Do I throw the railroad schedule away or do I frame it? Is it ridiculous to frame it? Is it ridiculous for that tobacco tin with a dead mother's rosary beads and a shortened lifetime of a dead daughter's school photos to now live in a stupid plastic storage tote bought in a 12 pack off an app on a phone? Or is it ridiculous for me to think that it belongs forever in a dead man's handmade road box, in his workshop?

How do I disturb this box of ghosts?