“What’s in the box?” my son asked as we dragged the 4-foot cardboard container into the kitchen from the porch where the UPS man had left it.
“You’ll see,” I answered him as I grabbed a paring knife and began to cut at the packaging tape that was securing this most important delivery.
30 years ago we took a trip up into New England and eastern Canada. My parents borrowed a huge Winnebago from some friends and we camped our way through the coastal towns of Maine and into Fundy National Park. I’m not very good at remembering specifics about trips I’ve been on, especially family vacations. When we were kids my mom used to play a game with us we affectionately called “It’s Your Nickel”. Mom would ask us a question about a place we’d visited or something we’d seen and whoever called out the answer first, got the nickel. Suffice to say I didn’t see many nickels.
I do remember, however, that on this particular trip I became fixated on having a lobster trap. I admit to a fondness for the buttery crustaceans (steamed, with butter and lemon). There was something romantic about the notion of having a trap of my very own. A conversation piece if you will. A one of a kind souvenir. Not wanting to disappoint his little girl, Dad found a way to talk some local lobstermen to hand over one of theirs.
The plan was to turn the trap into a coffee table, one that could bring a little bit of the sea to my college apartment. We’d seen them as we traveled throughout the northeast and they didn’t seem that complicated to make. I mean, what could be so hard about adding a piece of glass to a lobster trap?
Well, as often happens with the best-laid plans, the trap never quite made it into its table form. At least not for a very long time. At some point, long after I was done with college and on to “finding myself” in the wilds of Montana’s Northern Cheyenne reservation, my sister, needing a coffee table for her first home, managed to convert the trap into its long overdue table form with some assistance once again from D.O.D. (dear old Dad).
“I’ve got your lobster trap,” she told me when we spoke on the phone one evening. “You can have it back whenever you want.”
“No worries,” I said to her. “Someday I’ll figure out how to get it out to California. Until then, feel free to use it.”
And use it she did. At some point, she must have grown tired of the nautical theme and the trap found its way back to my parent’s garage where it has lived for the past 20 years.
“We’ve still got your lobster trap.” Dad would remind me affectionately when I flew home for the occasional visit, but try as I might, I could never quite figure out how to get that unique memento of my childhood across the country. It was too bulky for a carry on, too fragile for the luggage compartment and way too big to fit in the overhead. And so it remained in the garage, living out its life buried deep amidst the other someday and forgotten items, collecting dust and waiting for its someday to come.
It took the selling of my parent’s home to force the issue.
“What do you want to do with your lobster trap?” my sister asked. “Do you want me to see if I can ship it out to California?”
That a girl.
And finally, here it was. I felt a rush of excitement as I cut through the packaging tape Taking off the lid of the box, I began to shovel the Styrofoam peanuts into a plastic bag. I lifted it out from its careful packaging and placed it squarely on the floor. It was beautiful.
“What is that?” my son asked again as I sat looking at it, lost in memories.
“It’s a lobster trap,” I replied, consciously giving him the Reader’s Digest version of the story. “It’s used to catch lobsters on the bottom of the ocean.”
And along the way, the heart of a teenage girl.