MAGIC BOXES

“What’s in the box?”

It’s a question as old as Pandora, as famous as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman or as current as a little child shaking a gift from under a Christmas tree. At one time or another we have all wondered “What’s in the box?”.

And up until about 120 years ago it was a question that could be answered quite simply. You opened the box. Voila! For Pandora, it was every evil in the land, for Julia, a diamond necklace, for the little boy, a toy truck. You opened the box and whatever secret magic it may have had disappeared. An open box was a box without mystery.

And then in 1894 Gugliemo Marconi invented the radio. And he put his radio in a box. So, the humble box, an inanimate, ubiquitous mechanism of containment and transportation for thousands of years, became a magic box. A box that could talk, play music or bring into your living room a baseball game from a 1000 miles away. And unlike most every box before it, it could not be moved, for it was attached to the wall by a cord and most importantly, unlike any box before it, if you looked inside, it would still not reveal its secrets.

I’m not so old that I remember the Golden Age of radio, so it’s almost impossible for me to imagine the wonder and the amazement of it all, as entire families sat gathered around the Magnavox, a great hulking box of furniture, listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, talking to them from the box in the corner of the living room. It must have been as if the dog had broke out into an aria from The Marriage of Figaro.

My magic box was the TV. An RCA Victor TV, a great hulking box of furniture, with black and white pictures, 3 stations and Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless. That was 10 years after the Golden Age of radio and we had already become jaded citizens of the world of tomorrow. My generation was the first generation to accept the reality of a magic box. We took its wonders for granted.  We even pretended to be blasé  when the radio lost its cord and became portable, when the pictures on the TV came in color and music came to us on tape not vinyl.

I’d be lying to say that the blush on my blasé hasn’t gotten a little rusty with the advent of the ultimate magic box, the computer and all of its myriad attendant magic boxes. What one generation considers wondrous is old hat for the next. I sit here writing these words on a magic box they call a notebook, with a keyboard and screen that’s smaller than the paper notebook I carried in high school. I’m told if I wanted it to, it could connect me to the rest of the world. I still haven’t figured out why I would want to do this, as I think of the rest of the world the same way I do as the people in the DMV. I know they’re there but I choose to mix with them as infrequently as possible.

Now we’re all surrounded by a world full of magic boxes. They’re everywhere. The phone, the TV,  the remotes for the TV, Alexa, Siri, my car “keys” and ATMs. And no one seems to even notice. All the boxes are sealed in the factory so that we couldn’t open them if we tried. And to what end?  I could no more explain or comprehend the inner workings of the first simple radio, let alone the transistorized algorithms that have somehow managed to put Tom Cruise on the touchscreen of my phone. It’s all magic to me.

So it seems as if the humble box, inanimate and ubiquitous, isn’t so humble anymore and the question is not “What’s in the box?”. But rather “Who, or what, is putting the magic in the boxes and what do they want of me?”I certainly don’t know the answer and I have the funny feeling that, more and more, few of you do.

But that doesn’t bother me because I’ve already picked out my box. Mahogany, satin lined with four bright brass handles.

“What’s in the box?

Doc’s in the box.

Good luck, Pandora. I think you’re going to need it.