Startbox, my Startbox

When I decided last summer that I was moving here, I had moments of panic when I couldn’t imagine where I was going to come up with the necessary household goods to stock two places of residence. You know, stuff like pots, pans, spatulas.

The nice guy I married suggested a trip to Ikea, homeland of cheap assemble-it-yourself furniture and meatballs. "At Ikea," he told me, "they have boxes for things like this." A few mouse clicks later, I found them: Startboxes.

Startboxes are a marvel of modern engineering. In a 12 x 21 box, I found pots, pans, baking dishes, mixing bowls, storage containers, trivets and an assortment of tools. The pieces fit together like a 3-dimensional puzzle—you know the kind. Sometimes they have money tucked into the middle, sometimes a bottle of wine, and in order to get to the treasure, you have to take the puzzle apart.

There were spatulas, a peeler, metric measuring cups, a garlic press, kitchen shears (among other things) and my favorite of all: a groggy.

Yes, a groggy. It said so right on the package. Groggy.

A groggy, in case you’re wondering, is a corkscrew. A fairly standard restaurant-style corkscrew at that.

By now, 4 months into my apartment, I’ve used the garlic press and the spatulas, the peeler and the can opener. I’ve even purchased and used English measuring cups. But my groggy sits in my drawer, sadly unused. I should go buy a bottle of NYS wine so that I can finally use the poor thing. I think about it regularly, but never do it because here in Wine Country, you have to actually go to a wine store to buy it. Liquor, also, comes from the wine store, though you can pick up a 6-pack of Yuengling just about anywhere. Except for a wine store, of course. And I haven’t yet made it into a wine store.

But of course there’s more to the story than that—there always is.

I believe, as much as I believe in anything, that we are, ultimately, the product of our choices. We make good choices, we make bad ones. How we react to and clean up after those bad ones is also indicative of who we are not just in how we present ourselves externally, but of who we believe ourselves to be internally. Granted, what we do, how we do it, is colored by experience and belief but in the end, who we are is defined by those choices.

I come from a family with well-documented, addictive personalities. Thanks to science, we are beginning to understand and recognize that there are bits of genetic code that help to make those addictions more, well, addicting. So on the one hand, I am a product of those things that were done by others. But it is the other hand, that notion of choice, that drives my decision to leave the groggy in the drawer.

What I know, because of my genetic coding and because of behaviors I have seen modeled, is that the bottle of wine will very easily lead to the bottle of scotch, and the bottle of scotch, well, it’s not something I need to have in my solo apartment. So I choose, each time I drive past the wine store and think about veering into the parking lot, to look out the opposite window at the empty lot across the street from the store.

So my groggy waits.

Meanwhile, the box, my empty Startbox, is in the closet because eventually I know that I’ll be packing up the pots, the pans, the garlic press, and taking them to wherever I go next, be it a house here in upstate New York or somewhere else. I will try to fit the pots, the pans, the garlic press back into those confines though I know that, like other genies from other bottles, they’ll never go in exactly the same they were in the beginning.