Bento Boxes In The Refrigerator

a conversation with an imaginary dog

I have a pretty elaborate alarm clock. A little white and silver ball wakes me by speaking aloud the time, the day, the weather, and the top three news stories, then it turns on the lights and the television, but without any volume. It calls me by name and knows the difference between when I speak to it and when a friend does. It will tell me how to properly pronounce Greek phrases if I ask, and it reminds me of the year Archie Manning won the Sugar Bowl. 1970, by three points over the dreaded Arkansas Razorpigs. One day, I fully expect it to wake me by saying, “Good Morning, Boyd. I’ve opened the Pod Bay Doors.”

“Why, thank you, Alexa. Thanks for doing your fucking job without killing anyone like HAL did.”

I don’t actually need an alarm clock. Since nineteen sixty-eight, Feist Dog wakes me up around five AM. Feist Dog isn’t real. He’s a fictional character created by Farmer Jim Neal, who was the morning DJ for WSLI during some of the most troubled years in Mississippi history.

Feist Dog wakes me up around five AM, and my alarm is set for six AM. Alexa is a backup. Maybe that’s why she hates me. I’ll wake up at five AM. I don’t have a choice about that. Sometimes I don’t get up though. Sometimes I’m sad, terribly, hauntingly, sad. Crushing sadness keeps me in bed, where, if I’m quiet, nobody will notice I’m sad. Nobody will say, “What’s wrong, Boyd?” and I won’t have to say, “I DON’T KNOW!”

Today, At five AM, I feel Feist Dog jump up on the bed. I can feel his wagging tail thumping against the mattress. Five thirty AM, Feist Dog adjusts his position so his body is touching mine. He shakes the fleas off his head and whimpers. Six thirty, Feist Dog rests his head on my stomach. “You’re not awake.” He says. “Just a few minutes more,” I say.

Seven o’clock. Feist Dog sits up beside me and stares down at me. “You’re not asleep.” He says. “Yeah, well, you’re not a real dog,” I reply.

At eight o’clock, Feist Dog sits all four paws on my chest, and glares down at me.

“For fifty years, you’ve been begging me to let you work as a writer, and now! Now you want to stay in bed all day! It IS TIME TO GET UP, Mr. Campbell; you have work to do, Fatboy!”

“I’m sad. I want to avoid the world.”

“Oh, and what makes you so sad you can’t work?” Feist Dog says, pretending to wipe the imaginary tears from my eyes with his paw.

“My master is ill,” I said.

“SO? Let him sleep in if he’s sick!”

“I’m pretty sure he is.”

Last week, instead of going to graduation with me, Brent decided to let his gall bladder get so infected they had to yank it out. The surgery went well, but nothing about your body is simple or easy when you're old.

One day, Brent was straddling the A-frame ladder, thirty feet in the air, focusing a light for a show. Because he set up the feet of the ladder in a way not approved by OSHA, the ladder tipped over and threw him into the audience, thirty feet down and fifty feet stage left. While everyone’s heart stopped, he stood up and said, “Well, that sucked.” and went back to work. If he reads this, he’ll tell you it didn’t happen that way. He’s lying. It happened exactly that way, with a few embellishments.

Retirement has not been kind to my master. He’s an artist. He NEEDS to create. Sitting at home with no projects to design and no students to teach, he’s been wondering what life is for anymore.

My father wanted me to choose a master who was an economist, marketer, or financier. He made sure I had the opportunity to meet the best Mississippi had to offer. He and George Harmon made sure we had the best we could find and stuffed them in offices in Murrah Hall. “Better do what your daddy says.” Feist Dog reminds me, mocking me.

Financiers retire beautifully. Their work is done, so in their golden years, they give away their money and bestow blessings on the community, being far kinder people than they were at forty. Not working doesn’t bother them. It’s not like that with an artist. An artist needs to work to survive.

When I was at St. Catherine’s for rehab, I saw all these canvasses where Edwina Goodman continued painting, even as her mind and body left her. Sometimes, watching a person get old is crushingly sad. Watching an old person continue to be themselves, long after they’ve forgotten who you are, is actually pretty life-affirming, though.

Brent has to go to rehab. If he decides to get well at rehab, he will—it’s that simple. What he needs to get well again is to be an artist again, to create again. Talking with Shawn on the phone, we have a plan for that. The world’s not done with my master. Not yet. Neither am I.

“So, you’re worried about your friend. You can still get up. You can still work.” Feist Dog insists. He can be pretty annoying for a faded memory and a figment of my imagination.

“I had a dream.”

“Oh, you had a dream. La-di-da. What happened in this dream? Did seven skinny cows eat seven fat cows?” Feist Dog was losing patience with me.

“When I was in middle school, I saw this show on television where Japanese mothers made these cool lunch boxes for their children. They called them ‘Bento Boxes.’ I always thought I should be a chef, and I had an idea. My mother bought these folded-down cardboard boxes to put Christmas gifts in. My mother was pretty crafty, like me, or maybe I was pretty crafty, like her. She bought a stack of about fifty of these boxes but only used eight or nine, so this stack of unused cardboard boxes sat in the closet.”

“More often than not, my father and I communicated over food. He had an unusual taste in food. He had a very Mississippi taste in food. He liked canned sausages, canned sardines, boiled peanuts, boiled horse corn, and hot tamales in a can from a guy who had a stand down in four points.”

“I had a solid idea of what my father liked to eat. There came a time when, about once a week, my father would take the company plane and fly away to places far away from me. Even though I didn’t entirely understand what he was doing, I knew that what he did on these trips was important. I was pretty young when his career started taking him away from me, and I missed him. Sometimes, I missed him a lot. I kept notes on my father’s schedule in the notebook on my desk. When I knew a trip was coming up, I’d ask my mother to pick up ingredients when she went to the Kroger store.”

“I made cardboard bento boxes for my father filled with liverwurst sandwiches, caramel cookies, boiled peanuts, and everything he ate. I put in drawings I made and slips of paper where I showed off how much my penmanship had approved, a plastic Marx dinosaur, and some honeysuckle flowers because he said he loved the smell. While he went out jogging in the dark with Rowan Taylor and Ben Puckett, I took his bento box from the refrigerator and left it on his dressing counter so he could take it on his flight.”

“So, why did you stop?” Feist Dog asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I quit believing.”

“So, you had a dream about making lunch for your dad, and now you’re too sad to work?” Feist Dog asked.

“No, the dream was later. In the dream, I was a young man, and Daddy was dead. For some reason, we all still lived at home instead of having our own homes like we did in real life.”

“I opened the refrigerator, my mother’s refrigerator, to get a coke or something, and when I opened the door, the top three shelves were filled with cardboard bento boxes. Bento boxes like I made for my father. Somebody loved somebody enough to make them a bento box lunch. I pulled out the topmost boxed lunch; a name was written on it, but not mine. I pulled out another and another; they had names on them, but not mine. Pulling bento boxes out of my mother’s refrigerator, I began throwing them on the floor if they didn’t have my name on them. Finally, I got to the last one, and it didn’t have my name on it either. I turned around, and my mother was there. ‘Why don’t I have a bento box?’ I asked her. And then I woke up with you beside me.”

“So, you had a dream about your mother?” Feist Dog asked.

“Well, probably more about my brother, actually.”

“Your brother now?” Feist dog was ready for me to stop this game.

“When I was thirteen, my brother lost his mind. You’re an imaginary dog, so you probably never saw anybody have a psychotic break, but it can be pretty rough. They scream and make animal noises. They throw things and make very violent threats. You don’t know if they’ll hurt you or hurt themselves or burn the house down. When it happened, my mother would call the police and an ambulance. My father was friends with the Mayor and made sure that the first responders in Jackson were trained to deal with situations like this. After a few days, they’d bring my brother home from the hospital, so drugged that all he could do was stare at the wall with threads of drool falling from his chin while he sat at the dinner table, not eating.”

“Something about seeing somebody I loved lose themselves and become something else, something broken and always sad. Something about that changed me. Changed me forever.”

“Changed you how?” Feist Dog said, sitting beside me so that I could stroke the longer hairs on his back. He is a dog, after all.

“Well, for one thing, I quit ever talking about myself, ever. If he had to go through that, how could anything that happened to me be important? How could I ever need nurturing or attention?”

“My mother devoted her life to finding a way to help my brother, which was not all that different from how she worked to help teach me to read, but with much greater intensity. She went back to college to get a psychology degree, thinking at least she’d be able to understand what was happening to him. My mother was one of the first people to enroll in the Millsaps Adult Degree Program.”

“When you play football, you learn to play hurt. That’s probably actually terrible advice, but it was the philosophy every boy I knew lived under. Broken hearts, broken bones, abandoned dreams, none of that mattered. Stay in the game, Boyd; that’s your only job. ‘STAY IN THE GODDAMN GAME!’ One night, I destroyed my knee playing against some boys from Puckett or Pisgah or one of those little country towns we played against. Michael Mitchell had to hide my helmet to keep me from going back in the game, even though my knee was so swollen they had to cut my football pants to get them off me.”

“One night, when I was sixteen, I called my father from my girlfriend’s house. ‘Hey, um, I may not come home tonight. Mr. Smith, he uh… Mr. Smith shot himself. In the head. He shot himself in the head, and uh, I guess I found the body. Anyway, the police are here; everybody is a wreck. I, uh, I gotta clean the floor or something. I just feel like I should stay tonight, just in case anybody needs me.’”

“‘Are you ok?’ My father asked. ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Can you, uh, can you call Charles Wright and tell him I can’t go with him tomorrow?’ I asked.”

“I don’t get it.” Feist Dog said. “You saw a dead guy, you made lunches for your dad, and your brother lost his mind; what does any of this have to do with your mom’s refrigerator?”

“Mothers take care of you when you’re hurt. ‘I hurt my finger, mommy!’ ‘Let me kiss it and make it better!’ Mommy says. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s how our brains work. There came a time when I quit ever telling my mother when I was hurt. I stopped because she was tending to so many other people who were hurt, and whatever I was going through, it was absolutely inconsequential compared to what was happening to my brother.”

“So, you had a dream where you blamed your mother?” Feist Dog was concerned.

“No, I had a dream where I blamed myself.”

“You cant go through life always blaming yourself for everything, Boyd.”

‘You wanna bet?” I said

“So, who did you tell when you got hurt.” Feist dog asked.

“You, mostly,” I said

“But, I’m an imaginary dog.” Feist Dog said.

“You’re a fucking genius,” I said. “It’s time for me to get up.”

“You’re going to work?”

“I’m going to work. Get the coffee started, will ya?”

“I’m imaginary, get that bitch Alexa to start the coffee.”

“ALEXA, turn on Tea Kettle!”