A long and winding road

One of the funniest stories I remember about Charles-Henry and Frank involved a cardboard box. It was C-H who told it to me.

C-H collected empty cardboard boxes. He said you never knew when you might need one. He kept them piled up in the living room of his house in Arlington VA. I never went inside that house, so I never saw the pile of boxes except in a photograph C-H showed me one time. Another time C-H told me he had been searching his collection for just the right cardboard box for some particular purpose. Devine ce que j'ai trouvé, he said. J'ai trouvé mon piano!

Charles-Henry used to fly out to Calfornia every year in late spring or early summer. He would stay out there a few days and then he and Frank would drive back to Washington DC, with Frank at the wheel and C-H navigating. C-H always had an itinerary all planned out, so they would sightsee along the way. Frank had sisters who lived in West Virginia and in Connecticut (IIRC) and he would go see them. One of Frank's favorite quips was based on those trips. We were lost, he would say of their adventures, but we were making good time. At the end of the summer, C-H and Frank would drive back to California, taking a roads and again sightseeing along the way. C-H would fly back to Washington. When Frank wasn't visiting his sisters back east, he would stay at Charles-Henry's house, which C-H had bought from him decades earlier so that Frank could afford move to California, where another of his sisters, her husband, and her daughter lived.

One summer, Frank was staying at C-H's house in Arlington VA and he wanted to send send a package to his daughter in California. C-H was at work; he worked all summer and took his vacations to drive back and forth across the country with Frank at the beginning and the end of summer, as I've described above. So Frank looked through C-H's cardboard box collection and picked one out. He packed up whatever it was he wanted to send to his daughter, addressed the box, and taped it shut. When Charles-Henry got home from work a few hours later, Frank told him he had a package he wanted to send. C-H asked him where he had gotten the box. I pulled it out of the pile in the living room, Frank said.

C-H was outraged. Those are MY boxes and I've told you NOT to mess with them. Frank was angry by then. He ripped open his chosen box, took the contents out, and threw the torn-up box on the floor. He went into his bedroom, packed up his things, walked out the front door, got into his car, and proceeded to drive back to California alone. Remember it takes nearly week to drive across the U.S from coast to coast. Google Maps says you should plan to be on the road for a total of 38 hours. I don't know how C-H and Frank ever patched things up, but they did. By the way, Frank and C-H shared a birthday, and Frank was exactly one year older. He passed away in 2006.