A plain white box can hold so many memories

 Anybody who's been in the card hobby for any length of time has encountered white boxes. They come in a variety of sizes and are the absolute best way to store cards- my entire collection is stored in them, and always will be. 

Most of them, however, are pretty nondescript. They all look a lot alike, for the most part. This one box, though...this one is different. 

Sorry for the blurriness, my camera refused to focus on it

I don't know exactly when I got this box, but I remember where. It was the Danbury Mall in Danbury, Connecticut, sometime in early 1996. I know it HAD to be then because I got it for the basketball card content, which I began collecting on Valentine's Day 1996. And I know it couldn't be any later because of what I did with it. 

All the dirt, all the dings and wear, all happened in my possession. That's highly unusual for me, as I take very good care of my things and always have. 

I used to take this box to school with me, every day, in the 6th grade, which was a horrible year for me....it's the year my health problems kicked in, that I'm still dealing with today. Every day was misery, and enduring so many tests that found nothing just made it worse. In fact, I would say that my ONLY good memories of 6th grade revolve around this box. During that year, I was one of many of my friends who was collecting, and the NBA was the #1 collecting topic among my friends.

I would trade my duplicates only even back then. In fact, I would often give them away, even inventing a guessing game where whichever of my friends who could guess closest to the card number got the card. 

Although I don't know whatever happened to all my collecting classmates, I'm the only one who never stopped collecting. The others stopped while we were still in school.

There are two ironies about this box. 

The first is that I bought it to get the NBA cards, but I don't know which cards it was since I've been collecting the Finest set for so long, and had most of them before I started tracking the dates, or I got them late enough that I have the dates and know they weren't added to my collection in 1996. However, since the contents of this box is the entirety of Finest baseball and football cards in my entire collection, I know for sure which cards in the two major sports I don't actively collect came from this box. 

Secondly, the reason this box ended up holding the memories, and was the one chosen to take to school every day, was almost surely because it had the writing on the top and side (not shown, it has 1995-96 Finest basketball written on it, and crossed out, before I got it) which means that I probably considered it damaged and thus expendable, if something happened to it at school! It essentially went from a cast-off to become one of the most cherished boxes in my collection. Until very recently (within the last 10 years) I was much more rigid about how the boxes I stored my collection in looked. Since my collection has grown exponentially since I returned to the NBA in 2012 and began collecting the NHL in 2017, I have become less picky and any box that is not stained and/or scuzzy is now likely to be reused for card storage. 

Here's a photo of it next to a clean box, to show the contrast.

Thanks for reading this most unusual post.