The Boxes of Incarceration

Almost twenty-four years ago, I made a grave mistake. Unfortunately, it was not my first mistake and led to a lengthy prison stay at the taxpayers expense.

I have learned a lot of terms here over the last twenty-three years and four months. For example, I prefer the term incarcerated, and I will soon be kissing the bricks. My debt to society is paid.

The prison system gives me six cubic feet of space for my personal belongings, which I keep in various boxes. Many may think that six cubic feet does not sound too bad. However, consider how much space twenty-three year’s worth of letters occupy. Anyways, entering the last few hours of my incarceration, I have decided to dig into my belongings and see what I have collected through this time I have served.

In the top box, I have my things I have purchased from the canteen. There is bread, bologna, peanut butter, chips, and candy.

My next box has my reading and writing material, including books, notebooks, pens, envelopes, and a common prison currency: stamps.

Lastly, I have my deeply personal box. Rifling through twenty-three years of letters brings back some beautiful and tough memories. The most recent letter is from my son, Barney. It includes a summary of a life changing event. I am now a grandfather, with a beautiful picture, sized to the right dimensions to be allowed in prison, as proof of this new addition.

Other letters follow deeper in the stack, and Barney gets younger and younger. He did something I did not and graduated college and high school. He hit the game winning home run in the championship his junior year and had his first kiss the year before that. More importantly, Barney’s letters speak to the achieving of his main goal; he is breaking the family pattern. He is going to be the first male from a few generations our family to not do hard time. My brother and I acted much like our father and his father before him, but Barney has always been motivated to make a change.

I keep going deeper in the pile, and Barney’s handwriting gets messier. His words hold more anger that I am not around. His mother, my ex-wife, has done a wonderful job with him. She divorced me shortly after the foreman read the words, “We find the defendant guilty…” Lucky for me, and Barney of course, she has always been there for him.

My eyes begin to blur, a few tears fall on these letters, not for the first time. Getting to the bottom of pile, I find something I had forgotten about: a small, stuffed barn owl. Before my incarceration, Barney was a toddler, and I called him my little barn owl. The stuffed barn owl was in my first care package. Barney thought I needed it more than he did. Finding it now, the weight of this day hits me with great force. I lose all control of my emotions and cannot wait to give him a hug and apologize again for all that I have missed. Now I can promise to never miss a moment of my grandchild’s life and be a better grandfather than I was father. Sometimes we lose something or someone. More importantly, we then know how to be grateful for that thing or person if we find them in our life again.

After dressing in the clothes I picked out specially for this day, I move toward the exit. The gate swings open. My first step of freedom is interrupted by a bear hug from my son, and I could not be happier.