"He put me in a box.  It was roomy enough, and I thought everything was going to be ok.  But then he...  he tossed in a Geiger counter, a spring-loaded hammer, a flask, and an atom.  And then he shut the lid.  Although sounds from outside were muffled, I could hear him talking to someone.  Probably a woman he was trying to impress.  Whoever it was, he was telling them that the atom was radioactive and might or might not decay.  There was no way to tell.  If it decayed, however, it would certainly release an alpha particle, the Geiger counter would register it, and the hammer would be sprung - breaking the flask and releasing a poison gas.  A poison gas!  He said that the only way to find out if the atom had decayed and the gas had been released was to open the box and look.  Until the box was opened, both results were not only equally likely, but... in suspension.  Things were actually undecided until someone looked!  And maybe - just maybe - both outcomes occurred as the universe sorta split in two, with one universe releasing the gas and one not.  I'd heard enough.  I yowled.  I clawed the sides of the box.  I tried to make it clear that I was looking at the atom, even if he wasn't, and that I was in no mood that day to be poisoned, or have the universe split into two.  He hit the box.  He lifted the lid a bit and angrily told me to 'play along' - or else.  Then he cranked up the Frank Sinatra.  As I stared in disbelief at the atom, the hammer, and the flask, repulsive kissing noises came from the direction of his lab couch.  It wasn't until the next day's newspaper came and I didn't see my name in the obits that my heart stopped racing.  I've been in therapy ever since...."

- Testimony of Schrödinger's cat in the case of  Schrödinger's Cat vs. Schrödinger.  A mistrial was declared when an atom unexpectedly decayed in the spectator's section, sending everyone in the courtroom running for their lives.

     I almost died in a box once. 
     Actually, I almost died in a box twice.
     I involuntarily recall both times at the start of the Christmas shopping season every year.  All those gift boxes, you know.  I'm terribly allergic to even the smallest.  No matter how bright and gay the packaging, no matter how pretty the ribbons and bows, there's still a death trap at the center of it all. 
     You got something to give me, just put it in one of those clear plastic bags you can get at any dry cleaners....

     The first time I almost died in a box, I was about 4.  We were living in an apartment above a hardware in urban Toledo, in 1963 or so.  Behind the hardware was an alley.  Across the alley were the back ends of a row of mostly empty shops, above which were tenement apartments. 
     Near one of these store backs was a discarded refrigerator.
     An icebox, my mother called it.
     "Whatever you do, don't go near that icebox!" she told me as we stared at it from our second floor back porch.
     The moment she left me, I slipped down our back steps and headed right for it.
     Near it was a boy I'd never seen before.  A strange, poorly dressed boy who seems now to have been some odd mixture of Auschwitz camp survivor and that banjo-playing hillbilly on the porch in Deliverance.
     "Wanna go for a ride in a spaceship?" he asked me.
     "Sure," I said.  Spaceships were all the rage just then.  One might even say they were the cat's pajamas.
     "Hop in," he told me, pulling on the heavy chrome handle of the icebox and swinging open its vault-like door, real friendly-like.
     "Ummm, you'll let me back out, won't you?" I double-checked with Mission Control as I eyed the heavy gray rubber ringing the door, and the heavy, heavy chrome latch that could clearly only be opened from the outside.
     I wasn't a fool.  I always asked questions first.
     "Yeah, sure.  Get in."
     I got in.

     The racks had been taken out, so my 40 pounds of meat fit in rather nicely.  And despite being called an icebox, it wasn't icy at all.  Just slick and smooth and oddly clean.
     And then suddenly as dark and quiet as a tomb.

     Going in it occurred to me that even if the boy didn't keep his promise and let me out, there'd still be air in there with me.  Maybe five whole minutes worth.  Maybe ten.  
     A virtual eternity to me back then.  
     One time my aunt had said she'd be by to pick us up in ten minutes and the wait had seemed like a lifetime.  So, even if the boy never opened the door, so what?  
     I still had my entire life ahead of me....

     Only things didn't go exactly as planned.

     The instant after the boy had slammed the door shut, I found I couldn't breathe.
     At all.
     It was as if my lungs had become paralyzed in the absence of light and sound.
     To this day, I don't know why.  I've never heard or read of this happening to anyone else on a spaceship ride.  As near as I can figure, the slamming of the door had created a partial vacuum or an excess of air pressure.  
     In any case, it proved impossible for me to either inhale or exhale. 
     I may as well have been a helpless infant in a crib with a big, fat cat that had decided to take a nap on my warm and cozy face....

     I pounded my little fists on the door.
     The boy opened it, sharing with me once again the sunlight it had just recently occurred to me I might never see again.
     "What took you so long?!" I demanded to know, remembering my 5 seconds out there past Jupiter.
     The boy was casual, dumbfounded, indifferent. 
     Suddenly more interested in pounding a bug with a stick he had found than in me.... 

     I got back to my porch even more quickly than I had left it.
     When my mother saw me again a few moments later, I couldn't quite believe that her first look in my direction didn't reveal to her my brush with a distant realm or my difficult re-entry....
 

     I never saw that boy again.

     I never even knew his name.

     I know he's Out There, though.
     Out There... somewhere...  in space and time. 
     Part of that elite group of people whose actions or mere existence constitute a necessary prerequisite of my being here today.
     A peer of all those ancestors of mine who just happen to have chewed their food enough times to keep from choking, who managed to not get hit by lightning in their youth, who arranged to have sex with each other at just the right moment....
     An equal of all those people on earth between 1928 and 1958 who could have killed my mother or father, but, for whatever reason, did not.
     A kind of living, breathing Salk vaccine or penicillin which just happened to come along right when my body needed it most....

     How awful it is to realize that, had he been the astronaut and I been Mission Control, he'd probably still be in outer space.
 

     The second time that I almost died in a box...
     The second time was a one-man show, performed without an audience.
     But that's a tale for another day, I think.
     Right now I have to go feed my cat....