When I was a kid, my mom bought me a book called “How to Build a Monster.” I probably still have it, somewhere. The book went through a list of monsters like “Bigfoot,” “Lock Ness Monster,” and “Giant Robot” and showed you how to build them.

Now I gotta tell you, there were some definite leaps of faith contained within the pages of that book. I’m reminded of the old math joke, where the guy is writing a big formula on a blackboard and in the middle it says “then a miracle occurs” in between a couple of steps. I’ll give you an example. On the instructions on how to create a sea monster, there were x steps. The first step said get a bunch of spare boxes from your local grocery store. Step two was to arrange the boxes in the shape of a sea monster. Step three involved crumpling up newspaper to round out the edges and then throwing a drop cloth over the whole thing. Step four involved painting the drop cloth and sticking buttons and decorations all over the place. So think about this: at this point you have a bunch of boxes with a cloth thrown over them. Step five was a picture of this gigantic sea monster, swimming in the ocean and breathing fire. Somewhere between steps four and five, a miracle occured I guess. No such miracle took place in my bedroom. After shuffling around some old boxes for a while all I had was a pile of boxes stacked up underneath an old bed spread. There were plans for making Bigfoot that included gluing a thousand Kleenexes to a bunch of boxes, and one for an alien costume that involved making a paper mache’ mask from a balloon. That book had a lot of interesting ideas but it also had a lot of miracles.

A month or two after school started we always had Open House, the night your parents came up to school to see your rooms and meet your teachers and see what all you had been working on. It’s been so long I can’t even remember how we scammed her into the idea but somehow we convinced Mrs. Leatherwood we should build robots or something and put them on display. She agreed to our goofy fifth grade plans, and each of us went on our own ways to begin building robots in preparation for Open Night.

For inspiration, I turned to my old trusty book, “How to Build a Monster,” which contained all the plans I needed for creating my own robot. Step one involved stacking cardboard boxes. Come to think of it, pretty much everything in that book involved stacking cardboard boxes. Step two involved painting it like a robot. Step three had a picture of a couple of robots that looked like C3P0 and Robbie the Robot. Man, this one was going to be easy — it only involved three steps!

I got some boxes and I did some stacking and everything I made just looked like a stack of boxes. I asked Mrs. Leatherwood for help and she suggested that I wrap the boxes with paper, so I did. In retrospect I should have used tin foil, but I didn’t. Instead I used yellow paper, because that kind of looked like C3P0. I wrapped my boxes and stood them up and ended up with a big, yellow, stupid-looking pyramid. The thing needed arms, so I got a couple of pieces of Hot Wheels race track and taped them on to look like arms. He needed hands too, so I took some gloves and taped those on as well. For eyes I used a string of Christmas lights with every bulb removed but two. And then — oh, and this was the good part — I put a tape recorder inside the robot. Why? Because I recorded myself talking like a robot for half an hour. “Hello. My. Name. Is. Robot. It. Is. Nice. To. Meet. Youuuuuu.”

Man, this was going to be sweet.

So we went to Open House and when we got to our room I ran over and pressed play on the tape recorder and the thing sat there like the big pile of boxes it was with my voice coming out of its belly. I remember a few people laughing at it and thinking how stupid it looked. This wasn’t even one of those things where I looked back through time and realized how stupid it was. I pretty much realized it was stupid right then. There was no miracle that day. My stupid robot looked like exactly what it was.

I wish this story had a better ending. I’m pretty sure the day after Open House I drug the thing out to the school’s trash dumpster and heaved it in.