Wed 18 Oct 2006
What ever happened to time capsules, anyway? I mean, besides the obvious fact that they are somewhere in the ground, rusting, rotting, and being churned up by backhoes in the wake of so many condominium developments. (I said backhoes.) I seem to remember a period of my youth in which “time capsule” was quite a regular figure of speech, probably because it was quite a regular activity. Was it just around years that ended in zero? Was it an eighties thing? Was it just something that grade school classes did as a fun arts ‘n’ crafts project? ‘Cause if that’s the case, that’s a really stupid class project, considering I, one of the smarter ones I dare say, would have no flippin’ idea where we buried any of that shit, or even what we buried. Tip #1: don’t engage in projects requiring long-term memory recall from 8-year-olds.
What is with this notion, anyway, that you can bury some objects in the ground in some vain attempt to hold onto a moment forever? Not that it’s a bad one — I certainly appreciate the intent. But sometimes you have to dig things up to make a memory stick around.
Seniors at my high school were not required to take a final exam in any class in which they had a B, I believe, so what with the study days and the dead week and all that, the last day of classes for seniors was a good few weeks earlier than it was for the rest of the students. Like many other arbitrarily assigned special occasions during one’s senior year, this day warranted extreme celebration. My friends and I gathered at one of our favorite party spots: the beachfront apartment building on Key Biscayne where one of our classmates’ parents pretty much let us run amok whenever we wanted if only by virtue of the fact that it’s hard to keep tabs on drunk high schoolers from 11 stories up. No matter what the weather in general was, the wind on this side of the Key was always whipping up with some vitality, carrying the heavy scent of ocean and damp sand into your nose at all times. There was drinking and dancing and a bonfire and general carrying-on, as would be expected at the end of one’s secondary school obligations, and as would be expected to eventually draw the attention of the local tight-ass police force.
Intoxicated minors quickly scattered into the darkness up and down the beach from the party, leaving behind only those who deserved to be caught in spite of the fact that they should want most not to be caught, half-baked and too stupid to run in time. Alex and Lambros and I caught our breath near some sea turtle sign or something, still carrying the barely-opened bottle of rank but potent orange-flavored Greek liquor. Once reality caught up with us, we knew we should get back to the building, sober enough to pass muster, to see who might need bailing out later. We didn’t want to return to the scene of the crime carrying the evidence, so I counted out five haphazard paces from the signpost and we buried our liquid treasure under a foot of sand, just in case.
A few weeks later, I’m back on Key Biscayne, having barely survived one of the most seriously boring and unnecessarily sober prom nights of my life. It was not my own senior prom, but that of the girl I was dating at the time from our rival (and my former) prep school. I quickly remembered why I was glad I left, lifeless prison camp that it was. And my girlfriend? A devout Christian teetotaler, whose not-so-Christian friends were still sufficiently enthralled with the single bottle of cheap champagne they had secured for the six of us to leave me high and dry for the duration of the night with nary a blip on the BAL-o-meter. By the time we reached our post-prom destination on the Key, our four limo-mates were perfectly content to sully up the darkness with the sounds of rampant makeoutery, but I was still itching for an adventure I knew I wasn’t going to get in that hotel room to make up for the hours of quiet desperation I’d survived to that point. Taking a walk out toward the beach with my date, I ran into a much livelier friend of mine — another cross-country runner I’d barely managed to stay ahead of all year, but a runner nonetheless that shared our bond of self-torture and general wackiness — who had a definite lead on me in the drinking department and was out angling to pick up the pace.
“Waaai-haaait a second,” I sang as I stopped us all in our tracks, and then I looked up at this small crowd with a devilish grin. “Let’s take a walk down the beach!” We hit the sand and cavorted and stumbled and skipped and trotted down the beach until we hit the well-demarcated breeding ground for shelled reptiles. “Where the hell are we going?” someone who had the tenacity to say “hell” wondered allowed. “This has got to be the one,” quoth I, and I marched my five paces inland from the signpost. When I got down on my knees and started digging, I’m pretty sure I saw them all take a careful step backwards — whether from what I might dig up or just from me, we’ll never know.
Dink! There it was! Dink! Dink! I plucked the bottle of God-knows-what from the sand and jumped to my feet holding our sacred liquor aloft. From the wide eyes of my drinking cohorts, I knew I had just finagled a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes, and I was perfectly happy to be the savior so long as I might be filled with the spirit myself. In the end, it didn’t make an overall lousy prom night all that much more entertaining, but it made sleeping through the sounds of makeoutery more likely, and for that one, brief moment, it made me feel like nobody else in the world.
So that memory was dug up and made actual and is certainly burned into my brain (even if immediately weathered by alcohol), but I have to admit there is something about it that will never be freed from the earth from whence it came. Snapshots of space and time are, like smell, inextricably linked to human memory, and if I were to stand five paces from that sign on the beach on the right kind of night, I would shed fourteen years in a beat of my heart.
And on returning, I might collapse under the weight of remembering all the mundane drudgery that we learn in the years that pass after moments like that one.
October 19th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
When I was in second grade, we buried a time capsule to be opened in the year 2000. We buried it in the middle of the soccer field. Then my brother and I buried a bunch of coal in the same soccer field because we figured that by the year 2000, the coal would have become diamonds and we would be rich 20somethings.
Sixth grade, different school, another time capsule. Again, we were to open it in the year 2000. But then the school had asbestos, and it was plowed down, and the administration left, taking with it all of the staff, and no one ever said anything about the time capsule. And on a drunken Thanksgiving evening in 2002, my brother, a couple friends and I all got shovels and tried to find the time capsule, and for all our digging and being generally destructive, we never found it.
It still haunts me.
October 20th, 2006 at 11:33 am
My family put together a time capsule a few years back. I accidentally heard about it, and when I confronted the ringleaders they pretended like they had been planning on asking me to submit something the whole time.
So I spent a long time writing this big, long thing about memories of an uncle who had passed away from cancer. Months later, months and months later, I asked someone how the big burial went and if they got my letter.
“What letter?”
“The letter I wrote about Uncle Steve.”
“Um…I don’t know. I don’t recall.”
But that’s kind of how they are. They don’t recall. Who knows if my nice memories about my dear uncle ever made it into the ground.
That whole thing made me want to crochet the words “fuck” and “you” onto a potholder and attach a note with a safety pin that said, “Put that in your time capsule.”