Throw it in the memory hole

Burying a childhood time capsule and living long enough to forget to dig it up

Photo by Valentin Lacoste via Unsplash

In the summer of 2007, my friends and I started digging a hole. It wasn’t my idea but when it was my turn, I showed up and began to dig. It was the end of an era. We had just graduated from high school and in the wandering summer days that would eventually fizzle out into a post-high school diaspora, someone decided that we should commemorate all those years running around the suburbs by burying a time capsule.

Set against the tree-lined property line in my friend Blake’s backyard, we excavated heaps of earth under the promise that it would be filled in. I’m sure my friend’s parents weren’t entirely aware of the lengths or depths we were willing to go— but after a few days the hole was deep enough to stand in. Like all of our adolescent hijinks, the ask was always a touch more innocent than the outcome.

Compounded beneath five feet of loose-packed dirt went a potluck of memories. Equal parts sentimental and chaotic, we deposited “sealed” boxes of photographs, copies of the movies we made as kids, a bottle of SoBe (Snapple’s odd cousin), more that I’m forgetting, and for some reason— an entire turquoise iMac.

In hindsight, there is a certain sense of eulogy to the whole endeavor. A tight group of four, then five, and eventually seven or eight teenagers all showed up in shifts to dig a hole where we would bury our collective past. Adulthood threatened as SMS text messages scheduled hours where each person could convene with the hole in-between summer jobs, romantic interests, or other friend groups that had threatened the structural integrity of our own.

But at the time, it wasn’t somber, it was just the next great thing we had decided to kill time with. The past instinctually took a back seat to the future when we had to decide when to dig it back up. And then someone had a fun idea— that the time capsule should be dug up when the last friend got married.

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This weekend our friend Kevin is getting married. He will be the last of us to get married. With the longest running friendship of five friends now spread across five states, we will reunite as his groomsmen to stand as he makes his big promise to his lovely fiancé. Which begged the question, would we keep our own promise and dig up the fabled time capsule?

Realistically, doing so would mean asking the new owners of Blake’s childhood home to see if we could excavate a teenager-sized hole in their backyard. Even more realistically, seventeen years later, the contents of the time capsule are probably too far gone.

When I think back to those hot summer days, my memory is hazy enough to forget if I was even there when the decision was made to dig it up when the last of us was married. I was too focused on the future. It was calling, pulling us all in different directions, each with tidy visions of how theirs would play out, wonderfully naive to the way life makes reunion more and more difficult— but all sure we had plenty more time to make memories in the future.

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When I was first diagnosed with leukemia, I called all five of my friends to tell them over the phone. From a hospital bed, I dropped the bomb from half a country away, hung up, and was spared the aftermath. When I returned to a hospital in Chicago, I gratefully saw all of them here and there. They would arrive both recognizable and not, the way faces you grow up with always look the same until one day you realize you both look very different than the person you have in your mind.

Flying from many states over or just stopping by to kill time, eat a sandwich, and watch some basketball— it was an abrupt reunion. (2 of 5 married at the time, time capsule still marinading).

But when I relapsed, I was back in California and was once again hospitalized for a month as I went through a course of immunotherapy. Coupled with spinal intrathecals, it resulted in some real brain-melting headaches. I had less friends to visit, though I had family. But amidst one of these particularly mean migraines, I returned from a pounding two minute walk around the unit to find… Kevin?

Kevin had flown from Chicago to Los Angeles to surprise me as the first wave of friends who would come visit during my second stay. Much like when digging the memory hole, the boys had scheduled a shift, swiped these fancy new things called credit cards, got on an airplane, now with wives or fiancés in tow (4 out of 5 counting engagements), and came to see me through my second run of sickness. Kevin, John, Taylor, Blake… They all came a long way for one more odd reunification. In the depths of my gratitude, all I could offer was a cookie, added to my plate of spaghetti.

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In hindsight, there is something so pure about the memory hole. We buried the past with the specific intent of exhuming it years later, after everything had supposedly gone well and all of our lives had played out as we had imagined it. Some might say… that innocence has faded. Because since then I feel like I’ve been digging another hole.

It is a place where memories go to be forgotten. Because life can’t or won’t or doesn’t play out exactly as you imagine it when you have four hours to sit on a swing set and watch your friends chuck dirt. But as I turn the corner on midlife, I’ve only come to appreciate the innocence more. The luxury of enjoyable monotony, the sense of fulfillment from (arguably) nothing, and the strange prescience to know, on some level, that the time that we were spending together mattered— that it was worth preserving.

But I would like to rely less on memory. Partly because it’s become more unreliable and partly because I have a lot of memories I’d rather leave buried. But you take the good with the bad. My own anecdotal data suggests that time moves slower through the bad than the good— but perhaps that’s another lesson to be learned, for myself to be more present when all is well. Something I should remember for this weekend.

Kevin instructing John how to dig a hole.

I think about time a lot. It’s as mercurial as memory, the two intrinsically tied together, one begetting the other… And this week I’m thinking about how, in some ways, our time has finally run out. The last domino has fallen and Kevin is getting married. Per our own rules, it is undeniably time to dig up that hole.

But I know what’s going to happen. We’re going to sit around, smile, and laugh about the very large, possibly unsafe hole we spent all that time digging— and we’ll move the goal posts.

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There is a list of goals and events that I keep quiet track of in my head. Amidst illness and in the better times beyond, it is a list of things I would like to live long enough to see. For the longest time it was my own wedding and life has been kind enough to see that one through. The list grows shorter and longer by the day, gratitude for what I’ve made it to and an unspoken ambition to move the goal posts and add things farther down the road.

After this weekend, five of five will be married and I will have gratefully gotten on a plane and stood by my friends to repay a few favors that have been a long time coming— and which we all know never had terms for repayment. But one item will come off the list and I will be given hope to add something new.

And while I will leave it up to a group vote (and someone else is paying for the backhoe), I don’t necessarily think the past needs to be dug up. But it will be nice to smile and laugh and know that whatever went into that hole, and so much more, is likely the reason we all keep finding our way back to one another.

And congratulations Kevin, I know you’re reading this.

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Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week

“Crying Myself To Sleep On the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever” by Gary Shteyngart

In this piece for The Atlantic, writer Gary Shteyngart was given the now infamous task of “cruise reporting", in which he set sail on the newest, biggest cruise liner, the Icon of the Seas. As someone who’s been on two cruises, I don’t particularly enjoy them, but I do get a kick out of the petri dish of life that they are and always enjoy the trope of a miserable writer shipped off to sea to make sense of all those people and all those buffets.

But… I’m seeing that The Atlantic has pay-walled it. I still want to plug the read, but I’ll also plug this great double album that’s taking the indie world by storm with its mysterious, Spotify-less appearance.

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