The saddest, silliest, and most useful things from a largely unbearable year.
Mother Jones Staff
December 22, 2020
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In March 2015, as part of the town’s 350th anniversary celebration, local officials in Smithtown, New York, opened up a time capsule that had been buried near the town hall 50 years earlier. According to Newsday, when they pried open the unearthed milk can, they found:
a proclamation of [the] beard-growing group Brothers of the Brush, papers and paraphernalia from the town’s 300th anniversary events, a phone book, and edition of The Smithtown News, pennies from the 1950s and ’60s, a man’s black hat and a white bonnet.“The most interesting thing that came out of the time capsule,” said the executive director of the Smithtown Historical Society, “was the smell. It was horrible. I have smelled history before; history does not smell like that.”
Time capsules often stink. At their worst, they’re full of boring documents, moldy knickknacks, and (shudder) the occasional business card. They’re generic, flat versions of a place’s official story.
But at their best, they can give future generations a sense of what it was like to live in a particular era—or to live through a particularly horrible moment in time. What delighted when everything else dispirited? What were our rituals? Our talismans? Our griefs?
That’s the spirit of our Mother Jones pandemic time capsule. We got through 2020—barely. These things, though we never expected we would need them, helped. The year may have been a complete shitshow, but maybe, if we’re lucky, the stench will wear off soon enough.
March 2020: I had lived my entire adult life without owning a thermometer. Correction, there was a meat thermometer in the kitchen drawer, there to help a pork roast emerge beautifully from the oven—not so much to gauge the onset of my partner’s COVID infection. It didn’t have the decimal accuracy I was craving, but it did display a big “100,” useful when I stuck him like a slab of meat several times a day. It goes in the capsule as a reminder of those panicky early days, when getting an accurate read on anything, let alone body temperature, felt impossible, and time was measured in the intervals between bouts of fever and fatigue. —
James West
Tiens, en passant, l’idee du thermometre (voir ci-haut) etait un des sujets,pour la production des nouvelles toiles, eventuellement… et il y a quelques autres objets du meme genre dont les images ont ete preparees.
