Recycled Calendars and Expectant Fireplaces

Plans to return to Dr. Andy's favorite time capsule

As a child, I watched many horror films with my best friend Tito. On Saturday nights, we would end up at his house or mine, trying to stay up unusually late to watch either Saturday Night Live or Creature Feature, which presented “unearthed” horror movies from the 1930s to the 1960s. Often our enthusiasm for the SNL guest host would determine which we would watch, or try to watch, for sleep inevitably claimed us both before we could watch one of those horror movies all the way through.

Universal Pictures horror films taught us that we were right to fear large and seemingly abandoned burial places of mythic undead figures, and that we were much safer on Tito’s orange couch in the living room of his home on the 3600 block of Whitehaven Parkway in Washington, D.C., than we were exploring rural Transylvania or the what The Mummy called the “Hill of the Seven Jackals” near Thebes (now Luxor) in Egypt.

That part of Egypt is still revealing surprises. According to an Owen Jarus article published last month on the website Live Science, we continue to make discoveries near the onetime resting place of Boris Karloff’s titular villain, Imhotep: “Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered three New Kingdom tombs dating to more than 3,000 years ago. The burials were found within a cemetery now known as Dra Abu el-Naga, which is near modern-day Luxor (ancient Thebes).” I hope these tombs are not cursed!

One fascinating detail: “One [of the tombs] is of a man named Baki, who was a supervisor of grain silos.” This must have been an important job, for, like the other discovered non-royals that are featured in this article, each of their tombs had a courtyard and featured profile figures on murals that would be familiar to anyone who visited the King Tut exhibits that came to Washington D.C. in 1976, as I did.

Imagine a room that sits in stillness for 3,000 years, almost everything we know as history taking place before the return of even a hint (or a glint) of sunshine. Such places that stay undisturbed for ages fascinate me.

Consider, for instance, the “time capsule” apartment in Paris that was unsealed in 2010, after its owner died, having abandoned the place (while keeping up with the rent) back in 1942. Understandably, an influx of Nazis evidently convinced the owner of this apartment to look elsewhere.

As we can see from the photographs in this extended blog entry on the blog Beautiful Buildings, the books, plateware, paintings and make-up cases were found just as they had been left 70 years previously. There was even a Mickey Mouse doll in the apartment, further proof that none of us can escape Disney.

A contemporary of the owner of that Paris apartment, my grandmother saved money by reusing old calendars. During the summer of 1973, she showed me that that year’s calendar had all the same days of the month and year as 1962. I remember being amazed by this and impressed by my grandmother’s frugality.

Vera Rosina Boush came from a distant era that required such thriftiness. My grandmother was born in the year 1900, the same year as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and England’s Queen Mother, so she witnessed much during her 91 years. She learned to mend clothes, rather than replacing them, in the 1910s and 1920s, and then made do with less during the 1930s when the Great Depression era auto industry layoffs in her hometown of Detroit affected everyone. One imagines that she bartered for eggs and other foodstuffs, walked when she could to conserve rubber, and repaired her family’s shoes that wore out because of all that walking.

I became eco-conscious in Berkeley in the late 1980s (thanks to Roy Bridgman and Steve Manning), but way back in the 1970s, in a rural cabin in Beavertown, Pennsylvania, my grandmother taught me about sustainable and minimalist living. We burned our paper trash in the fireplace to help start fires in the morning, composted our food scraps, and “packed out” our trash. We used lye in the outhouse.

My grandmother died almost 35 years ago (though I can still summon her voice and hear her stories in my head when I need to), and her youngest daughter, my mom, passed away last year. I miss them both.

Meanwhile, the cabin stands, its own sort of time capsule, ready to reveal stories from a previous age. With my two sons, I return there later this month, eager to recapture some of that familial love and sentiment from a previous century. I wonder if I will find my grandma’s recycled calendars. For example, 1958 corresponds in the placement of months, weeks, and days to 2025.

More likely, all those weeks and days long ago went up in smoke to warm whoever perched expectantly before that ancient fireplace, contemplating the descendants who would fill the rooms of the family cabin in the future.

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Dr. Andy

P.S. Four Tom Cruise questions from last week:

17. Tom Cruise was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award as Worst Actor for his work in what 2017 horror film?

18. At almost $1.5 billion dollars in worldwide box office, what was Tom Cruise’s highest grossing film?

19. In Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing film that was not a sequel (though it was a remake), he played a character named Ray Ferier. Name this 2005 Steven Spielberg film.

20. Released last month, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is what even number film in the franchise?