Time in a Bottle

The beauty of grandparents is that they can focus on unconditional love leaving discipline and behavior issues to the parents.

Ten years ago my three sons spent a week with my parents in rural Vermont.  I remember picking them up at the end of the week.  They were full of life and stories of running through a maze made of corn, picking blueberries, baking blueberry pound cake, sailing on the lake, playing golf and more.  What I didn't know was that they had created a time capsule and buried it in the yard at my parents' farm.  The plan was to gather back in Grand Isle, Vermont in 10 years to open the capsule.

Grandpa Jim and Barber Boys Summer 2010

The logistics of getting three now grown boys to rural Vermont on the same day to open the capsule provided some challenges; all three are working and one now lives in Seattle.  They were determined and, with a few compromises, we were able to find a small sliver of time in late June that worked.  I went along for the 'ride'.

I felt a bit like a party crasher, so I stayed inside when the five of them went out to dig up the capsule.  After dinner I was there to take pictures and wipe a few tears as my parents and children read the letters they had written to their future selves, buried for ten years and now found perfectly preserved.

Their letters give a picture beyond the words on the page.  My step-mothers' is hastily written. She was, I'm sure, exhausted after a week of caring, feeding and playing with three energetic grandchildren.  Chris' letter is in Grandpa Jim's handwriting, as he was not yet old enough to write his own letter.  He reminisced about going to Yankee Stadium with his dad that summer.  Nick wrote and drew about Wiffle Ball - a game he still loves.  Doug, an avid reader, spent the week immersed in the Lord of the Rings and meticulously drew the map that led them to the buried treasure.

And, here I share with you my dad's letter - carefully written.  My guess is that the time capsule was his idea.

Grandpa Jim, Nick and Doug 10 years ago

I hope that you are still around to help dig up this time capsule and open it and remember the summer of 2000, when we buried it.  I hope that you are happy and healthy and enjoying your retirement then, and that the Barber boys (and Esse and all our other grandchildren) have continued to visit us, especially in the summer when it is so beautiful in Vermont.

I also hope that we remember this summer and what we did:

• Meeting in Wilmington, VT, with Doug and Nick and Chris and their parents and their Grandpa Hugh and Grandma Lee and Uncle Rick and Aunt Maria, and learning more about the Barber ancestors in Wilmington.
• Going to the Montshire Museum on the way home, and playing skittles (where a spinning top goes around inside a box and knocks down tall, skinny pins) and experimenting with little nerf balls on top of columns of air and playing with the fog machine.
• Making a one-hole golf course in our yard, where Chris and Nick especially spent hours playing golf, with their 7-iron and 3-irons and putter (and where all three of them spent hours playing baseball with a whiffleball and bat).
• Going to Hershey's ice cream at the stand in South Hero.
• Searching along the road across from the Wilcox Bay golf course for the lost golf balls and fishing 19,
  

  Aspiring Golfers - Chris and Nick

  plus two that had been cut up by the roadside. mower, and then having tons of golf balls (of "goof ball") to play with for the rest of the week. (Chris and Nick had already lost two of the three TI golf balls they started out with.)
• Going to the world oldest coral reef in Isle LaMotte and finding quite a few fossils, and then driving around the lake, through New York State and coming back home on the Grand Isle ferry.
• Going to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and learning about the Battle of Valcour Island and all the wrecks at the bottom of the lake. It rained really hard and we were stuck in the museum buildings for a while because we would have got drenched if we tried to go outside.
• Going with Grandma Meg and picking blueberries and coming back and Doug and Nick helping Grandma make a blueberry pound cake and blueberry pie (both delicious!).
• Building birdhouses and finally being able to put two of them, for white-breasted nuthatches, up on trees beyond the barn.
• Finally, on Friday being able to go out on the sailboat and anchoring offshore and going swimming and drinking cokes and eating cookies and chips and dip, and making up silly verses to "I with I were a widdle thugar bun", like "I with I were a widdle Thilath cat, I with I were a widdle Thilath cat, I'd lie on Grandpa's tummy and make him look just like a dummy, I with I were a widdle Thilath cat"

You will probably remember what a good time you had.  And how you even managed to get a lot of weeding done in the garden during the week.

Well, again, I hope you're around to enjoy reading this note ten years later and I hope you're still enjoying your Barber grandsons as much as you did during the summer of 2000 and that all three of them have grown up to be happy and healthy.

Sincerely,

Jim Rader (also known as Grandpa Jim)

I'm in no hurry, but I look forward to taking the example set by my parents and being an awesome grandparent sometime in the future.

Want to create your own time capsule - here are some tips from the Library of Congress:  Time Capsules