Photo: Courtesy of Dan Tobin

Time Travelers

A couple of beers, a boxful of memories, and it’s 1997 again
By Dan Tobin, A97

Shortly before graduating in 1997, the guys who shared the house at 39 Curtis Avenue —there were seven of us—assembled a time capsule. We scrounged up a bankers box and filled it with items reflecting our time at Tufts, as well as surveys predicting where we’d each be in 10 years. I then managed to convince a bemused attendant at the front desk of Tisch Library to put the box on reserve. I had to call it a “Class of ’97 Time Capsule”—which technically it was; it’s just that the scope was limited to seven members.

I assumed anyone who opened the box would throw it away. After depositing a candle from baccalaureate, photos from Senior Gala, and a few other souvenirs, we had run out of poignant artifacts and filled the remainder of the box with such treasures as a broken cordless phone and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. We regretted not making backup copies of the surveys.

Last May, as our 10-year reunion neared, I called University Archives on the off chance the box still existed.

“Oh, it’s here. It’s a very famous box.”

“Really?”

“Well, there was a bottle of beer in there”—I had forgotten about the bottle of O’Keefe we included in honor of our housemate John O’Keefe—“along with some other choice items. It’s been the subject of a lot of discussions.”

Some years earlier, the archivist explained, the box had been opened after it made a telltale clang (the O’Keefe). The “time capsule” became an office joke, and the O’Keefe now sat on a shelf in the head archivist’s office. Although the archivists had replaced the beer, they had removed other items. Our pep rally megaphone, for example. “We didn’t have one in our collection, and now it’s in a display case in the library. Is that OK?” It seemed a small price to pay for 10 years of storage. I visited Tisch Library and traded a box of pastries for our box of mementoes.

The afternoon before our reunion, the five of us on the East Coast—two lawyers, a college dean, a brand manager for Wisk laundry detergent, and a recovering television writer (yours truly)—gathered in my condo to open the box. I offered to refrigerate the vintage O’Keefe beer for John, but we agreed a late-model Sam Adams was a safer bet. Scott Thompson’s baby played with our dog while three patient wives tried to keep up with our dusty jokes. We passed the box around the room, taking turns pulling out the “choice items”:

• John’s photography project Big Toilet, Little Toilet (an exercise in perspective featuring a toilet-shaped coin bank in front of an actual porcelain god)
• Tickets to the ’96 Olympics (Josh Rubin hosted us in Atlanta)
• The sign that hung outside our Hillside apartment: “Welcome to our Dojo” (a Karate Kid reference that led to the seven of us becoming known around campus as “the Dojo”)
• A wooden duck purchased for a dollar (dubbed “duck for a buck” by the flea market vendor)
• A take-out menu from K_ _ K_ _ L_ _ (the worst Chinese restaurant ever, and Josh’s favorite)
• A Tufts Daily Commencement issue with the Horace aphorism “Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone” on the front (John and I had each been editor-in-chief)
• A matchbook from the Dojo Restaurant in Manhattan (I stole a dozen)
• The backstage passes for our “Bad Music Party” (the arm-in-arm group sing-along to “We Are the World” was the highlight of my Tufts career)

At the bottom of the box lay seven envelopes, one sealed by each Dojo member. Each contained six questionnaires with predictions for the others, plus another sheet of general predictions for us, Tufts, and the world. We cracked open new beers and took turns reading our answers.

“Does John still like Amy?” The two O’Keefes, she a Zimmet until their marriage three years ago, tried to look nonchalant as the noes edged the yeses four to three. (Luckily, John was a yes.) Scott predicted Brian Ostrer would be fat: “Not super fat, but he’s about two and a half bills.” Brian is more than a few Arby’s beef-and-cheddars shy of 250. Guesses on Josh’s location ranged from Seattle to the mid-Atlantic, as a teacher, lawyer, or political aide; I later sent a copy of the surveys to his Foreign Service posting in Uzbekistan. Guesses on the president ranged from Bill Weld to Bill Bradley, but only Josh knew that Professor Robert Devigne, with his wild hair, black-on-black outfits, and sermons on Pulp Fiction through the lens of Hobbes and Rousseau, would be head of the poli-sci department.

As we howled at our decade-old jokes and memories, a strange thing began to happen. Suddenly, there was John, venturing onto the wobbly pigeon-covered deck at 39 Curtis Avenue. Josh was presiding over a mold-growing contest in our broken mini-fridge. Jason Greif was going on about the mouse who ate our Taco Bell hot sauce. On Alex Berk’s 1980s projection TV, the Red Sox were fielding a rookie by the side-splitting name of Nomar Garciaparra. Scott was packing for law school, I was pondering an offer to be a police reporter in Roswell, New Mexico, and our biggest worry was whether drinking white Russians would make us look uncool. The reunion reminded us of 1997, but the time capsule actually sent us there.

DAN TOBIN, A97, spent seven years in Los Angeles, sometimes writing for television, sometimes fetching coffee for people writing for television. He is now a freelance writer living in Boston.