Posted 5:00 AM by Angie Schultz

Time Capsule

I'm supposed to be unpacking.

I am unpacking.

Specifically, I just unpacked a picture frame. My paternal grandfather made this frame out of walnut. It's a very fancy one, which swivels between two pillars. Now that I think of it, I can't imagine why you'd want it to do that, but that's how he made it.

It was wrapped in a small plastic garbage bag, then in newspaper -- a lot of newspaper -- then in a brown paper grocery bag, and hogtied with packing tape. So it was quite a struggle to free it.

When I got to the newspaper I was curious as to which paper it was. I don't remember seeing this frame recently. I didn't think it was out in Houston, nor did I take it to Australia. California, maybe.

Nope. It was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from August of 1993. That's 16 years. This newspaper is old enough to drive. It's been 16 years since this frame has seen the light of day.

(Which is over half the frame's lifetime. Grandpa carved the date in the bottom of the base: December 1979.)

What was going on in August of '93? The headline reads, "Free Trade Accord Gets Back on Track." Just reading that is putting me to sleep. I can't read it through the tape; something about NAFTA.

Most of the front page is local stuff. One juicy local story: "160 Shots Fired in 10-Minute Chase." 100 rounds for the cops; 60 for the perps. There's also a section on the Great Flood of '93. And then there's "Tiring Pope Urges Ministry to Young" (that would be the failing John Paul II, who finally "tired" twelve years later).

Oh, here's the TV section. What's on TV? Murder, She Wrote is on Sunday at 7pm. Murphy Brown, Monday at 8. Egad, Full House, Roseanne, Coach, Seinfeld. Plus, Nick at Nite was still worth watching. Remember that?

Real estate! Housing developments springing up like mushrooms! In the town where my brother lives, new houses going for $77K. Nice looking ones, too.

Big ol' ad section for Levitz Furniture. "Since 1910". Went belly-up last year.

Ah, the comics. Calvin and Hobbes, Outland, and The Far Side. *Sniff* 1993, it was a very good year...

The Outland is a eulogy for photography, now that that newfangled "digital computer imagery" stuff that all the teeners are into has come along. My AE-1 begs to differ.

This has been the news from August 14, 1993. Next up, a gripping report on the status of my laundry. At this rate, I'll have to get a Twitter account.