"Time Marches On"

November 1997

It happened once in 1938, in a little suburb of Manhattan known as Flushing Meadows. It happened again in 1964, in the same location, over 25 years later. The events I speak of, of course, are the two famous New York World's Fairs at which the Westinghouse company filled and buried, for posterity, two separate time capsules. Stuff, stuffed in tubes then stuffed ceremoniously into the ground.

A Mickey mouse watch, A 78 rpm Bing Crosby record and other mementos of the life in the late 1930's. Decades later, a Polaroid camera, a 45 rpm Beatles record, a transistor radio and a Bikini bathing suit were just a sampling of what was added to the 1965 counterpart of the Westinghouse time capsule. These items and more, (selected democratically by a panel of experts and fairgoers of the day) stand as sort of a cultural snapshot of society at the time of selection and internment. Mementos of the popular culture of an era set aside for archeologists of future generations to discover, ponder and maybe even learn a little something, good or bad, about who we were as a people.

Recently, while packing up my old office to move to my new office at the other end of the Southside building, I started to become aware of the fact that, over the years, without any planning and totally unbeknownst to me, I had been creating my own personal time capsule in the form of my animation desk, it's payload buried deep within the dark recesses of it's many drawers, shelves and chubby holes. One by one, I would pull out a drawer and carefully move through it's contents before emptying them into a box as I had done without acknowledgment countless times before. But this time, as I did so, I started unearthing objects, documents and writings that I suddenly saw as bearing insight into who I was at any particular moment from my early days at Disney to the present. I kept digging deeper.

Down, down, down I went. Past the sedimental layers of my career. Beyond the surface crust of chewed pencil stubs and amorphous gray-blue fragments of kneaded erasers where I began to find more representational relics of another time, a former self, all preserved as they were in their more relevant times, and each with a story to tell. Tiny snippets of paper, "Post-its" more yellowed than normal, jottings and doodles on tattered napkins, thumbnails for an "out of picture" Flounder scene, a take out menu from a long forgotten and since defunct restaurant all lining up like historic markers or "Burma Shave" signs along the road that I have traveled for the past 16 years.

As I continued moving through the stratum I pushed further back into my own recent past where I came across items like:

A package of chewing tobacco stolen off the set of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and a rubber banana, which I recall as being one of the many that "Herbie" went.

The lock used on a sliding window of the Flower Street trailer office I shared with Jay Jackson starting late in the production of "Oliver and Co." and continuing through the early part of "The Little Mermaid".

An assessment of my blood pressure from May of 1987. (122/74, not bad.)

A tiny sewing kit left over from a heavier time when the danger of splitting a pants seam seemed very real.

Matchbooks from numerous restaurants that probably contributed to the above condition.

Proud newspaper clippings from 1989 hailing the triumphant release of "The Little Mermaid".

An unused timecard from October of 1991, probably from one of the weeks when I took my trip through the Pacific Northwest but saw no rain, even in the Olympic Rain Forest.

Numerous "Thank you for your contribution...." notes from various productions.

Phone messages from long forgotten associates with archaic area codes.

Footage charts from "Aladdin" and "Pocahontas" with scene descriptions that took me right back to the very day I was toiling away at them.

Calendars from various years from 1981 to 1996 commemorating "important" events whose details now seem sketchy at best.

Small notepads with my thoughts after presentations for upcoming productions, ("This 'Beauty And The Beast' thing looks promising........").

A tangled mass of spent Walkman headphones.

Audio cassettes filled with dialog going back to "Mickey's Christmas Carol".

A greeting card from a woman whom I once held with great affection.

Various inspirational messages used to pick myself up during difficult times.

But below all these levels, I begin to uncover remnants of an even earlier culture in the form of:

Partial drawings of Pete's dragon scrawled into the wooden bottom of a drawer of my desk by a previous owner.

Numerous cigarette burns along the edges of the paper shelves. Reminders of a time before many of us when smoking cigarettes inside a sealed building was considered a socially acceptable pleasure.

A 35mm pencil test from "Scrooge McDuck And Money", (1967).

The mysterious initials R. H. painted on the inside rim of the florescent lamp hanging over my disk, and dated 1956.

And finally, an old phone book from 1964 with a cover sporting a stylized drawing of Jiminy Cricket standing by a graphic of "The Tower Of The Four Winds" for the 1964 World's Fair and filled with the extensions and locations of Walt Disney and many of the other people who once furiously toiled on "The Jungle Book" and each with a story of their own.

Discovering the remains of items that at one time I deemed important enough to save or commemorate, for me, raised new insight into the significance of what we label important in our life today and what passes away as trivial. How the things we hold dear and the feelings we have can lose their relevance, some even fading to a point where they become, in time, incomprehensible. Thus, our relation to things that were once concerns or fears or passions can fade into oblivion and likewise, things that had little imprint in the past, brushed aside as being meaningless or without purpose, can sometimes grow to have great significance and sentimental value.

What this recent discovery brought to me was an fascinating mix of observations about myself and my world view as relative to today. Through the process I noticed pockets of personal growth in many areas, but I also observed dark corners of degeneration in other aspects of life. I witnessed shifts in my perspective about certain issues and deepening convictions to other concerns. I was even able to revisit and better appreciate relationships long past. Thoughts came to me like, "Boy, am I glad that that's over!", or "How did I survive that?", or "Gee, what happened to those wonderful qualities I had and how can I rekindle them?" and "Wow, I really miss that person."

In the end, I began thinking that perhaps, going through this experience or self assessment, I could learn how to let go of more, to learn not to take life so seriously and to give more of myself back to the people currently gracing my life. To appreciate myself as a work in progress and to accept myself as I am at the present time. To not to let concerns, cares or material things too much influence my life or perceptions because these things are transient and are likely to change over time. Sometimes surprisingly quickly.

Indeed, looking back in the right frame of mind can prove to be cathartic, inspiring and freeing. A place where little insignificant shards of the past can be the cornerstones of tomorrow. Say! What have you got in your drawers?

"Back to the cupboard with you now",

Dave Pruiksma