A few months ago I read all the Life magazines from 1963.

1963 was an interesting year. There was an eclipse and a new pope. Prayer in schools was the divisive issue of the day. Beer can technology was changing quickly (at least according to all the Schlitz ads), and long-distance calls were the new way to keep in touch with faraway friends and family. An article about a disturbing new teenage trend of party crashing made me laugh out loud.

There is something about these articles and advertisements that reminds me of my grandparents and especially of their home. Their house was filled with Reader’s Digest condensed books and vintage Tupperware; it was a highway to the past, full of souvenirs of two long lives, well-lived.

Here, the cake topper from Grandpa’s 60th birthday party in 1990. On the countertop, an Amway dish soap bottle purchased from a cousin in the 1980s. On the bookshelf, a memoir about a good Christian family adopting four difficult children, published 1960. Over here, wooden clogs made by my grandfather’s grandfather, perhaps from the 1930s.

Flipping through the pages of 1963 reminded me of a time when my grandparents were alive, when they were traveling, when they were raising children and buying books and Tupperware. When they worriedly discussed prayer in school and wondered if President Kennedy was going to get his tax cuts through Congress. I turn the page and see an advertisement for the exact encyclopedia set my grandparents had in the sewing room. Did they see this same ad?

This is the feeling I was seeking when I worked on that archaeological dig in Greece. I would gently uncover a terracotta lamp from the floor of the tomb, hold it in my hands, and wonder at the last person who held that lamp. Who made it. Who treasured it. But they were unknowable, unseeable, their experience too far from mine. Thousands of pot sherds and never once did I conjure up a connection with those Roman families from two-thousand years ago.

But 1963 is so much closer. Why, it was practically yesterday that my grandma went to the store and bought that new 1970s era Christmas candy dish. A blink of an eye separates her from me in the churn of generations coming and going, and it seems that in mere seconds my own grandchildren will tumble through this front door and break this same vintage candy dish and complain about how old all my books are.

How will the next generation travel through time to get to me? What will be their equivalent of reading Life magazines? Will they get out the vintage Nintendo Switch and load up my Animal Crossing island? Watch documentaries produced in the 2020s? Read this blog?

(Old Life magazines are available on Google Books if you’re interested.)