Sometimes, spontaneous fun occurs when it is least expected. The excavation of the Warren time capsule this week was a perfect example. In these little moments, where we find ourselves gathering with people we’ve known from many overlapping aspects of our lives, people we have known from years prior, those we haven’t seen in years, and those we just met yesterday, we are affirming and creating connections. Those connections create community.
The reach of the Warren Fourth of July is hard to describe. Ask someone who misses a year what it feels like to know it’s going on, while you are not there and the answer is the same, the pull is palpable.
The gathering in Warren this week, 50 years after a time capsule (a Sugarbush gondola) was somewhat haphazardly (or not) buried on the Fourth of July, full of memento mori of the time, shows the strength of that magnetic attraction.
People who were born here, people who have been here since the 1960s and 1970s, and people who have arrived every year since that time were represented in Warren Village on Tuesday morning, along with elementary school students ranging from preschoolers to sixth graders. So compelling is the Fourth of July and buried treasure that people showed up to check out what was happening 50 years ago on that day.
Gathering for a non-essential but compelling and fun shared moment is creating community. It’s creating a community of shared interests, not necessarily shared values (political or otherwise), but shared curiosities and camaraderie. And those connections can supersede any political divisions that may separate people in these fraught and bifurcated days.
And an event like this has all the right elements: fun, interesting, surprising, suspense, people’s reactions, and also, people’s reasoning (those who were there then and this week) in placing those items in the time capsule in the first place. To hear from those who were there, reasoning may not have been foremost in the minds of those who filled the capsule in 1976.
What an outstanding event. Congrats to those who made it happen at the town level. It was a lot of work. It went off without a hitch. And kudos to excavator operator Jeff Parent, who donated his time.
