I made a time capsule once. It wasn’t buried with items that would tell future generations about what life was like 50 or 100 years before them. This was an accident.

This wasn’t a special canister or sealed box. It was a beer cooler. And it didn’t have newspapers, pictures or any other mementos in it. Just a pack of leftover Ball Park franks I’d forgotten about from a Fourth of July camp out. There wasn’t a special ceremony when it was opened. Just my dad – alone and innocent, getting stuff ready for a Labor Day picnic.

Unprepared, the festering horror that slithered out when dad cracked the lid was unimaginable. An ancient evil, yet only a few months old. It was like when everyone’s faces melted at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Still in shock, “They plump when you cook ‘em” was the only phrase my poor pops could stammer for several days.

Heinous as it was, this time capsule did its job. Its rotted contents took my old man back to another place in time. Where he saw and felt everything that those tortured hot dogs did.