It was an ordinary day. Reading in my morning newspaper about 21-year-old twins, Cate and Alex Cardwell opening two small FedEx boxes that had rested in the back of their mother's, Beth Cardwell's closet, for almost 21 years. The boxes were addressed to her twin children and labeled with instructions to wait to open them until the twins' 21st birthday. So, on this past April 18th, Cate and Alex, now college juniors studying at different schools, finally had a chance to find out what has been inside the boxes all of those years. Beth wasn't sure either since she stored the boxes, but it was her brother who had packed them. Mark Sahm, also known as Uncle Mark, was a 20-something artist living in Manhattan when his sister, Beth was pregnant with twins in Lancaster. He says he didn't have a lot of money for a gift for the kids, so he decided to make them each a time capsule, to be opened when they turned 21 years old. Mark said he wanted to capture the essence of that day they were born - how the world was - as well as what was going on with me as their uncle! Mark now lives in Stamford, Connecticut. He is quick to add that the twin's time capsules are "just a little thing, and not Apple stock or a new car." Darn! The twins' birth was a joyful moment for Sam after a difficult time being a New Yorker. When the twins were born, it was just a year and a half after 9/11. Sham watched the Twin Towers from 35th Street and Madison Avenue. "I'll never forget that feeling," Sahm says. The day before the twins Cate and Alex were born, he had purchased a Polaroid camera and took pictures of Ground Zero from different city corners for the time capsule. He says it was a windy, cold day, but he felt compelled to capture the historical moment, knowing it would be completely different in 21 years. "I don't want them to see it as dark, but that the city rebounded," he says. He hopes to someday meet up with Alex and Cate and the Polaroid images, to observe together how the city kept 'moving on," Cate, a biology student at West Chester University was excited to open the time capsule. Alex, who is studying supply chain management and marketing at Kutztown University, says his uncle is "smart and artsy," and they both did wrestling in school so they both have "a lot in common." The twins opening the capsules midway through their college careers is exactly what Sahm had intended. He said he chose 21 instead of 18 years old because the twins would have a better sense of the world and have gone off to school. Parents Beth and Ted Cardwell met with the kids to open their time capsules on April 18, their 21st birthday. The twins' grandparents, as well as Uncle Mark and his wife Sharon, joined the party via Face-Time. "My brother really knocked it out of the park for coolness," said Beth of the time capsules. Each box had a newspaper from that day, a USA Today and a New York Times, and a pop culture magazine and a People magazine featuring Madonna, and Entertainment Weekly featuring Jennifer Anison and Jim Carey. Cate was amused by the tiny 30-program TV Guide in the paper. There was also a lottery ticket and a receipt. Sahm was trying to include items with their birth date printed on it. "How many things can you capture in a day with a printed date on it? The time capsules also contained a heartfelt letter and a funny Happy 21st Birthday card. And, those Polaroids! They stood the test of time, from the site where the Twin Towers once stood to the joy on Sahm's face holding each the newborn twins in the hospital. "It was a cool gesture," says Alex. "It is investing reading the paper back from that time." "I am so proud of them - they are good kids and will be good adults," says Sahm of his niece and nephew. "It was worth the effort back then, and I'm glad I could share it with them." Time capsules been in the late 1930s. These days, there are even four galactic time capsules "buried" in space to possibly benefit space travelers in the distant future. In 1990, the International Time Capsule Society was launched to maintain a global database of all known time capsules. It was another Extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. Click on images to enlarge them and to better see some of the information that was in the time capsule.
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