Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

Have you ever watched those great shows on PBS? You know, the ones with titles like "Ancient Secrets of the Maya," or "Ancient Egypt Revealed." I've always loved those shows, but I've become more skeptical of them over the years. They always rely upon the latest dig of some ancient city, tomb or temple. Archeologists and anthropologists team up to inspect all the little gadgets and goodies, and then they tell us what a typical day was like for an ancient Mesopotamian hamster trainer or how Bronze-Age Minoans fashioned fine dental tools from chicken bones and bees' wax. To support the arguments, they show a one-inch piece of a chicken wing stuck in the mouth of a skull or three strands of hair that either belonged to a Viking trapeze artist or to a mutant mountain yak, depending on which DNA results you believe.

Most of the time I'm thinking, "That's a great story, but I'm pretty sure they made that up." I'm willing to accept that Stonehenge is a really weird, but fairly impressive accomplishment, but I can't buy that it was the food court in an ancient bus station, let alone a high-tech observatory. Sure, the sun points through one arch and hits a rock in the middle on the solstice, and sure, the full moon on the Ides of March casts a vaguely Abraham-Lincoln-shaped shaft of light straight through the center of the monument, but we should remember something important. The bloody thing is a circle. The sun, moon and stars are bound to shine through just about every part of it at one time or another. Anyway, all this guessing what artifacts tell us about ancient cultures always gets me thinking about how our culture would be interpreted if people found our junk laying around a few thousand years from now.

"What do you make of these curious items, Dr. Svendersson?"

"Well, we found a lot of these colorful imitation jewels in the small passages beneath many ancient American dwellings. We're pretty sure the passage systems were used either to move warm air throughout the dwelling or as small subway systems for pets. Leaning toward the warm air theory, as I do, we think these little, jewel-like items were a sort of appeasement to the heating god, whose name was Furnace."

Actually, they'd be looking at old Lite-Brite pegs that fell down heater vents. There's not a house in America without a couple dozen Lite-Brite pegs in the ducts.

"Professor Milquefass/, we notice that many of the people from the Age of Vanity had these metal inserts placed in their teeth. What does it all mean?"

"The people of the 20th century and slightly after were not only vain, but they were also somewhat greedy and heavily taxed by their government. We believe they were in the habit of melting down coins and hiding them in drilled-out holes in their teeth. The metal could later be extracted and minted into coinage or simply traded on the black market. In the meantime, it had the added bonus of being pretty darned strong, so it was functional, too."

Fillings.

How on earth will they interpret the weird stuff even we can't figure out? When they find my old clothes, and come across the hat made out of crochet and beer cans, what will they think? What about those great plastic glasses with the fake eyeballs on springs -- what will they make of those? I can picture some future archeologist saying, "Now, this is curious," and holding up a Tammy Faye Baker bobble-head doll. "What do think about this, Sam?"

"I don't know Milt, but it scares the bejesus out of me!"

And who wouldn't want to be there 2,000 years from now when some archeological college intern unearths a liposuction machine, complete with photographic instructions.

"My God, Dr. Flippershodt, look at this!"

"Yes, Flip. They were an intelligent race, but there was a dark side, too. Their treatment of Democrats during the early 21st century was unspeakable."

"Oh, the humanity!"

Frank Ameduri watches way too much PBS.