My six-year-old grandson seriously
asked me one morning, “Grandma Linda, have you ever time-traveled?”
I don’t believe anyone had ever asked
me that question before, but it really got me to thinking about time
travel. I remember the first time I read H. G. Wells’ The Time
Machine and saw the original
movie. The Time Traveler observes that time travel is a fourth
dimension and “only another way of looking at Time.”
Then,
of course, time travel was common on Star Trek.
I remember one episode when Captain Kirk and the crew from the
Enterprise went back
in time to find themselves in a gunfight against the Earp brothers at
the O.K. Corral. They survived when Mr. Spock realized that the time
travel was an illusion in their minds.
We travel to the
past in our dreams and in sudden flashes of remembrance. Travel to
the future can be through daydreams, plans, goals, or intuition. Some
claim to see the future in a crystal ball, but I’ve never had that
advantage. Jim’s grandma used to see the future in coffee
grounds...guess that’s a version of reading tea leaves. That her
coffee had grounds in the bottom is an indication of how strong it
was. I was always afraid to have her read my coffee grounds because
she once told a neighbor that her daughter would “come home in a
box.” And she did after a car wreck.
Anniversaries are a
time that make people time travel. Whether it is a personal
anniversary or historical anniversary, dates can trigger realistic
memory travel. With the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s
assassination, I’ve about overloaded on specials about the
shooting in Dallas and the mysteries that linger. Today as a nation,
many will collectively time travel to November 22, 1963. We will
think about where we were and what we were doing when we heard about
the assassination. I heard the news in the hallway at school. We sat
on the floor listening to the radio as the tragedy unfolded. I was
telling my granddaughter a few weeks ago that we were out of school
and at home watching TV when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.
Before dementia,
Jim was a much more effective time traveler than I will ever be. He
remembered people, places, and dates from his childhood with more
clarity than I could remember the previous week.
One of the
cruelties of dementia is how it erases memories. In the earlier
stages, long-term memory isn’t affected as much as short-term
memory, and it seems the person with dementia has effectively time
traveled and, in fact, seems to be living in a different time. Once
an elderly lady who was in the nursing home with Jim told me that she
had to get home because her dad would be really mad that she was out
after dark.
Alzheimer’s is
like entering a time machine that zooms into the past, wiping out the
present and future. Eventually, plaques and tangles jam up the moving
parts and the fabulous time machine malfunctions leaving the traveler
stranded.
So, the answer is
“yes.” I do time travel. I don’t need a machine with whirling
dials that I have to enter to travel back and forth in time. Any
little nanosecond will do. All I have to do is rev up the fabulous
time machine located between my ears to retrieve another place and
time. As far as the future, those travels are flashes of “coming
attractions” found in the realm of imagination. Yes, I still look
forward to the future and would rather travel forward than backward
any day.
The
mind is the real time machine, and it really is
just another way of looking at time.
Copyright (c)
November 2013 by L.S. Fisher
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