I woke up the next morning to WNAP playing the hits of 1976, and doing so once again became my habit. April turned to May, which seemed to last about a week and then June’s warm, sunny days meant the end of the school year. I felt strong, and those 20 pounds that I’d packed on during my inactivity melted off. When I had been in my 30s and 40s, battling being overweight and the lingering painkiller addiction I’d never fully licked, only barely controlled, I would often have dreams about running. In my dreams, I’d run and run and run, without tiring, exhilarated at the freedom and the sheer pleasure of it. In real life, I’d always hated running, partly because I’d never been what you’d call "slim," but also because when I was a young athlete, running was always used as punishment. Not hustling enough during practice? Run. Suicides, generally, where you would have to start at the baseline, run to the free throw line, then back to the baseline, then to half-court, then back, etc…Four stages – free throw line, half-court, other free throw line, full-court, all in thirty seconds. If you didn’t hit that mark, you kept doing it until you could do it in thirty seconds. Then, there were free-throws on Saturday practice. We’d shoot a hundred, and the more you missed, the more you ran. How could you love something that was constantly used as punishment, unless you were some sort of masochist? I was no masochist, so I hated running.
Not this time through though. A couple weeks after I woke up back in 1976, I decided that if I was going to repeat this portion of my life, even if it was all a dream, or a coma because of my apparent car crash or, God forbid, the result of a drug overdose or something, I wouldn’t repeat all of my mistakes. So, I started running.
The area around our suburban house was heavily wooded, with trails snaking through the acres of trees. I started slowly, working through the pain of my damaged left leg, as well as the general discomfort of being 20 pounds heavier than I’d ever been. By the first of June, my leg pain was infrequent at most, and I weighed 190, which for me at 6′2" was pretty slim, yet solid. I was determined to do what I hadn’t done the last time I experienced 1976 – play basketball my senior year of high school. As summer set in, I had even started going to the gym, mornings and late afternoons, working for my Dad’s company in the middle of the day. It was a busy time, and I was very happy. I thought of 2005 constantly, and still was puzzled by this whole thing, but life in 1976 had become so routine, I was more comfortable with it. Before going to bed, and often while running and working out, I would mentally run through things that existed for me in 2005. I reminded myself of my address in San Diego, my phone numbers, my email addresses, the URLs of the websites I liked, the technical specs of the various Macintosh computers I owned. I thought about anything I could remember that hadn’t existed in the mid 70s. It was almost as if I was worried that if I forgot about the future I had lived in, it wouldn’t be reality, and that meant my wife and my daughter weren’t real. I just couldn’t face the thought of that. All else could go to hell, but not them. I tried to in my mind relive in detail, experiences I’d had with my family. My daughter’s first birthday party, her second, the first Christmas with my folks. I refused to allow them to not exist in my life. I even briefly considered looking up my wife here in this time, but since she was only 12 years old right now, I figured there was no point in doing that.
So, I kept my future life fresh in my mind and worked on the current one. I wondered whether my actions here would have an impact on that future life when I returned to it, if I returned to it, because I was doing things I hadn’t done the first time, approaching it all as I was, with both excellent hindsight and a whole lot more maturity. It was a fascinating thing, actually, especially my relationship with my father. Where he had been a little cold and distant when I first arrived back here, my working to overcome the physical and developing emotional problems my severely broken leg had caused, had earned a lot of respect in his eyes, it seemed. I remembered the coldness and distance, but had never realized what it was, until I came back with a chronological age equal to his here. He felt guilty. I had been badly hurt while working for him, and it had derailed my plans and dramatically changed what I was. The first time, I didn’t grow at all through the adversity. My father had seen that and blamed himself. Not this time, though. In this version of things, the version I was in the middle of creating, that adversity had made me stronger as I overcame it. At least that’s what he saw. In reality, it was the strength created by my overcoming the dark years that were born in this time period that ironically, helped me avoid them again. It was a causality loop that boggled the mind, and bordered on paradox.
But whatever the causality, my father and I had an understanding that in the timeline I had lived, we hadn’t developed until much later. He was visibly relieved, at least relative to how I remember him from this time. As a result, what was important to him as well as to me, was that I had the flexibility to workout in the mornings and late afternoons, and work for him when I had the time. So, I got fitter and fitter, got to know my father better and made some money. It was shaping up to be a great year.
It was the last week in June, 1976, and the air was clear and a little unseasonably crisp in the morning as I walked into the gym at about 8am. It had rained overnight, so there was a little water still in the parking lot, and only one other car besides my El Camino parked there. I had a red pair of sweat pants and a loose basketball jersey on. Carrying my gym bag with a fresh change of clothes inside, I walked through the hallway that ran from the six doors leading in from the outside to the gym floor, dropped the gym bag on one of the courtside bleachers, and sat down on the hardwood floor to stretch. My routine had become a two-hour cycle of activity that went like this: stretch, run bleachers, stretch some more, do some light strength training, run yet again and then shoot free throws, finishing things off with some ball handling and suicides. A lot like a practice, I figured, and I had decided that if I was still here in the fall, I wanted to be that much farther ahead of my teammates when the practice season started.
In truth, I was relying on my future knowledge, which included knowing how Michael Jordan managed to do all the things he’d done. Basically, it came down to working a hell of a lot harder than anyone else. So, I followed the example of the now thirteen year old MJ, a boy living in North Carolina, and worked harder than anyone else I knew even dreamed of working.
Stretching done, I was on my third circuit of the gym, running along the bleachers at the top of the gym, feeling the sweat start to roll down my face when the pain struck. And God, what pain it was, cold, like a huge, sharp icicle that suddenly shot out of nowhere and impaled me. I felt my legs give way, and sagged stumbling, reaching out with my right arm to catch myself. Luckily, I didn’t tumble down the 30 rows of bleachers, but instead, through blinding pain, managed to ease myself down to the wooden bench bleacher seats. I was dimly aware of my own voice, moaning in agony and then, everything exploded in a flash of white energy, and was looking up at a gray textured surface a few inches from my face, hearing a cacophony of noises and voices and smelling smoke mixed with what seemed to be burning rubber. One voice seemed louder than the others.
"Sir? Can you hear me sir?"
Whoever this was, he was agitated and excited, his voice sounding unnaturally high and reedy. I could tell he was talking to me, but I had no idea how to respond, and couldn’t even begin to do what was necessary to talk to him. I blinked, and he must have taken that to mean I had heard him, because he then said "we’re going to get you out of there…Just hang in."
I couldn’t seem to move, there was a great pressure pushing me down into whatever I was lying one, so all I could do was shift my eyes left to where the voice seemed to be coming from, and I saw a young, thin man with very short brown hair, round wire frame glasses and a white shirt with writing and insignia on it. I see the insignia clearly, and there seemed to be writing on it, but I couldn’t make sense of what it said. The man turned his head and shouted to someone I couldn’t see "Jalen, JAWS!"
His eyes came back to lock with mine, and just as a reassuring smile that didn’t include his concerned-looking eyes started to form, everything was gone, and I was face down again on the bleacher, feeling my heart pound madly, like it was trying to escape from my chest. But I was obviously back.
Whoa. What the hell was that?
I rolled into a sitting position on a bleacher seat, and looking around the gym, saw that I was alone. That was good. One of the custodial staff was somewhere in the building, since there was another car in the parking lot and one of the doors to the gym had been unlocked, but apparently whoever was here wasn’t close by. My breathing returned to normal and I stood hesitantly and stretched, making sure I hadn’t injured anything in my unexpected fall. I was fine, my heartbeat returning to normal. After a couple minutes, I started walking down the row of bleachers again, then accelerated to the jogging pace I’d been at when the pain had hit. From then, I ran more carefully than I had before. My fall could have been much, much worse. Within 10 minutes, I was back at full speed as if nothing had happened, but a darkness was hanging over my thoughts now. The episode had been extremely upsetting, and though I’d recovered physically very quickly, it brought back the unreality of this whole experience. Not that I’d ever started feeling "normal," life had nonetheless, taken on a rhythm of routine, and as I said before, I was feeling good.
Maybe the most unsettling thing about the fall and suddenly finding myself helpless, pinned into a situation I needed saving from, was that in those brief, fleeting seconds, I had the distinct impression that it was real, and more so than 1976. The smoke and burning rubber and guy in the shirt and round glasses were all real, and the gym, and 1976 were not. As strange as that felt, with my legs pounding rhythmically on the wooden bleacher seats as I ran down from the top of the gym to the bottom, taking a row at a time, and then back up, two rows at a time, easier than it had been last week, my comfort with this experience was again unbalanced. I could feel the sweat running down all over my body, the fatigue teasing my quads, and the air rusing in and out of my 17 year old lungs, but those few seconds pinned into a frightening, obviously dangerous situation, seemed more real than this.
So I kept running, longer than my regimen called for, figuring that maybe, if I made it hurt more, it would all seem more real. By the time I was done running, it was after 9am. I sat down on the court to do some more stretching, and after 15 minutes of that, decided not to do any weight training for the day. I had been doing low weight, high repetition lifting to build endurance and strength more than bulk. It wouldn’t kill me to miss a day. I grabbed a ball from the rolling rack at the end of the floor by the stage and slowly walked downcourt, dribbling hand to hand, thinking about the pain and the weird moments trapped in…I’m guessing my Pacifica in 2005. Had to be.
I reached the end of the court and sat down, my back against the huge pad that protected players from running into the wall that was just a couple steps past the baseline on that end. I rested my head back against the pad and closed my eyes.
I heard her come into the gym, soft tennis shoe footfalls giving her away as female. Then the scent of Taboo hit me, and I somehow managed to keep my eyes shut and my body immobile, even though it felt like my heart leapt into my throat. Thank goodness I was already hot and sweaty, I thought, or she’d be able to see my face flush. I suddenly felt hot.
"Hi Richie," Tammy said
I felt a smile appear on my face, but my eyes were still closed.
I guess I need to tell you about Tammy Sorenson.
As I’ve already said, I loved her the first moment I saw her in 7th grade. All those new people and faces from several elementary schools that fed into Washington Jr. High School and the only one I could see that first day of school in September of 1970 was hers. I found out who she was from a friend who I had already known because we played basketball against each other in grade school, and even at 13 years old, she took my breath away. Over the next few years, it was boyfriend after boyfriend, and me just a friend. I had crushes here and there, even one on her best friend for a year or so, but nothing close to how I felt about Tammy. Though our interests were different, there was always one or two things going on that we had in common. Student council, a couple musicals (she acted and danced, while I played piano in the pit orchestra) and the Yearbook staff had kept us in pretty close proximity through most of our 3 years of high school up to this point.
Since my return to my own past, I had played out our entire history in my mind, time and time again. Last fall, we had found ourselves alone during a rehearsal for a musical review "The Roaring 20s." It was late in the evening and a portion of the show that required neither of us was being rehearsed. It was in a short hallway between the orchestra and choir practice studios that we were talking while the orchestra’s brass section, who had been giving the director fits for weeks, were being "wood-shedded" and working on their part in the Eddie Cantor song "Makin’ Whoopee." We could hear them playing a section over and over again and as we talked, I had sensed Tammy edging closer and closer, until we were a mere arm’s length away from each other. I was talking about something, and noticed her singing the portion of the song the brass players were working on under her breath.
Finally, she cocked her head to one side, gave me a small, somewhat evil grin and asked "you know what "makin’ whoopee is?"
I stopped, whatever I was saying forgotten, and shrugged. "Yea, sure."
The horns had started up again, and this time, she sang softly but clearly, looking me in the eye and punctuating each syllable with a light poke in the chest:
He’s washin’ dishes and baby clothes,
He’s so ambitious, he even sews
But don’t forget folks, that’s what you gets folks
For makin’ whoopee
I couldn’t speak. And I know I was standing there smiling, probably a stupid smile, and though I don’t have a specific recollection of it, there were probably more hormones coursing through my body at that moment than in all the moments since, combined. Looking back on it with the life experience I’ve accumulated, as well as the clinical way of looking at the world I’ve developed, I realize now that Tammy, well, there’s no better way to say it, in the full blush of womanhood, was probably in a state that had something really, really significant happened (and I’m talking about much more than a kiss here), I probably would have found myself set smack dab in that very song in a very real way. Not that there had been any chance of things going that far, mind you.
But, in the end, I did nothing. Tammy stood there after her performance, looking into my eyes, a subtle, knowing and I have to admit, slightly scary smile on her face. I looked back, and we probably stayed that way for a minute, but I didn’t touch her. Since that day, I have relived the moment a thousand times, and it’s a mystery to me why I didn’t lean forward the necessary foot or so and kiss her. Even sitting here today writing this, I can’t believe I just didn’t kiss her. Of all the moments I had with Tammy Sorenson over the years, that’s one of two that I have that I would have given anything to do over again. I am absolutely certain that if the one in the music hallway had gone as it should have, the second moment, almost two years later, would have happened as it should have.
But neither moments happened as I have wished they would have. And as such, time unfolded as it did. But at this point, in the summer of my second trip through 1976, I had a chance to do things differently, As far as I knew, I had a wife I loved and a child I adored waiting for me in 2005, but I had to ask myself if I would ever see them again. Would I ever see 2005 again?
The only thing I new for sure, was that Tammy Sorenson was right here, right now, standing beside me and despite the fact that this whole thing seemed more or less unreal, I was in the experience. I wouldn’t meet my wife for years.
I opened my eyes, looked up at her and said "Hi, Tammy."
Her eyes looked down on me as if she knew every single damn thing I was thinking. Tammy’s thick and somewhat frizzy hair was tied back in a thick ponytail, and she was dressed in the knit top and shorts the drill team wore for rehearsals. I realized then that’s why she was at school. The huge Ben Davis Marching Band, of which Tammy was the Drill Team Captain was in their practice season, getting ready for the Indiana State Fair Band Competition. She stood far enough away from me to be modest enough, but closer than casual acquaintances would stand. She was even more breathtaking than my 30 years of memories had retained. But then, I was in a 17 year old body, too and that had to account for something.
"You’re here every day. You must like it," she said, kicking me lightly with her white sneakered foot.
"I do."
"How’s your leg?" She asked, sitting down beside me on the floor.
"Feeling great. How’s yours?" I asked, turning to give her a sidelong look. She was startlingly close to me.
In response, she leaned into me sharply, bumping me. "I guess if it was hurting you, you wouldn’t be such a smartass."
I chuckled, again closing my eyes and leaning my head back against the pad. "I guess not." I paused a couple seconds and then asked "where’s your boyfriend?"
She didn’t say anything for a couple seconds, and I sensed her moving away from me, very slightly.
"He’s coming to play with you guys tonight," she then said.
"Really." Me, more a statement than a question. So Steve was coming. Finally. I figured that some of the guys who had graduated would have been coming to work out with those of us still around, but since I hadn’t set foot in the gym during my first tour of 1976, I had no idea if Steve had done so. Every night we played, running full-court, I had looked for my old friend, hoping he’d show, but at the same time, afraid that he would. Knowing that he was coming tonight, I realized suddenly why I had been laying back a little during the scrimmages, taking it easier than I had to. Because of the regimen I’d been pursuing, the scrimmages were a bit easier for me than the other guys who were clearly enjoying the summer. I put my not pushing myself down to not wanting to overdo it and hurt myself again, but now, with the knowledge that Steve was coming tonight, and Tammy sitting on the gym floor next to me, I knew what I’d been doing, and why.
The relationship Steve Collins and I shared had begun to sour by the time I had gotten hurt, and nothing that happened after my accident took us back anywhere close to the friendliness we’d once had. I saw him on an airplane going from Indianapolis to San Diego in about 1987, and he couldn’t have been colder to me if I’d been caught kicking his dog. I remember wondering what the hell was up with him, and that the only thing he could possibly be pissed about happened 8 years before, and besides, nothing had happened that he should have been pissed about. Of course, three years later I’d learn the truth, and it all would fall into place. But in 1976, those tensions were all in the future.
And tonight he and I, coming from very different stages in our relationship, would see each other again, and right in the middle of this was this woman, my first true love, whose 17 year old self was sitting next to me. I again opened my eyes and turned to look at her. Tammy looked back with the same slight, subtle smile that had been on her face when after she had finished singing Makin’ Whoopee to me, her blue eyes looking straight into mine, causing me to for approximately the millionth time in my life to imagine what having her all to myself would feel like, somehow knowing that, as weird as it sounds, it was what the universe wanted for me.
"I haven’t seen him in awhile," I then said. "Be nice to."
Tammy nodded, her smile broader now. She raised her eyebrows in agreement. We talked for a few minutes, about the summer, what the band was doing, what musicals were planned for the school year. Her laugh, the first time it erupted in response to a comment I made about one of our teachers, a spinster appropriately named Miss Goring (just like the famous Nazi), gave me a slight feeling of vertigo, as it seemed to come flying out at me from the past. Maybe, I thought, I should just tell her now. Not wait around until the summer after we’re out of high school to attempt, in my 1969 Plymouth Fury on the way back to my family’s lake cottage, to tell her I loved her, that I had always loved her and WILL always love her. I had failed in the summer of 1977, weak in body, mind and lacking the confidence to tell her that simple truth. I sure as hell wasn’t weak now though. Why wait? The way things are going, if I’m even still here a year from now, my path, already so different from what it had been my first time through 1976 could easily be different enough that there would be no hour-long car trips back and forth to the summer musical theatre camp we would be attending together.
But once again, I played true to form and said nothing.
After a few minutes, her distracting work done, Tammy pushed herself up off the floor, turning slightly to look down on me. My eyes met hers again and I made a concerted effort to keep them there, ignoring the slightly more interesting view my vantage point offered.
"See you later, Richie," Tammy said, her small smile back.
"Seeya."
After Tammy left, I stood, stretched my arms out to the side, shaking off the tightness from sitting. Putting my feet together, I bent double at the waist, grabbing my ankles and stretching my hamstrings. Amazing what time does to our bodies, so slowly, a day at a time, so little we hardly notice. But then it’s all back and you realize how far you’d gone from this. Well, I felt that way anyway. Not that to my knowledge, anybody else had ever had this experience. I reached down to the leather basketball, gave it a slap and when it bounced up slightly again, hit it again quickly, in a few strokes bringing it up to a normal dribble. Down the court, through my moving legs a few times, around the back both ways, and then at the top of the key, I suddenly accelerated toward the basket until a couple steps past the free-throw line I took one more dribble with my left hand, transferring the ball to my right as I jumped. I felt the rim hit my arm a good four inches below my wrist, and I slammed the ball through the hoop, catching the rim in my right hand and hanging on for a brief second before letting go and softly landing back on both feet.
I’m just a shade over six foot two. At my best, first time through the 70s, I couldn’t come close to doing that. But now, not quite four months since arriving back here, I had, albeit through an enormous effort, gotten strong enough do do what I’d just done. The path that I was following this trip through the decade was beginning to bend further and further away from the first one. I left the ball bouncing as I picked up my gym bag and walked toward the doors to the parking lot, wondering if there would be any way to bridge those two paths now, even if I wanted to.
My episode with Tammy had distracted me from what had happened before she showed up in the gym. The memory of my sudden return to 2005 hung over the rest of the day, darkening my thoughts. I’d promised my dad that I’d drop by one of the job sites, a luxury home one of his crews was working on and inventory some material. Though he never told me I couldn’t climb and work with roofers, or help hang drywall, he was clearly uncomfortable with me doing any of that, so I didn’t. He didn’t try and turn me into a clerk, but always seemed to find some sort of blended job that wouldn’t look like a waste of time, but yet wouldn’t put me in danger of getting hurt again. I actually enjoyed the work this time around, being more mature and experienced this time, and briefly thought that maybe I should get to know this business better. It didn’t take long however, to remember that there were hard economic times coming and there wasn’t anything I could do to change THAT.
So, I was a little withdrawn at the building site as I counted the materials on the list. There was about a 50/50 mix of shortages and overages, something that irritated my father to no end. It always frustrated him that from his point of view, “people just can’t seem to be able to master the fine art of counting,” as he would frequently complain. This time around, his tirades just made me smile, outwardly at first, until he caught me and asked “what’s so goddamn funny?” After that, I managed to hide my enjoyment of my much younger than I remember him father getting extremely pissed. Fortunately, on this day he wasn’t on site, but was instead working in the office.
After a couple hours checking and double-checking the numbers, I put the inventory forms into the folder and sat down to eat the ham sandwich I’d packed into my gym bag. Since I wasn’t really “working,” I’d just stayed in the sweats I’d worn out of the gym. They were a little too warm, but I was still self-conscious wearing the contemporary styled basketball shorts. They’d never bothered me before, but after years of fashionably long and somewhat baggy shorts, these I found myself again having to wear, with their legs ending just a few inches below the crotch made me feel like one of the Village People. The first time I pulled a pair from my dresser and put them on, I looked in the mirror and imagined myself in a leather biker’s cap. Jeesh. At least I know now why we wore those long tube socks. I shook my head and thought I just looked like a freak. Three months later, and I still hadn’t gotten over that.
It was well past lunch time on the job, so I sat on the lowered tailgate of the El Camino and ate my ham sandwich alone, listening to the sounds of construction going on a few dozen yards away. Just as well I was by myself, since my mood wasn’t one that suited company. I tried for as long as I could to deny what I knew, that the incident in the gym was me traveling back to 2005. Had to be. I knew I’d had a car accident, but thinking about it in the detached way that I’d been able to do here in 1976, was very different than finding myself in what was obviously the wreckage of my car, unable to move, with presumably a number of people trying to come to my rescue. “Jalen, Jaws!” had to have something with the “Jaws of Life” which mean they were going to have to cut me out of my apparently ruined car. Great.
So, was this what they meant by “my life flashed before my eyes?” If so, it was taking a long time to do so, and anyway, I’d done things a LOT different this time than before. Again, I tried to fit the “I must be dead” piece into this puzzle, but it just didn’t seem to fit. More and more, it appeared that this was some sort of hallucination, brought on by my injuries in the accident. I missed my wife and daughter, but the thought of going back to a situation that was probably full of any number of kinds of pain didn’t really appeal to me that much. There’s a certain comfort to being in your past. I knew that in the Fall, Jimmy Carter would be elected President of the United States. I knew the Russians wouldn’t be launching ICBMs at us, or that there wouldn’t be another Arab oil embargo for a long, long time. On the other hand, I knew that Elvis had just about a year to live, and I wondered if there was any chance of my seeing him in concert before next August. I had to admit to myself that I hadn’t a clue who was going to win the World Series in October, or who would win the next Superbowl.
From time to time, I would think about the things I knew would happen, the good and the bad. I wondered if it would be of any use to try and change them. In 1980 for instance, should I get on a bus or airplane to New York and head off Mark David Chapman, maybe kick his ass before he stalked and killed John Lennon? I know a good friend of mine from 2005 would vote for just trying to talk him into leaving John alone and going for Yoko. What about John Hinckley? Should I go to Washington, DC and stop him from shooting Ronald Reagan? Given my actions over the past few months, I clearly didn’t have any clear devotion to preserving the time line that was my life. I’d upended the whole damn thing. As long as I’m here, why should I stop there? Why not reshape history in any number of ways? I certainly have the potential to do that by messing with key turning points that I knew were coming up.
But, I realized that despite all of my grand ideas about changing the world I remember, I wouldn’t do any of it. What I really wanted was to get back to my family and resume the 2005 life that I’d grown accustomed to. Sure, it was fun reliving some dark days and making them a bit lighter, and I’d be lying if I said that flirting with Tammy Sorenson wasn’t extremely titillating. I was at this point at least, still amazed that I didn’t feel any guilt about that. I occasionally felt a twinge of fear that I was so overturning the chain of what had gone before that my wife might not be available to me in 1990, the year we would meet, my world having been so changed by my “second-chance” actions.
And always on the periphery of my thoughts about the situation I was in, was wondering what my experiences in Belton the day before my car crash in 2005 meant. If I believed that situation to be what it seemed to be, I will bodily travel back to 1933 sometime in 2008. On the one hand, believing that would happen was comforting, because it meant I would in fact, return from this time. At least I’d always assumed that was the case. On this day however, sitting on the lowered tailgate of Girrard Construction’s El Camino, my dark attitude whispered to me that maybe I would travel to 1933 from the 2008 that proceeded from this timeline. What if I never made it back to 2005, but instead just aged from here, until in 2008 I either stumbled upon or had forced upon me the secret to physically doing what I had apprently done in consciousness only – traveling from one time to another?
That seriously bummed me out.
Suddenly, my trip this morning back to 2005 didn’t seem so threatening. It actually gave me some hope, and I promised myself I’d think more about how to do that again. But first, I had some loose ends to tie up in 1976. Nodding to myself, the decision made and committed to, I pushed myself off the El Camino’s tailgate, collected and walked my lunch trash over to the small fire my Dad’s crew had built to burn trash (again, how things have changed!). “Hang on a minute,” I called to the crew’s painter, Delray, whose afternoon entertainment of tossing an almost empty bucket of paint thinner into the fire to enjoy the explosion was imminent. I threw my trash in and smiled at him to go for it, and jogged toward the car. I needed to go see someone and have a conversation I’d been putting off.
* * *
25 minutes later I was pulling into the driveway at home. I found Thelma and Kristy in the backyard, my sister sitting on the ground surrounded by her Barbies and their clothes, Thelma sitting on the picnic table sewing something. I’d pulled a couple Cokes from the fridge in the kitchen and held one out to Thelma as I sat down on the bench across the picnic table from her. She nodded for me to set the can down on the table. I did so and popped the ring top on mine, pulling it off the can and laying it on the table.
“So, what do you know about all this, Thelma?”
She looked up at me over the top of the glasses she wore for reading and close work. “I know that you’re different from before you decided you were really 45 years old.”
“47.”
“47, right.” Thelma admitted, looking back down to her sewing.
“Different? How?” I asked, taking a drink of Coke.
Thelma shrugged. “My Nan passed on 22 years ago. She raised me – my Mama died in childbirth, and my daddy…” She sighed, not looking up from the sewing, “My daddy ran off.”
I nodded, interested. I’d never heard this story before.
“Nan dyin’ hit me hard. I had my boys, but they were old enough they didn’t need me so much anymore, and I just didn’t handle it very well.” Thelma put the sewing down, took off her glasses, opened her can of Coke and tipped her head back for a drink. She glanced over at Kristy for a second before continuing.
“She’d been gone for a month or so, and it was getting harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. Today, they’d say I was ‘depressed.’ Back then though, I just had the blues. One day, it just got to be too much. I had gone into Nan’s room to start going through her things, and started to feel real strange. I went to sit down on her bed, but didn’t make it down. They told me later I collapsed and hit my head on the night stand.
Thelma took another drink of Coke, her eyes looking off into the distance. “Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a bench in the park in Memphis, Tennessee and it was 1936.” Her eyes then turned and she looked at me, daring me to express any disbelief.
I didn’t.
“It was real. Everything about it was real. After a day or two, I just accepted it and lived day to day. I was so excited that Nan was there, back living again, I didn’t question it. I thought maybe I was dead, or that I really was 20 and had dreamed everything else, but I missed my boys something terrible and knew they weren’t just my imagination.
I nodded, understanding her perspective. I remained silent though, because I wanted to the hear the whole story.
“At first,” Thelma continued, after another sip of Coke, “I pretty much did what I remembered doing the first time. Going to work at the River Hotel, helping Nan with the washing she took in, whatnot. But after awhile, I still remembered that I was really 18 years older than the world thought, and that I seemed to be living in my past. I was able to do things differently this time, and so I began to change my life and do some things I hadn’t done before, and NOT do some other things I HAD done the first time.
At this, Thelma looked at me and smiled. “I made a few folks pretty upset.” Her smile grew wider. “But after a bit, I loved it. I read books I’d never read before, I quit the hotel and traveled around some, got a job writing for a newspaper! Learned to take photographs.” She kept smiling at the memory of it all.
“Did you tell anybody what you were going through?” I asked.
“No siree. I did not. Who would have believed me? They’d have locked me up in a padded room, or worse,” she said.
“How’d it all work out?” I wanted to know.
Thelma paused, thinking, and I saw the smile slowly fade. “You have to understand something, Richie. I love my boys. I missed them something terrible, but there were some things I’d done that given another chance, I didn’t do. And it involved them.” She pursed her lips and looked away. I thought I could see the beginnings of a tear forming in the corner of her left eye.
I realized then what she meant. She didn’t have them. Given the chance to repeat an important part of her life, she made the choice not to have her boys. I found myself nodding, understanding what she had gone through. Thelma had raised two boys, Christopher and Darnell, completely by herself. Obviously, the boys father was someone who, when Thelma was given a second chance, didn’t make the cut. Therefore, in her alternate past, there was no Christopher and Darnell. No Christopher, the Crispus Attucks High School basketball star I’d met once and idolized from then on, and no Darnell, the laughing, always-joking pastry chef who lived in Chicago and had the biggest, most magificent afro I’d ever seen.
“How did that feel?” I asked.
“Broke my heart.” She said, looking directly at me. Somehow the tear was gone. Maybe it had never been there in the first place.
Thelma paused a second, then took a last drink of Coke.
“And healed it.”
I nodded again. I knew exactly what she was saying, and why on that day a couple months ago, she’d asked me what I was doing back here.
“You got a do-over, and you did things differently,” I said. “How’d you know I was going through the same kind of thing?”
Thelma laughed and answered immediately. “You’re a man now, Richie. You were just a dumb-ass boy the day before, but you walked in that day you cut school, and was a man. Everthing about you was different.
Thelma smiled at me, then continued.
“I figured out pretty quick what I was going to do different when I got the chance. What are YOU going to change? What HAVE you changed, Richie?
As if I haven’t been thinking about THAT
“A few things,” I answered. “I’m working harder in the gym this summer. Hell, I didn’t even GO to the gym all summer my first time in 1976. My leg hurt too much.”
“Mmm Hmmm,” Thelma responded, in her slightly sarcastic way. “The way I figured it, you whined through the next several years, let your messed up leg keep you unhappy, didn’t do what you knew you should do, and ended up regretting most of it.”
Man, when she was right, Thelma was right. But it didn’t feel any better knowing that, and her words were starting to sting a little.
“You probably settled for a wife, a job and a life and regretted all that, too.” By the time she finished her sentence this time though, I was shaking my head, getting pretty pissed. She was right, but I didn’t need to hear this!
“I’ve got a great wife, Thelma. And a daughter, Samantha, both of whom I love very much!” My voice was raised, angry, and I looked over at Kristy, who had stopped playing, a Barbie hanging from her right hand, and looked puzzled
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Thelma called to my sister. Shaking her head, she said “your brother’s just bein’ a silly boy. Settle down, silly boy,” she said, pretend bonking me on the head with her hand. Kristy went back to her dolls and Thelma, looking me directly in the eye, her voice softer now, said “I didn’t say she wasn’t wonderful, or that you didn’t love her or your little girl.”
She paused, and continued to gaze at me.
“But you settled, didn’t you?”
Silence.
“You wanted something different,” she went on, “or at least thought you wanted something different, and you settled, didn’t you boy? Because you didn’t think you were worthy of what you really wanted.
I looked away, gazing at the hoop on the half-court basketball court my Dad had built for me three years ago.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “You’re right. I was incredibly lucky and married really well, but settled for something I’ve always thought was less than what I wanted.”
There, I said it.
“And I feel really, really guilty about that.”
Thelma then did something completely unexpected. She snorted.
“Oh, please!” She exclaimed. “I thought you’d grown up!” Then, on seeing my puzzled expression, continued. “I tell you, you children of plenty make me laugh! You have everything, and because of it, you worry about the least little things. You’re so guilty about settling for something you didn’t deserve, you don’t really deserve what you settled for!”
She smiled now, shaking her head in with an intensity that communicated to me that she really, really wanted me to listen. “Richie, this is real, but it’s not real. You can have whatever life you want here, but you’ve got a loving wife and little girl waiting for you when you wake up from all this. I’m pretty sure about that.”
The look on my face must have told her I wasn’t getting it, so she continued. “Do what you think you should have done all along while you’re here, because you won’t be here forever. Take your life off into whatever direction you think you should, but be ready to set it free because you’re going to give it back to the Richie that was here before.”
I felt myself nodding slightly, and was starting to understand what Thelma was telling me.
“Look, the way I believe it is, is this. Everything that could ever happen, does happen, and sometimes, we get a chance to jump the tracks to another route. Ride it as long as you can, make sure it’s pointing in the direction you want it to, and then you’ll jump back to your own track, and this train will continue on.” Thelma sat back and folded her arms, as if to say there, get it? How much simpler could it be?
I took a breath after a few seconds and answered her. “What you’re describing is a situation where we can sometimes travel to alternate quantum realities and influence how events play out. Certain theories of existence suggest that there’s an entire universe for every possible outcome of every possible event, and we can just…surf them.”
“Okay, I suppose,” Thelma responded, shrugging.
“When the consciousness that is me leaves this reality then,” I continued, “a copy is made and it goes along, not even realizing that I…Me…isn’t along for the ride any more.”
Thelma shrugged. “How the hell should I know? I just know that I woke up, back in my own body, in my own time, in this body, and went on with my life. I’d done the things I always wanted to do and didn’t ache for the things I’d only wished I’d done.”
I considered this, and it felt right. I hadn’t died, and I wasn’t in some drunken fever dream from a drug overdose. “How long were you away? How long before you returned to your old life?”
Thelma smiled at me, but it was a smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes.
“Almost 30 years.”
