Time Travel

by Chuck Sigars

Like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5, I occasionally get unstuck in time, and it's not nearly as painful as it sounds.

This happens sometimes at night, and sometimes in the car, and occasionally in the shower, but it's almost always fun, and almost always triggered by the usual suspects. Give me a whiff of musk cologne or pretty much any Bob Seger song, and I can go tripping back through time, always young and energetic and incredibly handsome (I'm not saying there aren't some reality bugs in the process). I become a temporal archeologist, exploring the past, and I generally have a really good time.

The trick is to wander, not wallow. Time travel is an exercise in restraint, after all, as any mediocre science fiction novel will tell you. Paradoxes are just waiting to be ignited, so be careful out there and stay away from regrets. But this is just common sense. Would you rather remember the road not taken, or the time in 1975 when a red-haired girl named Lynn spontaneously shucked her swimming suit and dived into the pool? I know my answer.

It's not about dwelling. We dwell enough as it is. Really, it's skating on Lake What Was, frozen and permanent but still worth returning to, even at the risk of a sprained ankle. I like to walk through high school hallways and labor rooms. I like to remember my grandfather's soundless laugh and my father's pathetic attempts at disco dancing.

I enjoy re-living the trips to Disneyland with my kids, the day I got married, rafting down the Salt River and seeing a UFO, almost any Jack Nicholson movie, and most kinds of pies. Video, analog or digital, doesn't do any of this justice; we need to travel again, which is why we do.

I remember riding bikes forever. I remember changing diapers. I remember struggling with quadratic equations, getting a mortgage, learning to roller skate, eating ice cream cones, applying for jobs, cutting my face while shaving, kissing Karen, starting a business, buying a Jeep, watching a river, catching a fish, swinging a bat, singing off-key, cutting my own hair, waiting for one particular phone call, writing that first poem, attending funerals and weddings, and knowing.

Knowing that I would come back, and that they would stay, these things. Knowing I would feel free to slip back to the past, visit and remember. I miss these moments so much but, again, I'm helpless to change any of it, so I just cherish the odd journey, the occasional unstuckness of it all. I slide right through the past, every so often peek at the future, and see the present for what it is.

That is, the tools of today. We can walk through the What We Did and worry about What We Will, but really this is What We Have, and it probably should be enough. Eventually we will ditch what was, voluntarily or not, and come back to now, smarter for what we've done and dumber for what we haven't, but here, and if you ask me it's about time.

The Author

Chuck Sigars is a syndicated newspaper columnist in the state of Washington (U.S.A.), and the author of The World According to Chuck (Xlibris, 2004). His web site is ChuckSigars.com and you can find his blog at http://blogs.salon.com/0002813/ .