Time Travel

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and would like to confirm that yes, it is possible to move around in your own timeline.  We go as solo travelers and are unable to change anything (that’s what nostalgia is for).  Fair warning, at least from my own experience: trips are something of a mixed blessing.

For example, I am watching television in my parents’ basement when a car commercial uses an old Paul Harvey monologue as a voice-over.  Suddenly, I am nine years old and sitting in the middle seat of my family’s minivan.  My sisters are behind me, Mom is reading the newspaper in the passenger seat, and Dad searches through static and farm reports to find a radio station while keeping the van parallel to the yellow dotted line on the road.  As we travel along Highway 4 to my grandparents’ house, the van doesn’t seem to make any progress under the vast expanse of blue sky that pushes down the tilled Nebraska prairie and flattens the wrinkles of rolling hills along the horizon.   I know we have gotten somewhere when Paul Harvey’s voice echoes from all the speakers and Dad sits back in his seat.  Mr. Harvey eventually assures us that, “Now, you know the rest of the story” and signs off with, “GOOD day!” before retreating back into static.

One day at the office a co-worker asks if I am familiar with polka music.  I blink and am back in the minivan, now on our way to church with everyone in their usual seats.  In our one-stoplight town, population 2000, we can leave our house at 9:20am and get to church downtown by 9:25 (or, more realistically, 9:23-9:28am for the 9:30 Sunday school).  Seat belts are not required in town, so they rattle against the plastic door frames as Dad evasively maneuvers around potholes.  My hair is still damp from the French braid Mom assembled with a spray bottle and yellow plastic, rat-tail comb.  My opaque white tights itch, and my white patent-leather shoes squeak when they rub together.  Dad finds the only station that features a “Polka Hour” every Sunday morning and snaps his fingers in time with the downbeat.  He turns up the volume as soon as Mom rolls her eyes and my sisters and I whine about the never-ending accordion.  And then I am back at the office, conversing with my colleague.  Because the whole trip took place in the space between seconds, he doesn’t notice I’ve been gone.

“Wouldn’t you know,” I respond.  “I am.”

Places are perhaps one of the most frequent conduits for time travel.  As soon as I round the corner into the dairy section at the grocery store a few miles from my parents’ house, I find myself reliving a specific visit last fall.  Mom stopped eating seven days earlier, and three days had passed since a hospice nurse told us she had less than 24 hours left.  I check the dates on a few blue and white cottage cheese cartons and realize that these dairy products will outlast my mother.  A certain kind of sadness catches in the back of my throat when the expiration dates flash to early October 2015 and then adjust to the present.

Understand that time travel and remembrances are not the same.  Memories are malleable and tend to become shiny with the influence of nostalgia.  For instance, I remember getting up early to say goodbye to my sisters and dad on the Friday morning in August I left for college.  Mom drove the minivan and decided to stop along the way at the nearest Walmart (in a town 45 miles down the road).  She insisted on using her own money to purchase items I didn’t realize I needed, like my own hair dryer and a set of blue plastic cereal bowls.  We got to campus three hours later, signed in and unloaded an hour after that, and then ran some more errands and had lunch.  She stayed for a “Welcome Freshmen” rally where the pep band played the school song, and she admitted that, as a Kearney alumna, she had more fun singing and clapping than I did.  Those are the clearest words I remember her saying to me that day.  As hard as I try, I cannot travel back and listen to the advice she might have given me, or the good wishes, or even the mundane stuff we might have talked about over lunch.  I don’t even know if she shared any advice, or just waited patiently for me to ask in a conversation that I never started. 

Because personal time travel does not allow for changes to be made, I might never be able to travel that far back for Mom.  I recently read Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, a memoir about a young woman dealing with the early death of her mother from cancer, which ironically happened during the first few years my mom was sick.  What resonates the most from her book is the idea that we not only grieve the loss of a loved one, but also our identity when we were with them.  All the people we meet “after” will know a slightly different version of who we used to be.  Perhaps this is why visiting Mom before she began forgetting is almost impossible; she would not recognize the woman I have become.

For all my attempts to find Mom in the past, I am very aware that time travel is also cruel.  One minute I am at the office, answering emails and formatting Word documents, and then I am in my mother’s room at the Memory Unit.  When she stops walking, I fold a few origami butterflies from old page-a-day calendar pages, and they make Mom smile.  I stick them to the wall so she can look at them from her bed.  Suddenly, dozens of butterflies swarm from the floor to the ceiling and move toward the door.  Mom is propped up in her bed, having transformed into bones and tissue-paper skin after not eating for almost two weeks and not opening her eyes for three days.  She is buried beneath a blanket Sara made her, and the plush “kitty” is draped across her shoulders.  I hold onto her left hand, trying to keep it warm and check her pulse.  Dad sits on her right, holding her other hand.  Sara leaves the room to call her husband, and Mom’s breathing turns to quick bursts of air. McKenzie runs out of the room to get Sara, and I squeeze Mom’s hand.  Her breathing stops.  McKenzie appears in the doorway to say that she can’t find Sara.  “Look again,” I order, my voice laced with fear and panic.  “Get everyone.”  As she disappears, Mom exhales one final time.  I check her neck and wrist for any trace that her strong heart is still there, but my hands shake and I don’t trust my fingertips.  Dad still grasps Mom’s hand, and he only moves out of the way when the nurse gently pushes past him with a stethoscope.  Sara is standing next to Dad when the nurse pulls away and says, her own voice breaking, that Mom is gone.  Dad yells for Mom as his face crumbles into his hands.  Sara holds him up as he struggles to breathe.   And then I am back at my desk, mascara-tinted tears falling into my lap and yet more emails to answer.

Some trips to the Memory Unit take me to Mom a year earlier.  I have just changed her out of a shirt covered in breakfast, lunch, snack food, and drool, and into a clean blouse.  I rub Mom’s favorite lotion on her arms and face, and then spritz her with Sweet Pea body spray.  She doesn’t talk, but her eyes shine when she smells something she likes.  We used to be the same height, but now she is a head shorter than me.  As I rummage around in her closet to check her laundry, she scoots in behind me.  Unable to hold still, she shuffles next to me, and as I turn to face her, she leans her head against my chest.  Quickly recovering from this surprise, I rub her back and set my chin on her head.  I whisper that she is loved, very much.  Her fidgeting pauses, and we stand together as mother and daughter for a moment and eternity.