I’ve developed a theory in the last few years about time travel. I don’t know if we’ll ever actually be able to do it in the physical sense: but I believe that in our memories and in our dreams it is always possible.
This is especially relevant as I return to California and to the town where I was born. Here, I have a present in which I’m renewing old friendships, making new ones, writing about events of the day, researching a book, and helping my aging parents.
In this place, I also have a past in which I can travel. Here, my teenage boyfriend and I had our first halting kiss. Here, I rode my bike to my friend Keith’s house after his mother died. Here, my Dad, my sister and I spent Saturdays in the yard, Dad always mowing and raking and hammering and Kimmie and I catching lizards and swinging on the backyard swing. Here my friend Leslie and I took the train to San Francisco for our first solo shopping trip. I loved the dress she bought: a green paisley print with a tiny belted waist. San Francisco Giants games with Dad, high school proms, kindergarten nap time. And it is all steeped in the perfume of Blenheim apricot trees on the summer wind. I can see and hear and catch the scent of all of it still.
At my high school reunion last summer I met a boy--well a man actually, but he seemed a boy to me--whom I’d gone to school with for a dozen years long ago but had never known. We went to dinner one night and he pointed to a building on the Stanford University property as we drove by. “I was born in Palo Alto hospital right there,” he said. “Not the Stanford Medical Center. That big building there used to be the city hospital.” “Yes I know,” I said. “I was born there the same year you were.”
I can see the future here too. But when I travel there my dreams are secret and evaporate if I speak or write of them.
In Florida I lived entirely in the present. I liked it there: don’t get me wrong. But I had come there to work and then I just stayed, a clear example of Newton's First Law at work: an object at rest tends to stay at rest. The time travels I made there were about other lives and took the form of history research and writing. That way I developed a past to travel in, but it was not my own.
Yesterday, my father was having a cranky moment. His weekend caregivers are often strangers to him and their otherness sometimes combines with his disease to make him angry and agitated. He gets discouraged that he needs so much help. His identity was always based on the many impossible things he could do for my mother.
“I’m just no good anymore,” he said as we sat down to lunch. He is deaf now, so we have to write our conversations with him.
“We love you Dad ... Mom and Kim and I, and we need you,” I wrote. “Please smile and be happy. I love you so much, I’m moving here because of you.”
His eyesight and his reading comprehension are very bad these days and he read what I wrote very slowly. Then he looked up.
“I hope that’s not true, because I’m not going to be around very much longer."
I tsked tsked his comment. I don’t want to be without him. But I think people who are old and sick can often see with clarity what those around them do not want to see.
What he can’t know is that I’m here for completely selfish reasons. I’m making memories for the future with him now, every moment. They will give me new, much beloved, material for my time travels to come.
Robin and her father in Shoup Park, Los Altos, California 2004
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