Time Travel and the Promise That Made it Happen

Have you ever wanted to talk to a time traveler?  What would you ask him? Despite Dr. Brown's repeated warnings, would you risk the space-time continuum? Would you want to visit yourself and see what you've become or give a younger you advice and maybe the winner of the next few sporting events in Vegas? I have and still do, but it wasn't the conversation or the reaction I was expecting.

Twenty years ago, I wrote myself a letter. I had a week to write it, so I woke up at 6AM the morning it was due and typed out the required page, double spaced with the largest allowed font size, on our brand new 486 computer. The dot matrix printer whined as the step feeder clicked a quarter line at a time. Hot off the printer, I tore off the sheet of ready to read dreams, stuffed it in a self addressed stamped envelope, and walked out to the waiting bus. I had done the minimum required. I didn't care or know what the stamp was for.

The letter was a strange mix of what I knew from home, a family that was still together, and the best paying job I could think of (which was the best paying job in the board game LIFE), being a doctor. Three boys seemed to work in my world of two brothers, so that's what I wanted. I liked my hometown, so I would move back after college. My letter-wife was more of an "of course" than a partner, friend, and certainly not a lover. I knew I would have a house, but had no idea what a mortgage was.

Dickens made his living by showing the terrible lives of others and their children. I had the idyllic childhood. My parents still kissed in public, fought behind closed doors, cooked every dinner at home, and we ate together with a fork, knife, and spoon at every meal, including pizza. I had acres of woods to roam in, no idea what 24/7 TV was, and friends I could call to come over any week-end. I lost track of what day of the week it was during summer breaks. Sunday was the only definable day in a whir of frivolity. I could have saved time that morning twenty years ago and simply wrote, "I want what I already have."    

But, all dreams must end and mine ended abruptly. Somewhere during my senior year, my parents shifted back from superhuman to being merely human. Their hard worked facade cracked under the weight of a soon to be empty nest and Dad's graduate school. Then it shattered with a quick divorce after my graduation from high-school.  I didn't know how to cope. I left the country and started running.

Between Japan, working summer camps, and college, I didn't spend more than a weekend home again for over six months.  At college, I joined Campus Crusade to jump around on Thursdays and joined the worship team for a smaller Christian Bible study to feel connected on Tuesdays. On the phone and at home, I devoted almost every waking moment to my high-school girlfriend. She was the glue that kept me coming back to Mansfield, back to home, but even her sweet touch couldn't keep my feet from running from the new reality at home.

When I came home for Christmas break, I had a letter waiting for me. As promised all those years before, a self-addressed stamped envelope from the past was waiting on the living room table, waiting to reminisce, waiting to remind, waiting for an accounting and an answer. Like a gunshot in the night, it stopped me in my tracks.

The paper time traveler wanted to tell me something and all I could do was cry. In three or four small paragraphs in large print, it confirmed for me the loss I had felt and yet couldn't pin down, couldn't remember how to put into words, couldn't recall as the broken ideal I had believed to the point of unspoken and forgotten truth. It allowed me to grieve and know what I was grieving for. I cried tears of remembrance, tears of regret... and, once out, tears of thankfulness, because it also reminded me of what I had had. It gave me a goal for my children as they grew up, albeit with a different ending.

In all the fog of divorce and broken dreams and ideals, a fifteen year-old boy walked me back into the dream he had come so far through space and time to remind me of. He was a procrastinator and a bit of a rule stretcher, but he could articulate his life with passion and conviction even if it was a bit naive. As a thirty-four year old, I have just begun to appreciate how significant that moment was and how you truly can meet wandering time travelers who will change your life and of the teacher's promise that made it possible.