I love stories about Time Travel

I don't know when I first encountered stories of time travel.  I have strong memories of books like: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court and A Wrinkle in Time from very early.  My parents who did not really permit much television in our house did watch Star Trek and Dr. Who with us. 

I'm sure it wasn't just these influential texts,  I'm sure there are other reasons, but the outcome?  I have always loved time travel stories. 

And another of way of saying that is:  I've long been skeptical of the tyranny of linear time.   As a child I really thought of characters from hundreds of years before being much better friends than the people in my grade.  And my relationship with my grandparents and my parents was always magical partly because I knew that they had been my age.   That a part of them was still my age (and that a part of me was already their age).  

At one point I decided to stop wearing wrist-watches as an act of symbolic resistance against the outlandish bias of our cultural moment that is always focused on the now, the soon and the plan for the next soons after that. 

The first grandparent I lost was the one who I had felt bound to through stories of the past more than any other (though my other grandmother was a very close second).  The clock in the picture was one of the few tokens that I accepted when she cleaned out her family house and gave away her things to her children and grandchildren.   Soon after she passed, one of my very young children ripped the hands off the clock with playful glee one day and I was stunned, then horrified, then overwhelmed with grief and loss. 

And then delighted. 

My child had inadvertently transformed the tin alarm clock into a piece of sculpture that bound me to the past and the future and never the now.  An icon.

Whenever I look at it or touch it, I remember:  Everything is always happening.  

And that's what I love about time travel stories.  They're constantly reminding us of how poignantly the past is haunting us  (those last few moments from Joyce's short story THE DEAD are some of my favorite of al the stories).  They also remind us of how vital the legacies we make now may empower or undo our progeny.   And sometimes they remind us of how powerless we are in the face of something as wide and mysterious as time. 

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