Time Travel

My brother, Woody, me, and my cousin, Sandy 1965

Time travel can be a state of mind.  Memories are alive, vivid, and fluid in our brains.    To travel back in time, we only need a trigger.   A flash of lightning, the wail of a siren, the soft mewing of a kitten,  or even a simple aroma can transport us and transcend us into the living world of memory.

Crack open the lid on a Play-Doh can, close your eyes, inhale, and you’re four years old again.  It works just like Dorothy’s ruby slippers minus the flying monkeys and the scrappy yapper dog.  Sorry, Toto.  Your mind’s eye starts watching you roll snakes and flatten pancakes.  You smile, flooded with recollection.

I spy the school supply shelves in a five and dime, look both ways, and sneak open a box of crayons.  Just because I’m tricky I can.  One whiff and magically I’m in Mrs. Greade’s  first grade class, adding the big box of 64 Crayola crayons to my Christmas wish list, careful to list the crayons under the first thing on my list, a  two wheeler.

I need the 64 count box because it has the sharpener in the back.  In the new year I’ll spend snowbound winter afternoons working with the prism blues, reds, and yellow discards–the captured, scrolled crayon shavings.   Molten artwork   masterpieces cover Mommy’s Frigidaire, created by melting and pressing these squirrley-curly scraps between two sheets of waxed paper with a warm iron and some elbow grease.  In my tween years I’ll advance to melting whole, peeled crayons, the junky ones, under a candle flame and dropping the heavy colored drops into peace-love-and-rock-and-roll designs whose sole purpose is my self expression and self pleasure.

Forget Calgon Bath Beads, lilacs take me away every time.  A mild  breeze, the buzz of a bouncing bumble, lifting my face up to absorb the first hot sun rays, all lead up to a trigger:  blooming purple lilacs.  One rush of their French perfume and I’m back in my grandma’s backyard, horsing around with my cousins and waiting for Grandpa to finish churning the crank on his bucket of vanilla bean ice cream.  My grandma is cleaning up from frying chicken legs in an electric skillet and serving up some potato salad.

Who needs a DeLorean  when there is line-dried laundry?  My mind’s eye can see strings of sun kissed bed sheets that snap, crackle and pop in the wind  stretched out beside pinned up bath towels so stiff you could sand the fur right off a dog, and blue jeans standing on their own volition.  I’m so small I can run under the sheets and smack them with arms splayed out overhead.  I hear the ch-ch-ch-ch of a rotary sprinkler head in the neighbor’s yard and then I see an enormous white belly fill the sky (and my eyes)  so close you could touch it, as an airplane zooms just above our rooftops, reaching and climbing into the clouds while window panes rattle for blocks all around and I cover my ears until it vanishes.  Midway Airport, Chicago, 63rd & Cicero, White Castles on the corner…I’m there!

Time travel is as easy when you put your mind to it…a bucket of fresh popped popcorn or being overwhelmed by the strength of a peeled orange and off I go… off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz.