Time Travel

 I met Archie one summer when we were both enjoying the break between the second and third grades. My family and I had just moved into a house in Palo Alto and as I explored the field behind our back yard I found him and his little sister in a tree. Now, just 63 years later, we are still friends, even though we communicate only by email, mostly, and neither of us climbs trees. Or, I should say, could climb a tree if we had to. 

Because of the prolonged time span of our friendship, the subject of time travel sometimes comes up in our correspondence. Stuff like, I bet we would have appreciated it if one of us could use a time machine to get our 1958 selves a couple of 21st Century skate boards. All we had were boards. With skates nailed to them. I'm saying what we did was use our then current mastery of technology to take perfectly good skate and make them worse, as well as more dangerous. 

But I digress. At some point we lusted after the brand new 1959 Chevy with the really cool tail fins, and hoped (in vain) that someone would make a wrong turn and drive one down our cul-de-sac.  Never happened, by the way. Recently in an email one of us wondered what our child selves would think of the decidedly spacecraft-like configuration of most cars today. I think we would have dug them. 

The 1959 Chevrolet Impala

And on and on. Point is, we dreamed up some good uses for a time machine. I still wonder. I think it would be great to actually witness some so-called historical events.  Would it not be fun to worm your way toward the front row and listen to President Lincoln deliver his Gettysburg address? Or, more practically, visit a musical instrument store in 1957 and buy up some new and used Fender electric guitars, or the odd pre-war Martin acoustic, maybe a couple of Guilds? One rather elaborate fantasy has me purchasing a stable of now-rare cars from a Fifties car dealer, preserve and store them in a warehouse with a long term lease made out in my name; it would be fun to have them now, not to mention quite lucrative to sell them off to collectors. 

I would ask anybody reading, what would you do? 

But the thought I had that stimulated this post was it never occurred to me to travel to the future. It's always the past I want to visit, or re-visit, if you will. And the idea that, for the most part, Archie and my childhood selves would actually find little use for 21st Century stuff. Except maybe the skateboards.