Summer time travel

Before she died, my maternal grandmother threw out the box of family photos I used to look through on Saturday mornings as a child. And what my grandmother missed, my mother tossed before she died. I have retained a fistful of grade B Polaroids that escaped the landfill—“as the shepherd rescues from the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear” (Amos 3:12). It is, of course, sheer coincidence that I grew up 32 miles from a more sensational family breach of etiquette:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”

I returned to my hometown this summer to visit my sole remaining aunt, as I did not want to be shouting the gospel into a comatose ear on sudden notice. She had a photo (also salvaged from a graven-image-disdaining mother) and I became immediately obsessed. There was my great-grandmother, austere and flanked by nine grandchildren; I spotted my father, well-scrubbed in a Sunday shirt, tie, sweater, and Mona Lisa smile. The others are all poker-faced boys (except beaming Rita, whom I heard smiled all her life), which was the fashion of the day, along with the Wallace and Gromit floral wallpaper.

Napoleon in the upper left-hand corner will die in WWII. Just in front of him, Raymond will survive 23 bombing raids over Germany only to be felled by polio at home in 1953. Bob will wreck his family with philandering. There they stand, not knowing what’s coming, not yet having made bad choices, or perhaps in the course of forming them even as the shutter clicks. One wants to issue individual warnings: Don’t be stiff-necked. Don’t lust for money. Mind your own cistern.

If we are on a bad course, we may turn from it and get right with God before we even finish reading this.

There is something called “breaking the fourth wall,” where the play comes alive and starts talking to the audience. I heard the voices, the water lapping. It was summer. I was at the cement raft my grandfather built in the middle of the pond, cousins diving off the edges and Aunt Simone calling from the shore for lunchtime.

The impulse to return is a seductive siren: The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen), “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” and “A Stop at Willoughby” (Rod Serling). At first one is excited to go back. In Serling’s “Walking Distance” (1959), tired business executive Martin Sloan pulls into a service station near his old hometown, walks to it, and finds it is 1934. He heads to the park carousel to tell a little boy named Sloan to enjoy his childhood while it lasts, but the encounter scares the boy. His own father, a man his age, entreats him to go back where he belongs.

Martin walks back to the car and to 1959, and the episode ends with this voice-over: “Martin Sloan, age 36, vice president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. …” We could have told him so in our saner moments. For somewhere it is written, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10).

What is wise to say then? Only this: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” (Hebrews 3:7-8). And this: “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). As for the dead, “their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in what is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 9:6)

But you and I are not dead, but alive! Here, among the living, is the land of choice, sweet choice, thrilling choice. Here is the only place of actualization. If we are on a bad course, we may turn from it and get right with God before we even finish reading this column of print. Ebenezer, waking from time travel, found it so, and he rejoiced: “Yes! And the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in” (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol).

Email aseupeterson@wng.org