DING! I’M IN the eighth grade, the editor of the Frick Junior High School Banner (Go, Bobcats!), watching Mrs. Kaye, the journalism teacher, type out my “Welcome, Scrubs!” column on the ditto master that would become 350 copies of the school paper, a volume read by at least forty students. I was busting with pride at seeing my first ever byline in a published newspaper…
DING! I’M IN high school now, the old campus of Logan High, on the upper floor of a building that was not earthquake safe (never felt a shudder) in a room that was meant for one subject only—Typing, levels 1, 2, and 3, for kids wanting to be professional office secretaries. Nothing but desks and indestructible typewriters overseen by a teacher so disinterested in his/her charges that I don’t recall seeing our instructor. Someone put a record on a phonograph and we pecked at whatever letter was called out. One semester of Typing 1 was all I needed before volunteering for the audiovisual crew. Instead of being in a classroom, I roamed the halls of Logan, delivering movie projectors and threading up the films for teachers who didn’t know how. So I never learned the many formats of business letters or what the heck a “salutation” is. I would have made a lousy secretary. Anyhow, I’ve been typing ever since…
DING! IT IS 2:00 a.m. in my dorm room at Wardell-Pierce College, and I’m pounding out a paper (due in eight hours) for a rhetoric class—and yes, there was such a subject. My title was “Comparative Criticism in Sports Reporting: Baseball/Track,” chosen because I was a sports reporter for the Wardell-Pierce Pioneer and that week I had covered both a ball game and a track meet. My roommate, Don Gammelgaard, was trying to sleep, but I was on a deadline. And because it was raining there was no way I was going to tramp all the way across the quad to the Student Service Building. As I recall, I aced Rhetoric.*
DING! I’M AT a so-called desk in the so-called office of the Greensheet Give-Away, the free shoppers’ guide that once provided the Tri-Cities with oodles of coupons, advertisements, and, in the back pages, local-interest stories where regular folks could see their names in print. I was crafting a piece on a dog show just held at the old Civic Auditorium—my pay was fifteen bucks!—when the most beautiful woman who ever started a conversation with me walked by and said, “You type fast.” She was right, and since I was the fast type, I wooed her, wed her, and have been her main squeeze for over forty years.
THAT SAME DISH of American Womanhood brought me back from back in time when she came into the kitchen, telling me to move that typewriter and set the table for dinner. The grandchildren were coming over and it was going to be Make Your Own Taco Night, so a mess was due. The Underwood has powers unexplained, a vehicle for my dreams, so I locked it back into its case and carried it to a shelf in my home office, pronto. At night I think it glows in the dark…
* Note: A check of transcripts shows I got a B minus in Rhetoric at W-P. My mistake…
The Past Is Important to Us
Because his plane was getting a new designer interior installed, J.J. Cox was hitching a ride to New York on Bert Allenberry’s WhisperJet ViewLiner.
“I thought you were a smart man, Bert!” J.J. was yelling at his friend.
They’d known each other since they were twenty-year-old college kids, drivers for FedEx, full of moxie and spunk—their two heads bursting with ideas. They pooled their paychecks to rent a windowless garage on the outskirts of Salina, Kansas, which became their live-in workshop. After three and a half years of working 120-hour weeks, they’d come up with a prototype of the Shuffle-Access Digital Valve-Relay. They might as well have invented fire. Thirty years and $756 billion later, J.J. was just now learning that Bert had paid $6 million a pop to some outfit called Chronometric Adventures for—get this—time travel vacations. No, no, no!
Cindee, the fourth and youngest ever Mrs. Allenberry, was clearing the lunch china herself. She was well practiced at the chore, since she had been the flight attendant on the plane just a year ago. She had to work fast as there were but minutes before landing. Two problems with the ViewLiner: speed and vertigo. The flights from Salina to New York City took only sixty-four minutes, barely enough time to lick your fingers clean of BBQ ribs. The transparent floor and ultrawide windows made for a nail-biter of a flight, especially if you were afraid of heights.
“I thought they had dosed us with some narcotic,” Cindee called out from the plane’s galley. “You wake up with a terrible headache and the room looks all different. Then you conk right back out and sleep for hours.”
J.J. could not believe what he was hearing. “Let’s figure out this scam. You go into a room, you fall asleep and wake up when?”
“Nineteen thirty-nine,” Bert chirped.
“Of course you do.” J.J. smirked. “But then you pass out, wake up again in 1939.”
“Right there in the City. In a hotel on Eighth Avenue.” Bert was looking down through the fuselage. Pennsylvania was becoming New Jersey. “Room 1114.”
“And you spend the day sitting in a hotel room?” J.J. wanted to slap his own head, as well as some sense into that of his friend and partner.
“Everything looks real,” Cindee continued as she returned to her seat to buckle up for landing. “You can touch things. You can eat and drink. And smell. The men wear stinky hair oil and the women use too much makeup and everyone smokes. And their teeth! Crooked and stained.”
“Roasted coffee is in the air.” Bert was smiling. “From a factory in New Jersey.”
“You woke up in 1939,” J.J. said. “And smelled the coffee.”
“Then Cindee took me to the World’s Fair,” Bert said. “For my birthday. We had VIP passes.”
“It was a surprise.” Cindee shot her husband a smile and took his hand in hers. “The Big Six-Oh only comes once.”
J.J. had a question. “Why not go back in time to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence or Jesus on the cross?”
“You can only go to 1939,” Bert explained. “June 8, 1939. Chronometric Adventures has a franchise in Cleveland. You can go to 1927 and see Babe Ruth hit a home run, but I’m not a baseball fan.”
“Babe Ruth. In Cleveland.” J.J. nearly spit. “Jesus on the cross.”
“He’s gone back four times without me,” Cindee said. “I’d had enough of everyone thinking we were father and daughter.”
“I’m going again tomorrow.” Bert smiled at the thought.
J.J. was laughing now. “Thirty-six million dollars! Bert, for half that I’ll arrange for you to meet Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and do the naked limbo. You’ll just have to trust me on how I make it happen.”
“My husband would live in 1939,” Cindee said. “But he can only stay twenty-two hours.”
“Why only twenty-two hours?” J.J. asked.
Bert told him why. “Wavelength in the Time-Space Continuum is finite. You can ride the echo only so long.”
“They provide this money made of paper and old-fashioned coins,” Cindee said. “I bought a tiny, gold-plated space needle and globe.”