No Wayback

I suspect every one of us has at one time or another, imagined how great it would be to be able to go back…or forward…in time, which is why time travel has been such fertile soil for fiction. (And we are going to stick to imaginary or fictional time travel for this missive, as you’d need someone much smarter than me to write intelligently about that subject and about if, sometime in the future, travelling through time might become a reality. Might. In the future. Because we all should {should, because some folks actually believe the freaking planet is flat) know that, at the moment, time travel is not possible.) But I digress.

Fictional time travel. As I suspect you have, I’ve read many stories about same, including Ray Bradbury’s excellent “A Sound of Thunder”. But the story that sticks with me the most isn’t that one. It’s a talewe read in class and the mists of time cover both the author and the title of the story. But, several decades on, I still remember just about everything else very, very well.

The tale revolved around an adult woman who was unhappy in her current life, so she took advantage of an opportunity to return to her childhood to relive a single day. For reasons those mists cover, she did not choose an extremely significant or “big” day, just one that was a little out of the ordinary, one of her childhood birthdays. And, unlike the characters in the Bradbury storywho had freedom of action but were sternly warned of actions they dare not take, the adult woman would have none. She could change nothing, do nothing differently. She could only relive the day exactly as it happened. And, as I’m sure many of us would, she jumped at the chance.

Initially, things went very well. The woman, now a girl, was overwhelmed with the sights and sounds and smells of a typical morning in her childhood, basking in both things she remembered well and little details she’d forgotten. It was all so special. And, slowly, that became the problem. Because, while the woman-turned-girl was thoroughly enjoying everything about this childhood morning, the people around her were not.

Oh, nobody was upset or anything. It’s just that the girl’s parents and siblings were simply going about their normal morning routine, and their minds were mostly elsewhere. They were thinking and talking about what the day would hold, what they needed to get done, what came next, all while being only sort of present for what was happening right now.

Soon, the woman-turned-girl was miserable. Only she could see how special this all was, how soon it would all be over, and how much everyone would miss it. She could see it. But she couldn’t communicate it. The others? They couldn’t see it because they were in it. It was a day much like any other to them, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing of import. By the time the story came to its conclusion, the protagonist was in tears, realizing the whole thing had been a mistake, that she’d have been better off just remembering the wonderful days of her childhood rather than attempting to reexperience them.

As you might imagine, since you already know that I remember this story several decades on, I picked up what the author was laying down, so to speak. And biggest theme here wasn’t quite as simple as “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”. It was deeper than that, more about the condition of the modern human and our tendency, caused by our busy lives with tons of external stimuli, to not be where we are, not fully engage in experiences. It’s a theme that’s become even more relevant as the years have gone on, of course. But there’s much more at work in this tale.

The story is also an examination of our propensity to romanticize the past. We’ve discussed same in this space previously, talking about how we often shine up our memories of bygone days, focusing on the great stuff while forgetting all about the bad. And that leads me to a story of my own.

Many of us are fortunate enough to have lots of conversations with our parents during our lifetimes. And, if you’re very lucky, those conversations get deeper as the years go on. And, if you’re even luckier, you get to learn a lot about your parents, not just as parents, but as people.

In her later years, I had a lot of those kinds of conversations with Mom. We’d be sitting in chairs with her TV on but muted talking about everything and anything, current events, what was happening around the town or the neighborhood or with family or friends, things like that. And we’d swap old stories, too. It was one of those stories that led to a question I’d been meaning to ask for decades.

Mom was talking about her teen years back in the 50s and a very good friend she used to have. Mom talked about that friend a lot, but all the stories revolved around their teen years together. There was nothing after that. So, one day, after meaning to do so for many, many years, I asked Mom what ever happened to that old friend. Mom smiled sadly and explained that she’d been killed in a car accident when they were teenagers, and that the accident happened the day after Mom and her old friend had had a big fight and vowed never to talk to one another again.

Why Mom had never mentioned that in any of the stories she’d told about the adventures the two friends had back in the 50s, I’ll never know. I didn’t ask. But it’s what Mom said next that’s germane to this missive. “You know,” she said, shaking her head and smiling, “If I could go back to the fifties, I would.” She stopped for a minute, and then said, “It was just a simpler time.”

At that point it was clear that Mom had forgotten who she was talking to. I have a degree in history and shelves and a Kindle full of books on the subject. I know the fifties were not a simpler time, nor were they a better time. And, on sober reflection, Mom would have admitted that, too. But that wasn’t the point.

The point was, the fifties were a simpler time in Mom’s life, a good time in her life. And what she missed wasn’t the fifties, it was her school days and the things she did back then, and, most of all, the people she used to do those things with, people who, in many cases, weren’t around anymore. So, yes, Mom was romanticizing history, longing for a simpler time that didn’t exist, wishing, like the woman in our story, that she could go back and do it all again. Even though, if she’d been able to do that, she would have almost certainly ended up just like the protagonist in the tale from my own school days.

And that brings us back to the first sentence of this blog. We’ve all felt the way Mom felt that Saturday afternoon when we were discussing her old school friend and what they did back in the 50s. Something brings back a memory, and we wistfully wish we could go back and do all that again, go back and hang out with those people again. And if you’ve read this blog, you know I’m as guilty of those sentiments as anyone…with one caveat. I know it’s better that we can only remember. And I also know it’s impossible to ever “go back”.

And now we’re getting into the real meat of this blog. Yeah. 1300 words in. Again. You can’t sue me. The kind of thing I do here, talking nostalgia, the kind of thing Mom and I did during those conversations in front of her TV, that’s harmless. It’s enjoyable reminiscing that’s not hurting anyone. But that longing to return to another time is, like all emotions, something that can be played upon, and often is.

You hear it all the time. “We need to get back to…” “We need to go back to the days when…” Now, to be fair, the folks saying this stuff don’t mean that we should literally go back, only that we should try to figuratively turn back the clock to a time when things were different. The problem is, those folks are either stupid or disingenuous, and I’m not sure what’s worse.

Anyone with any intelligence knows there’s no “getting back to” or “going back to the days when”. Because all of that is gone. And what’s changed is not just the single thing or the few things you’d like to return to the way they used to be. It’s literally everything else. Everything.And, while you wouldn’t need to reverse all those changes to effect the change you want, you’d have to, in every case, undo some things that are absolutely not going to be undone. In every case.

Here’s just one example. My generation remembers the heyday of Saturday morning cartoons, which we’ve discussed tangentially previously in this space and will, likely, address in further detail later. And, as special as that time was…and it was special, it’s never coming back. Why? Because kids don’t have to wait all week for Saturday morning to watch cartoons anymore. And, they haven’t for a long time.

There’s no point in listing all the changes that have occurred over the decades to give kids more options for entertainment in general and, specifically, the entertainment that used to be offered only on Saturday mornings by the then-three television networks. Because none of those changes are the point. The point is, none of those changes can be reversed and all of them would have to be to “get back to” a reality in which Saturday morning cartoons would make sense again. And, again, this is going to be the case any time you attempt to “get back to” or “go back to the days when”. Not some of the time. Not most of the time. Every single time.

Change is constant. And there’s only going forward. There’s no going back. The good news is, if you recognize that, if you accept that, you can spend your efforts trying to shape change in favorable ways. Fail to accept said inevitability, however, and you are fated to repeat the mistakes of the unhappy woman in the story, doomed to find out that, as much as we’d sometimes like to go back, we can’t. Not really. Because what happened happened. And, what happened since happened, too. There’s no changing any of it. And, those who suggest we try to do that are only distracting us from doing the one thing we can do, try to change the future.