FEBRUARY 16, 2025 – Anyone who has looked at a photograph or read a text or a letter has experienced to a lesser or greater degree, the effect of a time machine. On occasion, however, a picture or missive from your ancient past bursts forth upon the present, grabs you by the collar and yanks you into the fog of memory. As you travel back in time, the fog clears. You are seized by long-forgotten joys that along the winding path of life have now caught up to you. Revived, they color everything you’ve experienced since, providing new meaning to the course over which you’ve walked, run, crawled, raced, stumbled—and in all events, traveled.
The only way you can experience a time machine in this fashion is to reach a certain age and peer over your shoulder. At most earlier stages of life, your sights were trained on the future—a desired path of education, livelihood, family, and the progression of stages within each of those realms. Rarely did you have the time, need or inclination to turn the senses like radar dishes on your relatively myopic past.
Some old folks are mired in the past. They are not aboard a time machine, however, from which the past can be viewed at various levels, through multiple dimensions that provide dynamic perspectives. Instead, these people shuffle around in the past as if it were a museum where affixed to the walls are static displays of still life memories confined to overly embellished frames.
But if you’re not yet ossified by confining attitudes and if by some random cosmic design certain stars line up at the exact place and time where your gaze just happens to be trained, BAM! . . .
An honest-to-goodness time machine pulls up to your feet. You’re enticed aboard (“grabbed by the collar”) and offered a plushly upholstered seat. The hovering contraption is equipped with an automatic transmission and the gear settings, “Park,” “Past,” “Back to the Future – Slow” and “Back to the Future – Fast.” The shifter is a golden scepter topped with a knob bejeweled. Before you can complete the thought that maybe you’re hallucinating, the scepter shifts on its own to “Past.” The time machine rises six feet off the ground and does a one-eighty. You’re now looking over your shoulder without the need of twisting your head. You peer into the fog whence you’ve lived. An instant later you land deep in your past.
Last Tuesday, February 11, I experienced the very phenomenon I’ve just described. By cosmic coincidence, the time machine landed on that exact date—44 years ago.
Before I proceed any further, I must provide a bit of context . . .
First, a few readers might remember the 115-part blog series I commenced on January 26, 2022 with “A Son’s Remorse” and concluded with “Full Circle” on May 20 of that year—an account of my “Grand Odyssey” round the globe from February 18 to December 4, 1981. Upon posting the final chapter of that series, I thought I’d closed the book on my account of that footloose phase of life. I could then (late May 2022) prepare for what lay ahead, originally the very next month (later postponed till late August): a stem cell transplant to suppress the multiple myeloma that had stalked me for a year or so before ambushing me in December of 2021—40 years after my return from the rest of the world.
Second, earlier this month I received an email from my California cousin Russ (more precisely, my second cousin—the son of my one of my dad’s three American first cousins). Among some old papers of his late mother and two uncles, Russ had recently uncovered a cache of letters addressed to me, c/o his uncles. The letters dated from the week that the uncles had accommodated me at their home in Cupertino—the week immediately preceding my departure on the “Grand Odyssey.” San Francisco was my springboard by way of a PanAm flight to Auckland via Honolulu and Fiji.
On February 11 the packet of four letters, neatly wrapped and posted by Russ, arrived at our house. With the same great care and deliberation that he had deployed in packaging them, I applied to their un-packaging.
As if on the seat of a time machine, I sat down in our reading room, splashed in sunshine undiminished by the bitter cold outside. Each of the letters and its envelope were perfectly preserved. I gently handled the top one, then the next, then the third, and finally the last, as if I were a museum curator examining rare additions to a special collection.
By some divine force guiding Russ’s hand, the missives had arranged themselves in exactly the order in which they were meant to be read—and in which I would have chosen had they been ordered differently. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
