The Marvel movies may have spelled the death of time travel in popular culture, but for me its most successful use, most memorable use, nay, most unsettling use, was in Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” back in 1995. Near the end, James Cole, just a boy, witnesses his adult self, played by Bruce Willis, being shot dead by airport police, which allows David Morse as an eco-terrorist named Dr. Peters to board a plane with a vial of virus that pretty much kills off humanity.
The sensation of walking where once trod a younger self came upon me outside T. Anthony’s, a pizzeria relatively unchanged since I last saw it, in 1989, on Commonwealth Avenue, in the midst of the glass, stone, and concrete sprawl of the Boston University campus, just a few doors down from my old apartment — literally old, with beautiful scissor-folding elevator gates and all the rest. We were in town to catch our eldest daughter at B.U.’s elite David Hemery Valentine Invitational track meet over the weekend.
If I could’ve made like Bruce Willis and intervened with my young self for a moment, my open hand would’ve landed hard across his unlined face, communicating the folly of blowing the opportunity of a B.U. education. You can’t rush maturity, but dropping out sure looks like rank stupidity now, even if I did go on to graduate later at age 26 from a small Midwestern college.
A sudden fist to the solar plexus would impart that just a year or two in crummy, low-paying jobs would suffice in lessons learned, not seven straight years of it.
To wit, at The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a grim, gray place stuck in the 1970s where I did not work in the editorial department but where they had their own Rube Goldberg of a printing press taking up two stories, I once walked past a disconcertingly large pool of blood on the linoleum beneath the conveyor belt rollers next to a machine that pinched newspapers and bundled them tight with plastic straps.
Thought: Do bad jobs draw bad people, or do bad jobs make them that way?
At a boat parts packaging plant in Bellingham, Wash., at cleanup time a co-worker politely declined to sweep the factory floor’s detritus into the dustpan I was holding as I kneeled to help out because she felt it would be disrespectful. Lesson: These people deserve better than this.
And then I was snapped back to the present, in a full circle kind of way, when my daughter told me that she and some of her college teammates had in fact dined on mounds of pasta from T. Anthony’s the night before. Having children tends to ease the pain of mistakes, does it not? Tends to justify even the most tenuous existence. Particularly when a child is not willfully screwing up, but striving and achieving.
Because that’s the funny thing about time. It’s here and then it’s not.