PILE 03: Time, travel

A million little temporal tunnels

PSA—

1. Please don’t forget about Gaza. Please keep talking about it, protesting, and urging everyone you know with any kind of power to call for: an immediate ceasefire, LOTS of humanitarian aid, and the end of U.S. military support to Israel. Tune into JVP and PYM. May the people of Gaza live.

2. Please don’t forget about COVID. It’s baaaaaack (it never left). We’re in a big surge. Within my close inner circle are: babies who can’t mask, people in active chemo, and people with Long COVID. I want them to be safe. Please mask often, and stay home when you’re sick, and test all the time! Why not! Subscribe to The Gauntlet, follow Dr. Lucky Tran. Order free tests at covid.gov!

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Preamble—

Whoopsie, I missed a month! It’s ok. This is not a job! The holidays are wild! The days are short! I’ve been falling asleep during toddler bedtime. It’s stew season. Creative energy comes in bits and bursts! Anyways, thanks for being here.

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PILE—

I know this light cone diagram is about physics, but I prefer to stay in a place of unknowning that lets me enjoy the poetry of the thing. Here/Now, Elsewhere, Hypersurface of the Present.

This is a pile of time travels I’ve undertaken recently, tunnels into past places and selves.

I’ve been in a swirl of time-feelings this winter. Nostalgia is part of it, and so is fear of change, and a growing sense of my own mortality. Places are potent and objects are powerful! I’m feeling the spatial power of memory.

I’m not talking about spatial memory, which is like, what you use to remember the way to the bus stop each morning. I’m talking about places being layered with all different ages and ferments of meaning. It is jarring to encounter the familiar; it can be consoling, or uncomfortable. Life is a million little temporal tunnels. 

Do you know about memory palaces? This one, “The Temple of Time,” was published in 1846 by educator, activist, and cartographer Emma Willard.

I don’t love time travel plot lines in books or movies or television. I get so distracted poking holes in the premise, I can’t lean into it. I want to know what happens to the age of your organs when you travel through time, why doesn’t your hair grow super fast. Are you traveling THROUGH time, or INTO time, or OUT of time? Is it a wrinkle in time, or a dilation, or a fold? How can Picard just go on living aboard the Enterprise after having an entire other family and decades of another life on Kataan? How can he survive the heartbreak?!¹ I become stuck in my bewilderment. Don’t recommend time travel books to me, or please do, because maybe I just need a good one.²

Even if you are neutral about Star Trek, I ask you to consider the episode “The Inner Light.”

I went to Oregon for Christmas, to a place that feels like home: the house my dad lives in, where he and my mom moved during my first year of college, half hour outside of the town I went to high school in. The property that was my mom’s return to the rural life she grew up in, after years of urban living. All of her Country Living magazine dreams come true. I lived there for one summer in college, and it’s the address I put on my drivers license during that phase of life when I moved once a year. Home, in a way.

Sabrina (or Ruthie?) in the field. She is pregnant, perhaps with triplets.

My partner and child and I traveled north on an Amtrak train, in a very small space called a roomette, which is a cute way of saying “This is not really a room but a seat with a door.” It WAS cute, and way better than driving in bad weather for two days. Instead, we slept for nine hours, looked out the window for five hours, and we were there. Go to bed in California, wake up in Oregon. Time travel.

Have you ever seen Mount Shasta from your rocking, rumbling bed?

We went into town the day before Christmas Eve. I was having a bad time. I was hungry. The toddler broke down at the holiday market, a charming and goofy and oh-so-special indoor craft market at the fairgrounds. We stayed fifteen minutes and left quickly, without the hippy pad thai that I had been thinking about for weeks. As we drove away I remembered my dad said they’re trying to build a baseball stadium in the parking lot. My first thought was, “Where will the county fair go?” I love the county fair. I smoked weed for the first time at that county fair, that first time when you barely inhale, mostly cough, and wonder, “Do I feel it? Is this it?” Monuments to selfhood. Time travel!!! Dude, are you high?

Grandma and Mom at the county fair eleven years ago.

We had to drive to get the toddler to sleep, and the best drive I knew was out the south end of town, around a foggy butte. A dreamy, drippy, timeless mood. My French-class crush used to live up here, and so did his short, cute friend, the most famous person I went to high school with. Past the cluster of suburban mansions on the hill, down the hill past the cemetery. That’s where Jennifer lived, that’s where Paige lived. Sierra, Caitlin, Dana, Brendan, Ryan, Jordan, Kyle. Some people I’d recognize today and others I’d walk right past in the grocery store. I remember the insides of houses so clearly. Bedrooms, basements. The smells. I drove past Kelsea’s mom’s house, marveling at how big the trees are, wondering who lives there now. 485-0644. The old brick firehouse on the corner was gone and there was new housing and a food cart pod there instead. Signs of the times! Stuck in an old map, landline numbers popping into my head. Spatial time travel.

Housing is great, change is good, everything is fine.

Starving by now, baby asleep, driving through time, I whisper to my partner, “Is this what it’s like for you, every day?” (In the Bay Area, we live in the same town he went to high school in.) He explained that it dulls after a while, the memory landmines. When you encounter them everyday, they become smaller, weaker. I haven’t been back to Oregon for a while so the feelings are BIG.

The natural food store saved the day. I went inside by myself, baby and dada still driving the nap. I was so happy. I wanted to eat the whole salad bar, and the whole hot bar. Every vegan soup. This was a moment when time travel was exactly what I wanted: a hug. The sweet oatiness of the bulk bins, the cool dark of the produce room, the warm wood shelves and tight aisles. The cold bench out front where I sat and ate from the little waxed cardboard box, as I’ve done a hundred times before: my broccoli salad all mixed up with my sesame noodles and my tahini sweet potatoes, my kale salad and the warm brown rice at the bottom. Comforting time travel, the kind that sustains you, feeds you. 

Liz was at the register, and we hugged, and she cried. When I first walked in, she stared at me blankly for a moment, and then let out a huge exhale and said, “I thought you were your mom.” I’m about the same age now as my mom was when Liz met her, when she was over at our house all the time hanging out with my sister. “I’m a mom now,” I told her, my voice wavering. She hugged me again, and I cried. Bittersweet, shape-shifting, embodied time travel.

Bury me at the Sundance salad bar

The day after Christmas I called my high school English teacher to go visit, but her landline was busy all day. I had plans to see one friend but then I got sick, spent my last day in bed. I was transported to the feeling of visiting my parents during the cold, dark, depressing Oregon winter breaks during college, laying around the house because it’s too cold outside and mom is sick and there’s nothing to do. Sad, murky, stuck-in-time travel.

My dad’s shelves and closets and cupboards are wunderkammers, cabinets of curiosity, little collections of nostalgia landmines. Case in point: this freaky old Safeway-brand floss, which we most certainly moved with us from San Francisco in 1999, no doubt about it, 25-year-old floss from Safeway at the Beach. It’s like, I took a train from the Bay Area to Oregon, only to time travel *instantly* back to the Outer Richmond when I picked up this floss. 

And home now, after New Years, I pack up our windowsill of Swedish tomte, little red gnomes we lined up instead of a tree this year, with tinsel around the window and pine boughs in a vase. Made of wood and wool, collected over a lifetime by my partner’s grandmother, traveled from Göteborg to Philadelphia to California.

As I pack another box with hand-me-downs for my sister’s baby on the way, I encounter our baby quilt, soft purples and blues. My mom made in the 80s. When I send her a photo she says yes, of course she wants it, she doesn’t have anything mom made for her kid.

Time travel, back nine years to when mom died, remembering the weight of my sadness that she’d never know my children. And then just as quickly… ziiiip, back to the present moment: my life is full, I am loved, I am (mostly) present in every day (no choice—mama help, mama look). The fear I had that my life would end when she died did not come to pass. My life continues, and I grow, and look! I made new life! And this purple quilt is moving onto the next baby, just like that, the way things go. Time travel as a moving train, time travel as a quilt.

Not my email auto-reply, but one of my favorite email auto-replies of all time. Courtesy of Dr. Stone.

New Years week is some kind of time warp, sloggy weird fake time travel. My email auto-reply is on. I try to ignore the new year feeling as much as possible, to keep myself grounded in the passing of individual days, can I get some good sleep tonight?, my eye on the prize of what’s happening next week. I have this sense that if I embraced the sweeping new-calendar-year feeling too much, I’d have to confront time passing, my body aging, my baby growing into a kid. This winter I’d prefer to stay in the small-scale cadence of now, thank you. Goals are great, and plans are great, and refreshing the browser of the endless scroll of life: great. But presently? I’m trying my best to go day-by-day.

PG&E cut down this 200-year-old Douglas Fir tree in our driveway last month. My New Years aversion is really thrown into perspective when I think about tree-time. I’m reading a book about redwoods and sometimes it’s too intense for bedtime.

Is it too late to say Happy New Year? I may be a time-grinch but I like to say Happy Everything: equinox, weekend, Monday. Happy January! I will wish anyone a happy anything, because I mean it.

I wish you—and all beings—joy, and peace, and health, and safety, and love, and the opportunity to eat lunch at the Sundance salad bar in Eugene, Oregon at least once in your life. Happy New Year. May you enjoy today, may you enjoy tomorrow, and may you enjoy 1989, 2003, 2014, or 2019, if you decide to go back there anytime soon. 

Love,

Nicole

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Endnotes—

Thanks for being here for a diary-entry newsletter. I’m trying to figure out what comes next, and I’m a real sucker for external motivation: assignments, deadlines, invitations. Can you help? Collectively act as my managing editor? Invite me to prioritize one of these drafts swirling around in my notes app?

Ok those are my latest ideas. I also take suggestions! Thank you!

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Invitation—

I have a little public radio segment nestled into my friend Jeff’s morning show “Curio Cabinet,” on KWMR, West Marin Community Radio. It’s called Let’s Hear It. Each week we offer a prompt, and then stitch together your responses to air on the radio. This week the prompt is: What is the role of the artist, now?

I invite you to contribute! There are a few ways to share your thoughts: 1) Call the hotline, (415) 663-8068, extension 105, and leave a voicemail. 2) Email an audio file to programming@kwmr.org, or 3) Text or email me your audio file. You can just reply to this letter with a voice memo! They’re anonymous, unless you say your name.

Responses will air on Wednesday, January 24, between 8 and 9am. Tune in online or turn your West Marin dial. This is a special project that makes us all cry (the good kind!) over our morning coffee. Thanks!

1. It’s been pointed out to me that The Inner Light is not exactly about time travel but more about a “memory probe.” Whatever! I’m a fair-weather Star Trek fan.

2. I did like the time travel in Kindred by Octavia Butler, and I re-read A Wrinkle in Time recently, so maybe I’m not a lost cause.