*****

Hot and Cold

I once saw a Classified ad in a Portland, OR weekly newspaper that read:

WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. [Contact information and details including “You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapon. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.”]

Time and mysterious space travel are not high on my priority list. So many things could go wrong. I like air, but I don’t want my disparate cells to become part of it…at least not right now. But there is a place I would like to go that requires taking a risk.

I only have a few memories of my father. One time I crawled into the bathroom of our late 1950s model mobile home (in which privacy was not an optional amenity like upgraded kitchen cabinetry, even if we could have afforded it) while he was sitting on the toilet. He told me to go away. I turned my cloth-diapered butt around and did as I was told. That’s the kind of girl I’ve always been—obedient, not diapered.

No. That was Bunnum. The story about being in the truck with Tina. Another memory involved a rousing game of “hot and cold.” I sat on my daddy’s big lap (he was 6’4”) and searched all over his torso, neck and head for the piece of plastic fence from a farm set he said he hid somewhere on his body. We both laughed as he guided me with “getting hotter” or “getting colder” hints. If I found the plastic treasure, he must have cheated and showed me because I was either three years old or had just turned four and my sense of direction hadn’t blossomed yet. It’s still rather iffy.

If I could be hurled in time to a specific place, it would be to that trailer when my daddy was alive and in a really good mood—not drunk, surly, and planning to kill himself. I would take pictures in my mind of each room in that small trailer with its hollow doors and tin walls, the yard I played in, and the clothes I wore. I would gather all the happy memories I could of my father, a man I only know through mostly unsavory stories other people have told me about him and precious few mediocre black-and-white pictures taken from too far away. I might even tell my daddy that I love him, even if I might not understand exactly what love is. He died when I was four. Four-year-olds, at least this one, hang on to deep-seated, often confusing, feelings much better than they hang on to crisp visual memories.

Going back to that trailer, to that time, might settle some business that’s remained unresolved for over ty years. The trip would be worth scrambling my cells to transport me through time and space.