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David: Halfway Back

26 years since the time drift, David gives his report

Published onMay 06, 2023
David: Halfway Back
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Part 2: David's Half Way Back Story

Chapter 7: Time Day Zero: UK version

The Flying Scotsman

David Goldin here. It’s Time Day, 1993. Jeremy wants us to write a half-time review of the new now, since it’s twenty-six years later, and half-way back to 2019. I’m happy to report that my memories of the new now are, on the main, more satisfactory than those of the first time. I guess that history, like sex, gets better with practice.

He wants us to do a first-Saturday story too. And I’m good for that.

* * *

Here goes 1967.

* * *

A British train station

Unlike those in the Americas who went to sleep in 2019 and woke up in 1967, most of Europe and Africa made the transition while awake. It was quite a morning.

As it would be, I was in Great Britain on a vacation with my parents. They were “broadening my perspective” through travel. My parents are old-time socialists, Wobblies through-and-through. Glad to see Labor back in power in the UK, they figured it was time to visit. I was seven years old and it was my first time on a jetliner. We started in Ireland and then ferried over to Scotland.

On that very Saturday, August 19th, 1967, we boarded the Flying Scotsman at Waverly Station in Edinburgh, bound for London. After a “full-fry” breakfast in the dining car, we went back to our carriage for the remainder of the six-hour ride.

I spent about a half hour walking the whole length of the train. I loved trains, still do. I wanted to be fully acquainted with this one before we hit King’s Cross.

I had returned to my seat, on the padded bench across from where my parents were seated, each of them deep into a book. We passed through Morpeth at speed. The cups of highly-sugared tea I drank at breakfast were competing with the heaviness of the meal and sway of the train as a I sat back and watched to scenery pass by.

The Northumberland landscape was uninspiring even to my seven-year-old imagination, so I dug my book out of my pack and opened it at the bookmark. I had learned how read rather early. My parents mentioned this to all their friends.

I was deep into chapter three of Have Space Suit—Will Travel, when a metric fuckton of my future-past memories arrived, uninvited.

I’ll get back to this in a minute.

My US timedrifter friends remember waking up from sleep in their teen bodies, believing this was just a vivid dream, that they were still in their sixties, and still asleep. The transition for them was gentle: a “where am I? who am I?”, half-waking, emergent process. For me, it was like the book of my life—which I was busy reading at the time—skipped from page forty-nine to page, say, fifty… thousand, in the interval it took to turn the page.

At one moment, I might have glimpsed, out the window, a goat standing in a passing field. This might spark the early childhood memory of the goat in that petting-zoo in Brooklyn. In the next moment, the same goat out the window could awaken “memories” of a herd of goats in the mountains of Turkey, of goats in a kraal in Namibia, or just the goat-curry I shared with my new wife in the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, before we went back to our room and coupled like randy bunnies. Sure, I suddenly remembered having sex. There are no filters to our memories.

Did I believe I was insane, or suffering a brain aneurism? Nope. I let it all wash over me. I remember my mind suddenly feeling… full. Like my brain was a tea cup, mostly empty until just now, and then suddenly overflowing. Since I was on a train, my thoughts turned to dozens of other train rides across several continents. I told you, I like trains.

My reverie was broken when another child, a boy somewhat older than me, sitting ahead, and on the other side of the aisle, stood suddenly and shouted, “Brexit.”

“Brexit,” I said to myself. Others spoke up. This word echoed across the carriage. I glanced about me. Kids were standing up, making eye-contact with one another.

“Brexit,” they said.

“Brexit,” I answered, and stood. The word became a chant. “Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.” Kids, from pre-school to college-age, repeated a word that had no meaning in 1967.

I understood completely.

I was not alone.

Then a girl, maybe sixteen years old, with long raven hair pulled back in ponytail, dressed in a bright orange plaid miniskirt-length boho dress and knee-high white boots, began the “stomp, stomp, clap,” signal.

“Stomp, stomp, clap.” Repeated.

A couple others joined in.

“Stomp, stomp, clap.” I grinned and joined in. We stomped and clapped until most of the kids in the carriage were involved. We all looked at the girl, who laughed and shook her head.

“We will. We will. Rock you,” she sang.

“We will. We will. Rock you,” we sang back.

Several kids, singing and clapping surged forward and into the next carriage.

I spied my parents, who had been calling my name with increasing volume over the song. They had joined a silent cadre of weirded-out older people in the carriage. This situation reminded me, anachronistically (like all my memories from that point forward) of those flash-mob, Youtube videos, where a choir shows up, emerging out of the crowd at the mall—with an orchestra, the members of which pulled out horns and violins from somewhere—and start belting out the “Ode to Joy”, to the puzzled amazement of the shoppers.

I sat back down. My Mom reached over and took my hands in hers. She tilted her head in that “you are going to tell me just what the flying fuck is going on here” look. She squeezed rather hard.

“Queen,” I said. “That’s a British rock-and-roll band from the late 1970s.”

I realized that would not help.

My parents were so young, I marveled. I don’t think I saw them at all, back when I was a kid. I glanced out the window, half expecting that the train might have left the planet. I truly did not know what to say.

“You mean, the late 50s?” my dad offered. “I’ve never heard of that one. Tell me about ‘brexit’ It sounds like a breakfast cereal.”

“You don’t remember ‘Brexit’?” I asked. They shook their heads. How could they forget Brexit? I wondered.

“How about 9/11?”

“7-Eleven is a convenience store,” Mom said.

“Bobby Kennedy?” I asked.

“Our Senator,” Dad said.

“Great, then he’s still alive.” I said. They glanced at each other, but didn’t speak.

“The Mets take the World Series?” I offered.

“In your dreams,” Mom said. “Enough with the questions.” She let go of my hands and mirrored Dad’s posture: arms crossed tightly, legs crossed loosely. Annoyance mixed with defiance.

A crowd of young folks from a rear car came through the isle singing “Tiny Dancer” on their way to the next car forward. I heard a boy, maybe five years old, say, “God, I hope the bar car is open.” At that moment, I would have given my left testicle for an ice-cold Cadillac-margarita. Make it a double. My mind flashed on my favorite night spot on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

“I didn’t say that out-loud, did I?” I asked.

“Say what?” Mom said.

“What’s that all about?” Dad asked. He gestured at the kids in the aisle.

“It’s an Elton John tune.”

“From the 50’s?” Mom asked.

“Something like that.”

“I’m not asking about the damn song,” Dad said. “Why are they singing at all?”

I remember my parents as old, and those days when I was told they had died, Dad first, from sepsis, and then Mom from her stroke. Now they’re young and strong. They even look cute together. Why aren’t they singing along?

The girl who started the Queen sing-along walked by, headed toward the rear of the train.

“Say,” I said at her, and waved.

“What?” she stopped, turned, and smiled. A generous smile. Made we wish I was sixteen. We are bound for London. I could use some real fashion. I wondered if I could talk my folks into visiting Carnaby Street. My mind was just beginning to settle into its new/old self.

“What were you,” I asked her, “I mean yesterday, um, tomorrow, whenever?”

“I ran a clothing store, Notting Hill,” she said. “You?”

“Professor. UCLA. Economic sociology.” I said. It just came out. I just remembered falling asleep in my faculty-housing condo. Last night. Today would be Labor Day, 2019. I had skipped Burning Man this year, hoping to finish my latest book before the Fall term started.

“Excuse me.” A lad, could be five or six, wearing in a plaid Madras shirt had come up the aisle and was waiting to pass by the girl.

“I’m David,” I said to the girl. “David Goldin.”

“Alice,” she said, and slid forward into the space between our benches.

“Alice, these are my parents, Saul and Anna.” I gestured. They smiled thinly at the girl. I sensed a near panic in their eyes. Alice nodded at them. She turned and walked away.

The boy in the aisle stepped up to my bench and touched my shoulder. “David Goldin, author of Money Through the Ages?”

“Guilty,” I said.

He continued. “I was in the Occupy London camp.” He raised his chin up. “Mic Check!” he called out. “We are the ninety-nine percent…”

I put my finger to my lips. He quieted.

“I need to talk with my parents here,” I said. “Can we have this conversation later on?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Coffee in the dining car? I’m Arthur. Arthur Bremmer. I teach… I taught… anthropology at King’s College, London. We met once at an eScience conference in Oxford.”

Arthur stuck out his hand and we shook. He nodded over to my folks. “That’s tough, man. I’m traveling with my older sister and we both remember everything. Turns out that you have to have been alive in 2019.” Then he was off.

I turned back to my parents.

“Who are you?” Mom said.

“What have you done to our son?” Dad said.

The seven-year old I am poked out of my fifty-nine year-old rational shell and said, “I am Mork from planet Zardoz. If you ever want to see David again you must agree to these conditions.”

They said nothing. I continued.

“David must be allowed coffee in the morning and afternoon. His room must be a temple, untouched except for, you know, changing the bedding and washing clothing. He gets to indulge in a whiskey, or a gin and tonic in the evenings, and smoke a bit of weed on the weekends. Oh, and, at some future point, he might invite a girl or two over on Saturday nights.” I had a lot of growing to do before that last part made any physical sense. Seven going on sixty was not going to be simple.

Mom rolled her eyes and wagged her head from side to side. “Skip the crap, Davey. What’s really happening?”

So I told them all I knew, or guessed, or reasoned at the time. I didn’t tell them about their deaths, except to say they lived well into their eighties. Yes, I admitted, I diddone taught at a university, several actually, over decades, and I’ve written some books. None of these accomplishments have happened yet. I joked that, this time around, I might just learn to play the drums and join a punk band. I didn’t actually figure out that the whole planet somehow slipped back in time. I was thinking we were in some parallel universe.

We had a couple hours left until we arrived at King’s Cross. I did what I could to normalize an insane situation. I’m still me, I promised. I have a lot more on my mind, or in my mind. My past will not be their future.

Mom taught English at SUNY, and figured out right away that her job just got better and worse at the same time. Dad was an editor at Knopf, so he was fascinated about all the books I’ve read that haven’t been written yet. We had a long discussion about rights to ideas from a time lost in a vanished future.

A small boy came up racing up the aisle, sniffling, with a young adult woman in chase.

“What’s the matter?” I called out.

“He doesn’t remember, and now he’s terrified,” she said as she went by.

They announced on the intercom that the streets of London had been made impassible by hundreds of accidents and abandoned vehicles. The underground was running, but taxis were problematic. The conductor went off script. He wished us all a good day, and then mentioned that, in the coming week, he planned to avoid the initial meeting with his now ex-wife.

Our hotel was a moderate walk from King’s Cross Station. The streets were a jumble of recent fender-benders and abandoned cars. Blocked-in double-decker busses, emptied of their riders, stood out like red mastodons. Their drivers loitered in the stairwells, waiting for the roads to clear. Sirens blazed. Ambulances had nowhere to pass. Medics used stretchers to carry accident victims toward help. The air was abuzz with loud conversations, with staccato shouts and cries. If ever a city needed a cell-phone network, it was London. Our hotel was ready for us. An oasis of quiet.

We had four more days before our return flight to JFK. I’m not sure we saw any of the usual tourist sights, no Tower of London or Buckingham Palace, but we watched a lot of TV news and talked into the night up in our room, with room service and a bottle of single malt. They let me sip a wee bit. I snuck some too. We learned about the time slip.

We did wander Hyde Park in the August sunshine. I had lived in London variously over the course of a couple decades, and knew the kinds of shops my parents would enjoy, lefty book stores and quirky antique dealers, so I played local guide for them. We even went up to Cambridge, punted on the Cam, and had tea in The Orchard at Grantchester. I avoided the temptation of looking up some of the Fellows I knew in the colleges. This was family time.

For me, the first week was not spent trying to believe I was seven years old again. I was always seven. What really threw me off was going to sleep and having these boring sixty-year-old, tired-ass academic dreams.

Instead of the normal anxiety nightmares about being at school and getting called on to answer a question, only to discover that I’m completely naked, I now get nightmares of teaching at college. I walk into my classroom and I discover that I’ve assigned a ten-page essay on Volume One of Foucault’s History of Sexuality to all fifty sophomores. The essays are due today. Today is Friday. My whole weekend is fucked.

I’m seven years old. I deserve better nightmares.

It isn’t just the innocence of youth I lost, but also the wonder this brings to every waking thought. Since I now had all the time in the world, I decided I would work on recapturing wonder as a my new life goal. Instead of fame and pussy. Or, maybe, along with. My career goal last year as a six-year-old was to drive a garbage truck when I grew up.

And that’s my timewarp Saturday story.

* * *

New York city scene with bridge

New York City

Let’s get to the following twenty-three years.

* * *

The first three was me being too young to do anything, too excited to stay put anywhere, and too engaged to not write everything down. And footloose in Manhattan. Mom wrangled me a semi-legit student ID from SUNY, on the promise I would lecture there twice a semester. This got me out of attending grade school. I filled dozens of notebooks with geriatric juvenile musings.

* * *

In the future/past, New York City in the 1970s was a decade-long crime wave. The homicide rate tripled from 1960. Plenty of reasons for this situation: social, economic, racial, you name it. New York was not alone, mind you. I’m writing this to note that, when a million or so New Yorkers woke up from fifty-plus years in the future, they were not going to put up with this situation again. As the movie dialog willhavesaid, “We’re too old for this shit.” Even if we can’t yet vote.

Mayor Lindsay caught an epic break. As I write, historians and sociologists are putting together the new-now story of New York. Obviously, the timedrifter contingent diddone managed to avoid being a part of the murder statistics, at least on the victim side. On the personal side—and there were a million of these—the causes and issues, the fuel and the spark for violence—were now available in advance for conversational intervention. Dysfunctional family dynamics, the sadness of future abuse and neglect, were now countered by certain knowledge of their pain and consequences.

Emotions still run wild at times. New York is still New York. We got all types here. People still disrespect and injure each other. Some people. But a whole lot of now-young New Yorkers knew precisely who—in their family, their friends, and their associates—caused them the most grief in a future they remember. This means that civility got a boost from caution and regret.

At any other time, on any given planet, you could say, “we can learn a lot about the future by studying the past.” At this moment only, I can add, “we can learn a lot about the present by studying the future.” For the most part, the last two decades have been a wellspring of better vision, better governance, and better decisions in the public sphere, and also inside homes. I know that I had a lot more conversations about my fears and my hopes with my parents in that first year back than I did in my whole future-past life.

I’m not going to chronicle a “story of New York.” I left for the coast when I was eleven and returned mainly for family events. You can visit New York yourself. Check it out. My early new-teens were with Jeremy, Sophie, and the Wellspring Coop crew.

Those years were the most fulfilling career episode of my new life. But. And it’s a big but. I always felt like I needed to keep my anthropological distance from the project. I’m not a “joiner.” This is why I got kicked out of several university faculties in the future/past.

Still, we gifted the globe with decades of yet-unbuilt technology, instead of leaving planetary technology to a gaggle of unruly Silicon Valley megadorks, making then insanely wealthy in the process.

Today, there are something like a hundred-thousand Wellspring coops world-wide, born from the model we helped invent. The Wellspring coop franchise is bigger than Macdonald’s and Starbucks combined in the future/past.

* * *

Berkeley 1975

I took the visiting sociology spot at Berkeley. The UC got funded to gather together now-young anthropology and sociology heavy hitters from the future/past. We were supposed to reinvent the social sciences. Like we could just deliver some new plateau of knowledge and understanding from our future. The problem is this: the fifty years we lost to time were more a swamp of meandering dead-end theories than a deep clear pool of accumulated insights. The best we could offer was a guided tour on how the academy got lost in the bog it created for itself.

Within months of our first orchestrated Berkeley symposium on rebooting the social sciences, we, each of us, began to spend all our spare time with our new word-processing keyboards and TV computer monitors, pounding out the books and articles we willhavewritten in the next five decades. Timedrifter scholars everywhere rushed to re-publish our future books before other academics “borrowed” our best stuff as their own.

I could not pretend to have memorized my own future/past prose. Once you write a book, you move on. Most of the research sources I diddone used to anchor my future/past arguments had not yet been republished. So, my books got slimmed down to slight volumes of essays, without references. Anthropology as philosophy. I wrote from the memories of my intentions, my recollections at the chapter level, and my current understanding. I used the same titles as before.

I called these my “consolidated” versions. They are a much better, quicker read than my originals. Five books in two years. Not bad for a nineteen-year-old. And thank you, University of California Press.

The new now is also terra incognita for sociology. We humans have no prior experience with time drifting. A billion humans had arrived back to build a society unlike any in the past on this globe. Same year, same place, same young bodies, but nothing is the same. Sociologically, it’s a lot like we had voyaged to a different planet. Nothing written before 1967 could be easily applied to today’s situation. The flip side is that we have an artificial social experiment at a planetary scale. Probably a lot to learn in the coming years.

* * *

Photo of Sophie

Sophie

Sophie followed Nimali to Sri Lanka, where they honchoed the Wellspring Coop network from their hilltop headquarters in Nuwara Eliya. She was right to go. Right for her and for them, sad for me and for us.

I believe that Sophie knew I had to be alone during this time. The Berkeley gig was all-consuming; worse than my dissertation years. Between writing seven hours a day and partying with young/old European sociologists, including LSD in the desert, I was not partner-friendly. I was also legally hook-up ready, and the Berkeley scene was more than happy to accommodate this.

When I hit twenty-two, I promised myself to give up the whole academic rat-race. But the rat handlers kept offering me better deals than I ever had before. I had promised to visit the girls in Sri Lanka, and made plans to do so each season for years. Offers of visiting professorships kept coming, and I was too self-impressed to decline.

* * *

Serandib 1979

By the time I got to Sri Lanka, Sophie and Nimali had just adopted two pre-school-age daughters, Anjali and Dayani. I arrived in Nuwara Eliya, a lovely hill station surrounded by tea plantations, together with my then-current partner, Abigail.

Abigail was a timedrifter academic with a PhD in linguistics. We had known each other, in many ways, during my future/present days in London. This time around, we had been coupling for a year, while I took a visiting job at the University of London’s School for Oriental and African Studies.

I was back in my comfort zone of becoming somewhat-in-love with a woman who really deserved more than that. Not that I demanded more from her, only that she was somewhat-in-love with me—and us being physically exclusive for the duration. I offered lively conversation, cuddling, occasional opportunities for sexual gratification, cohabitation in university housing, and my share of daily chores. I could make risotto. Reading this, it sounds like I was eighty years old, instead of twenty-five.

I’m not saying I was afraid or immune to the idea of true love. For a long time, Sophie and I were as close to that as I’d known. Seeing Sophie when they picked us up at the train station was a thrill doused in chagrin. She and Nimali were so in sync with one another, they could have been mentally conjoined. They glommed onto Abigail during the taxi ride and playfully interrogated our entire London life from her POV.

So, Sophie, I admit that my reaction is entirely too self-absorbed. Yes, it took me a few days before the dazzle of your life with Nimali became something I could marvel at, instead of mourning the end of us. When Abigail and I left, I was so happy for you both, and for your lovely daughters. No lie.

Traveling about Sri Lanka did break up my relationship with Abigail. Nothing like a vicarious experience of actual love to make our dilettante version seem dreary. Like I said, she deserved more.

Chapter 8: Mend, Don't Spend

* * *

Not even a brave new world

Sophie, I know that you’ll be writing your own story. I Just want to add here that your work with open coops in Sri Lanka is amazing. We toured coops in eight towns where locals configured Wellspring tech into regional production schemes. From housing and appliances, to bicycles and farm equipment—their supply chain remained in-country. And their commitment to open democracy was outstanding. I was impressed enough to pull myself out of the academy and back into a world of “actually doing something.” Of course, first, I had to write a book. It’s what I do.

Mend, Don’t Spend was a meditation on sharing, with a wink at Huxley’s Brave New World. In the future/past, I had visited tool libraries, and other library-of-things (LOT) in Berkeley, Vancouver, Oslo, and elsewhere. The Rebuilding Center in Portland, Oregon sold recycled plumbing and household fixtures—sinks, bathtubs, windows, doors, cabinets, electrical boxes, whatever— that had been scavenged from tear-down and remodel jobs. These were available for reuse, instead of being landfilled. Car sharing coops and maker and hacker spaces in several cities offered access to goods and services.

As Wellspring Coop membership grew, I saw an opportunity to decenter the nuclear family as a site for consumption. Capitalism used this newly atomized family unit to push the myth of ownership. Each tiny family needs their own house, and each house needs its own appliances and tools, cars and RVs, yards and swimming pools.

When you attach twenty families in a neighborhood to the same coop, then you can pool resources to centralize ownership. Everybody gets access when they need a tool, or a camper for the weekend. Buy the drill bit, but borrow the drill. Using their buying power, coops demanded better tools; tools that were more durable, repairable, and recyclable. The coop’s common sewing room not only provides machines, but also learning and conversation.

What happens when people get a universal basic income? The cynics predicted more drug use and general laziness. The optimists pointed to increased autonomy, less personal stress, and more educational opportunities. Nobody predicted that a majority of people would get really clever at stretching out their budgets to make this basic income last. And sure, some used their funds to resist full-time work, or to go back to school. Everyone enjoyed increased autonomy—the freedom to make certain life choices—and the luxury of worry-free days. Having a national health care system was another feature in this. Most folks figured out that sharing inside a community traded worry for responsibility. You didn’t need to shoulder the burden of ownership, but you were responsible for returning shared items on time and in good form. It was a value parents passed along to their kids.

Mend, Don’t Spend caught the fancy of President Sanders, who was in his first term. I had spent a fair amount of time with Bernie in the future/now. We both checked in with the same anti-capitalist movements and actions.

President Bernie created an advisory committee to promote sharing and reuse by federation agencies. He talked me into a job at the White House to work on this. I spent five years there with uneven results. Every agency was sure that “sharing” was an alibi for “budget reduction.”

Still, we did pass new federal rules on reusing plumbing and electrical appliances from federal building renovations at the General Services Administration, and we boosted state-level sharing initiatives with federal funding. This put home-resilience tool sharing trailers in several hundred small-town fire stations across the nation.

We started the federal Repair Bonus program that gives up to $200 for residents to repair electric and electronic equipment at qualified repair shops across the nation. The “right to repair” got legal footing too. States and cities ran their own repair bonus schemes for bicycles, tools, and clothing. The big win was a widespread repair-first mindset.

* * *

* * *

A city bar close up of a drink

* * *

Lis

Elisabeth Hayes and I met by chance at the bar at Clyde’s on M Street in Georgetown. It was September of 1988. The crowd was watching the presidential debates on the TV behind the bar. Bernie was up for reelection along with his VP Meryl Streep, and the Republicans had chosen Senate Minority Leader, Bob Dole, to run against him.

The VP debates had concluded last week with an expected knock-out by Streep against Bob Griese, who had been picked by Dole to bolster the Southern vote. In the new now, Meryl Streep finished Vassar and did an MBA at Stanford. She spent some years in the management side of NBC, and refused to get in front of a camera, before Bernie snagged her as his running mate. Her debate skills were not rusty. Vice President Streep knew how to dominate a conversation.

Elisabeth was alone and intent on the presidential debate. So was I. But our stools at Clyde’s bar were packed tight side-by-side and we were wedged in by a crowd of rowdy standing drinkers behind us and others sitting beside us. After a bit, we started bantering together about the debate.

Bernie was handling his side in his humble-aggressive manner. Dole brought up sex education in the schools. Bernie countered with a zinger on the dangers of sexual ignorance. “What knowledge are you trying to protect teenagers from that will not be discovered anyhow at some later time.” He gestured in his Bernie style, “and maybe that time should not be in the back seat of a parked car.”

Lis laughed. “I prefer the front seat,” she said, “the view is better.” She glanced at me. I glanced back at her. We chatted our way out of the debates into our jobs. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Shirley Hufstedler: the first female supreme court justice, a Bobbie Kennedy appointee.

Lis had done her undergrad degree at Kenyon College, and her law school at Columbia University. Yes, she was a youngling, but we were born the same year. Both twenty-eight. I avoided the conversation-stopping question that drunk timedrifters ask younglings: “So, how did you die?”

It was some time later that I discovered she diddone died on September 11, 2001. She willhavebeen a passenger on American Airlines flight 77 from Dulles Airport to LAX, the one that willhavegotten hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon. This made her future/past death a prominent feature of her childhood, as her parents brought this up on many occasions.

“How am I supposed to feel about an event that hasn’t happened yet? I’m no martyr. I just diddone booked a ticket on the wrong day. I am happy that I wasn’t on United Flight 93. Those folks deal with an absurd amount of attention for something they haven’t done yet. People call them heroes. How weird is that?”

Our meeting at Clyde’s ended with me suggesting dinner up in Adams Morgan the next night. Lis had a flat in house in Foggy Bottom. The weather was splendid, so I met her and we walked all the way up to Axum on 18th Street for Ethiopian food. As we strolled up New Hampshire, I talked about my current work in the White House. I kept quiet about future/past events and my childhood work with the Stapleton Trust. I was having a great time just being twenty-eight. Twenty-eight-year-olds don’t have a long resumé.

During dinner, she asked about my future/past. I was truthful and unassuming. I told her about being a peripatetic anthropologist, too self-indulgent to stick with any academic job that required committee work. I confessed to being bored with the burden of the memories of a future that was daily being erased by a new present. I wanted to live today, just like she did.

She had grown up in the DC area. Her dad is an Earth scientist. He worked up at Goddard Space Flight Center, back when NASA ran the Landsat program. He got moved to NASA HQ while she was in college. She knew more local restaurants than I could count. From the Alpenhof to Zachery’s, and from West African to Okinawan cuisine. She loved to dance (still does) and introduced me to her favorite DC night clubs. The Bayou was now fully a rock concert hall.

I had a tiny second floor apartment on Corcoran Street. Lis’s flat on 25th Street was twice the size and half the rent. Local knowledge is a good thing. I started hanging out there more days than not. We were a business couple: a suit and a tie for me and a suit top and a skirt for Lis. We’d wake early, dress, and breakfast on toast and coffee. I’d escort Lis to the Foggy Bottom Metro station, and then keep walking to the Executive Office Building on 17th.

Our first year together was a continuous honeymoon period. Justice Hufstedler gave her a valued “rerun” clerkship, so she had an extra year. She set her sights on working for the World Bank international legal team.

This is not the World Bank I remembered. Instead of John McNamara, Vartan Gregorian was selected to be its president in 1968. Gregorian is a timedrifter who had diddone been president of both Brown University and the Carnegie Corporation.

Most of the Bank’s future/past neoliberal, small government, open market, industrialize or go-home, unintentionally ecocidal policies have been replaced in the new now by regenerative economic practices and a focus on long-term, sustainable, increases in health and wellbeing. “Donut economics” were fundamental to its plans, even though its founder was an afterkinder. The World Bank’s auditorium was renamed in rememory of Kate Raworth.

When Bernie was reelected, my work got easier. Those agencies that had backpedaled on the White House directives for sharing and reuse during the first term now faced four more years of creative policy dodging. Some of them gave up and became active in compliance. Others, like the Pentagon, figured they could stonewall for four more years. Fortunately, as the Pentagon’s budget shrank, and they abandoned bases, these got turned over to the General Services Administration, which was solidly into Mend, Don’t Spend.

* * *

I was itching to move on.

Move on, but not away. Lis and I kept getting closer. She read a couple of my rewritten books, and I started following the public Supreme Court filings. We took long walks with serious conversations. DC is a magical place if you know it well.

The future/past 1968 DC riots didn’t happen in the new now, since Martin Luthor King, Jr. was not assassinated. He’s just back from Paris, and still preaching. In the past decade, guaranteed income and paid health insurance have cushioned the urban existence of those whose daily work makes DC run. Folks have cash in their pockets. The town is hopping.

14th Street was still a wild place in 1989, with its own red hot reputation for hookers and recreational goodies. Reported to be a dangerous neighborhood. Lis was unconcerned. She liked to dance at the Silver Dollar Saloon, and, with some coaxing, taught me to line dance with her.

This is all an introduction to what happened that day in October.

* * *

Late Friday, before Halloween

I got to her flat an hour late that day, due to a longer than expected meeting with Vice President Streep. I could hear the music in the hallway as I approached the door: Achy Breaky Heart, a new release.

Stomp!

Her boots on the wooden floor. I figured the downstairs neighbors would be up here soon enough, and with good reason. I opened the door.

Lis was, and still is, a vision. Willowy and strong, soft and round in places, and sharp in glance and in wit. She had her brunette hair down over her shoulders, and her Wrangler jeans tucked into her boots. She grinned widely and motioned for me to join her. I demurred and she motioned harder. And stomp! She twirled.

I set down my briefcase and tossed my jacket on the sofa. We did electric slide until the song ended. She took me by the hand and led me to the kitchen table.

“Sit,” she said. We did.

“I have one announcement and one question,” she said. She stared into my eyes, a smile locked on her face.

My first thought, perhaps the first thought of any partner of a woman with a big announcement, is that there is a baby on the way. But Lis was too relaxed for that kind of life-changing news. Also, she had a beer in her hand and an open bottle of Quervo on the table.

“Announce away,” I said. The hand without the beer reached over and took mine.

“The World Bank called.” She grinned, “The job; it’s mine as soon as my clerkship is done!”

She raised the bottle and took a swig.

“I think that calls for hugs,” I moved to stand.

“I’m not done,” she said, and set the bottle down a bit harder than necessary.

I sat back. “The answer to your question…”

“…Which I have not asked yet,” she said.

“…is ‘Yes’” I said. “But, ask it anyhow.”

I had never seen her this nervous. Lis could litigate a mass shooting case in open court. There was only one question I could think of that would cause this effect.

Her hand on mine squeezed and released. She took a large inbreathe and let it out ever so slowly. Her gaze remained fixed on me.

She said, “O.K., I think we should get married.” Her mouth tightened into a thin line.

“Is that a proposal?” I said.

“Sure is.”

“Try it again. I’m a traditionalist. But no need to get on your knee.”

“Will you marry me, please,” she said, and squeaked an excited laugh.

“The answer is still ‘Yes’. You know I love you more than anything.” I took the hand holding mine and raised it into a kiss.

“Where’s my hug?” she said and stood. The next day we went shopping for rings.

So, that’s how true love found David Goldin.

A bit later, I left the White House for a career job in anthropology at Georgetown University. All the academic committee work I had avoided in the future/past also found me.

I spent four years on my retrospective work about the global economic impacts of Wellspring Coops, the Stapleton Trust, and new economic legislation. My book, The Taming of the Shrewd, explored the de-billionairization of society. No need to report on this here. You can buy the book.

As you know, we moved into a condo on the seventh floor of the Cairo, near Dupont Circle, where you visited us a couple years ago. We have a year-old daughter, Anna, who you will meet as soon as we can get out to California. Sophie, Nimali, and the girls are flying in next week for a visit.

I can only hope that the next twenty-six years are as gentle and rewarding as these past years have been. I’m thirty-three years old, or young. Married, settled, and happy. None of these were options in my future/past.

* * *

Jeremy, here is my disappointment.

In moments of melancholy, my inner voice reveals a cynical posture (yes, in addition to my normal cynical postures), based on an expectation that has failed in the new now.

The billion folks who came back to 1967 were not chosen for their wisdom. Yes, but being human, they remembered their failures and pain many times over their joys. They also remembered the future deaths of many of those around them. They carried an extraordinary awareness of their own existential predicament.

And yet, the Canon of Westminster Abby’s seven social sins are still with us. I fear we long for zero-sum games where we’ve already won. We want to belong to a group that dominates others. We shun the more difficult tasks integral to being human, loving kindness and happiness for other’s accomplishments, and are lesser for this.

We still idolize wealth without work, we want pleasure without consequences, we weaponize information instead of seeking knowledge, we allow corporations to delay moral duties, we play power games with science, we claim spirituality without bother, and we support political hacks if they offer to give us special treatment.

I fear that the current cultural bubble we’ve woven to reduce inequality and banish poverty will not endure. I suspect a near majority still long for the bounties of market capitalism, and not the solidarity that underpins a healthy civil society. At some point they will return to power.

I hope I’m wrong.

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