We are halfway back! Jeremy wants us each to tell our “the day” story. So many of these have been written, published, made into songs or movies, that I don’t know why I should add mine to this corpus. But I’ll do my bit. Here goes.
* * *
At first, it was your standard weird waking dream. Also a dream about waking. I was back in my high school home, in my bed, mostly asleep. I would be fully asleep, but my mom, Amy, was beside the bed leaning over me. She was talking. My eyes were closed, but the voice was unmistakable. Amy was not alarmed, no screaming or tears. And not angry.
I knew that voice. She was excited, way too excited for this time of day. The morning bird chorus was still in full voice outside my window. I only heard that sound on swim practice days, when I got up before six. How could I possibly stay asleep?
“What?” I said. In my dream, I opened my eyes and squinted at my mom.
She paused.
The next thing she said, “You are not dreaming,” is something nobody tells you in a dream. It’s far too self-referential.
She took hold my foot through the blanket, and squeezed it good. Again, not dream-time possible. My eyes roamed the room, confused.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to sort things out,” Mom said. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
She walked over to my door. Before she left, she turned on my desk-top radio. I could hear the voice of Peter Jennings, who was a night-time news anchor. Why was he talking at this hour? Must be something really, really wrong.
The radio droned… “… In Europe, where this event happened mid-day, thousands of road accidents, some of them fatal, are reported, as well as widespread panic and public unrest.
“Across the US, millions of Americans are waking up on a day that is more than a half-century earlier than when they went to bed. This sudden, global, time-shift seems to have affected every person alive today who had survived until the September 2, 2019. While many of us have no memory of a future time, today is a day we will always remember, all of us.
“We who know you as you were yesterday, we look forward to meeting your new self, old in experience, and fresh with youth. And you, who bring the memories and wisdom of a half century now erased, you will bring us all together to a new appreciation for the time we will share together going forward…”
Not a Dream
I actually jumped out of bed. My sixteen-year-old body sprang up where my sixty-eight year-old body would have lifted itself stiffly and with effort. I was wearing a blue t-shirt and panties. I grabbed a clean set from the wardrobe in my closet, threw on a robe and headed for the shower.
On the way to the bathroom, I could hear mom talking, either with dad or on the phone. I would guess Ma Bell made big bucks this morning. Everybody calling everyone else across the nation. I shut the bathroom door behind me and stripped. The door had a full-length mirror. I used all of it.
I had forgotten how trim and pert I was. Bright eyed, too, and bushy in all the right places. I danced in standing circle, grinning like a chimp. The reality of my new youth sank in. There is probably a one-to-ten happiness scale some social psychologist has published that I completely broke in that moment. I’ll call it a twenty-three.
The shower felt like a cleansing rain. I could not shake this weird internal doppelgänger feeling. I remembered yesterday like it was yesterday, only there were two of these. The “young me” went to swim class early, played some tennis mid morning with my tennis-teammate, Cynthia. Then I went shopping after lunch, mostly to pass the time. After dinner at home, my steady boyfriend, Dan, took me to the new Bond film at the Regency. I had to wrestle with him a bit in car when he brought me home. He has quick hands. Such a needy boy. That will have to stop.
Yesterday, the “old me” finished up a late shift in the Eugene, Oregon doc-in-a-box where I worked ever since my own medical practice proved economically unwise. I then caught the tale end of the latest Will & Grace show after grabbing a take-home box of KFC. Three IPAs later and I was asleep.
The young me was definitely having more fun. And that’s all me now. I toweled myself dry and went over to the sink. The sink mirror was flanked with lights. I took in the vision of my face, noting the blemishes that grabbed my attention the last time I was sixteen. This time, I took in my whole face as a single marvel. Behind my eyes, I could sense the weight of knowing and being that remained from my journey into a vanished future.
I made funny faces. I posed like a call girl from the eighties. I opened my mouth and rediscovered what four years of orthodontics had accomplished. I brushed my teeth. I combed out my hair. The bangs. Good lord. The bangs would have to go. I was dawdling. I knew that. The conversation waiting for me in the breakfast nook will be… will be… let’s call it “unreal.”
Most times, talking with parents is not easy. This morning is as far from most times as time can make it. I wandered back to my room.
Dad died in 2009, when his liver gave out after decades of daily lunch martini indulgence. I figured mom had already used this fun fact as a lever to pry him from his day drinking going forward. My door is cracked open. I could hear her worrying him about something. He has no defense against her future knowledge. I don’t hear him speak.
I felt the need to get out of the house. I wanted to encounter this now in tiny chunks I could swallow. It’s all rushing in together at this moment. But it was too early in the morning to escape breakfast without a plan.
I remember mom and dad as intellectually compatible mates and emotional counterparts: Mr. Stoic and Mrs. Excitement. Each day, mom and dad honored the word-view and the lifestyle vision that they’d built in this small town.
Dad runs the biggest civil law practice in the county. Mom plays bridge at the club and honchos the women’s auxiliary of the local Rotary. Dad is shouldering the mortgage on our four-bedroom, ranch-style house, up here on the hill, with the town overlook. He paid my older brother Billy’s tuition at Stanford. Billy died from colon cancer in 2014. That’s another conversation mom will have soon enough. In a few years, dad will pay my college expenses too, and without a single complaint. Mom arranges dinners and other social opportunities for dad to meet new clients.
I’m really happy that Billy is still alive today. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with my Big Bro’ this time around. Last time around, I was super busy with my own career. If I remember correctly, Billy’s got an internship at a CPA firm in San Francisco this summer. He’ll be graduating next June. Last time, Billy joined a Wall Street brokerage after Stanford, and moved to Manhattan. I guess he’ll likely do the same thing next year.
After dad died, mom sold the house and moved into a covenanted senior community in Walnut Creek, California. She had just transferred to assisted living when we both ended up here, this morning. Glad she didn’t have dementia. It would be a shame to show up in 1967 and not remember a thing.
My plan to escape the never-ending breakfast nook conversation will require an accomplice. I’m thinking who I can call, as my eyes roam across my room. I don’t see it. I wander back to the bathroom and check out countertop. Not there. I wonder where I put it. My mind suddenly snapped into the present.
I have no cell phone. I barked a laugh at myself.
I sit back hard on the bed and look around me. What’s missing? No computer. That sucks. No emails. I can live with that. No social media. No smart watch. Our giant color TV is in the family room downstairs. My folks have a small one in their bedroom. No cable TV yet. So, no 24-hour news.
I don’t even have my own phone line. Mom insisted that we could manage with one shared phone line, so all my calls are subject to accidental or surreptitious interception. Lately, mom’s been after me to talk less with my friends. I remind her that I’m off to school starting in September. She can talk all day, then. I called dibs on the summer. She could always get her own phone line, I suggest.
The three books on my desk have been checked out of the public library. There’s a stack of magazines on my bed table. On top is Vogue. A small record player and a stack of 45s. No CDs. I don’t see a tape player. My radio is still on. The commentators are trading aspects of their confusion while speculating about what today means for humans and the planet. I go over and turn it off. I grab up some underthings from the dresser, then I go to the closet, choose a pale turquoise cotton summer dress. I wiggle into my clothes. I’m as ready as I will be for this conversation.
Mom spies me when I leave my bedroom. She jumps up from the breakfast nook bench and comes at me, arms up, grinning broadly. “Sarah, darling!” she gushes, “Don’t you look marvelous.”
I knew a part of this was fishing. But I behave. “Mom. You are the one to talk. Just look at you, all thirty-something again. And so slender!”
“Go over and cheer up Ralph. I’ll put your breakfast on.” She looks over at dad and back at me with a sad clown face. Then she heads for the stove.
I slid in next to dad. His eyes inspected me like he’s a cop and I’m the prime suspect. He says, “I’m up to my eyeballs in bad news right now, so give me something to smile at.”
“She told you,” I said, “about your future…?”
“In technicolor detail,” he said.
I reached over and got my arm around his shoulder. Dad, in his early forties, still had the physique of a high-school cross-country runner, if you don’t count the paunch. He was dressed for golf: Tan slacks, light blue polo shirt, and a dark-blue v-neck sweater.
I bent forward an popped a feather kiss on his temple.
“Daddykins,” I said. “You can make your own future anew. And did she tell you about the Mariners and the Seahawks?” I pulled back.
“The what?” he said, and grinned. “You know, you haven’t called me that in…”
More years than you know, I thought.
“Seattle will get a major league baseball team, and an NFL football team,” I said.
“I can stop pretending to actually like the Giants and the 49ers,” he said. “Does the baseball team ever win the Series?”
“I’ll get back to you on that one,” I said.
“That’s O.K., just so they’re playin in the show. Donna tells me you will be a doctor,” he said.
“Trained, certified, and exhausted,” I said. “I could take out your appendix, here on this table, if you needed me to. Sew you up right, too.”
I raised my hand in front of my face and wondered if my surgical muscle memory was intact.
Mom came over with my plate, and set this in front of me. A short stack of blueberry buttermilk dollar pancakes, a couple eggs over easy, several bacon strips, a glass of OJ. She reached over, grabbed the percolator and poured me mug of coffee.
“I guess you are old enough for this,” she said.
I had forgotten that Saturday breakfast here was enormous.
“Thanks, mom, this looks amazing. I believe we’ve scared dad enough for one morning. I’m going to stick with some good news, while I tackle this plate.”
“Keep him company,” she said, “I’m going to call Billy.” She headed for their bedroom.
“Poor Billy,” I said to dad. “He’s going to get a dose of future reality too.”
“What’s your good news?” he asked.
I thought for a bit.
“The cold war ended without a nuclear exchange,” I started. “Speaking of wars. We mucked around in Vietnam for another several years and then got out of there quick when things went seriously south. You and mom visited in Hue in 2006, on a cruise ship. Um. Let me see. We all survived the gigantic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. The wind blew most of the ash to the East. Poor Yakima.”
“St. Helens? Not Baker?” He asked.
“Surprised everyone. Took out miles and miles of trees. But things grew back. Filled Spirit Lake with pumice. I’m glad we camped there when we could. Wait, we still can! Let’s plan a trip up there later this fall.”
Dad slumped back and stared out the window, either deep in thought or longing for a drink. I attacked my breakfast.
I said, “As weird as it is to wake up young again, I’m sure it’s even stranger to have people around you morph into insanely informed prophets.”
Dad closed his eyes. Maybe he was wishing himself back into yesterday.
Want to find out everything that will go wrong for you in the future? Ask your daughter. She knows details. Only this daughter is not going there. I look at dad, and there’s this huge gap in our knowledge of each other. For me, we’ve spent decades of Thanksgivings and Christmas visits. I’ve seen him happy and melancholy, upbeat and deep into his self-doubt. Drunk and funny in the morning, probably too often. Robust, he seemed, and then, suddenly dying.
He’s only known me as a kid. I’m this little, growing, feminine elf thing that’s slowing becoming more interesting as a person. Which I am, right now, at least on the outside. On the inside, that’s another story. I feel the urge to take my outsides and insides somewhere else, and I know exactly where.
“Dad, I’m going to go up to the Club and swim laps. I’ve got a lot to think about, too,” I said, “We’ll connect later today.”
“Have a good swim,” he said, without smiling.
I cleared my plate, and put all the dishes I could find into the dishwasher. I glanced around. Dad was still staring out the window.
* * *

How I met your Father
The pool was nearly vacant at this early hour. A mother and her two young kids were in the kiddie pool enclosure. A couple of older women were doing breakfast and mimosas over by the clubhouse patio. While it would be hot by mid-afternoon, the morning chill gave me a preview of that first dive into the cold pool.
I spent the initial laps relearning the joy of muscles working in symphony with the water. The thrust of the kick, the timing of the turns. Swimming was an excellent way for the old lady in me to realign with my teenage body sense. The next twenty were for real. At the end, I rested on my arms at the side of pool.
I was a good competitive swimmer, but not among the best at school. I am self-confident enough to imagine I could have been among the best, but that would require more hours than I wanted to spare, last time around.
My old high-school swimming future jumped me; reruns of swim meets yet to come: heats I would win, followed by finals where I could only contribute a runner-up score. My coach would always say I didn’t have my heart in it.
I knew that from the start. I enjoyed competing, but didn’t care all that much about winning. Competing was winning enough. I am thinking I can skip swimming this time, maybe try out for softball. Or maybe skip school entirely.
I noticed that Sue, Dixie, and Vivian, school chums, had arrived. They spread their towels near mine. Were they like me? I don’t remember reading anywhere that Sue or Dixie had died, and the high-school Facebook page was pretty good about marking these events. But then, I was pretty lax about staying in touch. Dixie had brought a radio, which was unusual. They prohibited radios on the deck on any given day. But then, this is not any given day. I gave them a wave. They returned it.
I swam over to the stair, and then quick-walked over to my towel, chilly and goosebumpled, trailing water drips as I went. Drying off, I nodded my hellos. I pulled off my swim cap and shook out my hair.
That’s better, I thought. I am ready for the day.
“Dixie, Sue…” I said. “You’ve been listening to the radio…”
Sue said. “What a crazy world this is. I guess you’re old and young too.”
I nodded, eager to talk about this.
Dixie said, “It’s all over the planet.” She reached over and turned on the radio.
“Turn it up,” I said. I would love some ’60s music, but this was a news-special kind of day. Today, the future had arrived. That’s us, I guess.
Walter Cronkite, no less, was delivering a montage of global reactions to the “planetary time warp.” Time warp. I laughed out loud when he said that. They stared at me.
I stood.
“It’s just a jump to the left,” I sang, and jumped. I cocked my head.
Sue threw her head back and squealed. She stood and spoke. “And then a step to the right.” We did that.
“Put your hands on your hips,” Sue glared at Dixie.
Dixie jumped up, “Bring your knees in tight.” We stood there, knees tight and sang in unison. “It’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insa..a…a…ne. Let’s… do… the time warp again.”
Vivian Stone arrived, raced over to us, and tossed down her towel. She took up the stance. “Let’s… do… the time warp again!”
We sang and danced one more verse. Then we all broke down laughing, and went for a group hug before settling back on our towels.
Lucy Buck, a little girl who had just graduated from the kiddie pool to “the big pool,” scampered toward us from the shallow-end stairs. At that moment, I remembered Lucy’s tragic death in the future/past.
“No running on the deck!” Chad, the Summer weekend lifeguard, who had just arrived, announced his authority. Lucy stumbled to a slow walk and joined us. “You there, shut off that radio!” He pointed at us. Dixie complied.
“What are you doing!” Lucy asked, hands on hip. She was shivering in her one-piece suit. I put Vivian’s dry towel over her shoulders.
Vivian reached over and pulled Lucy, protesting, down onto her lap, enfolding Lucy in her arms. “Why Magenta, don’t say you’ve forgotten The Time Warp?”
“Magenta?” Lucy glanced around the group.
I said, “It’s from a movie you will probably never see, since it hasn’t been made yet.”
I tried to imagine how to explain the Rocky Horror Picture Show to a second grader in 1967.
Lucy yanked herself free from Vivian’s grasp and stood up. “Why are you all so weird?” she said.
Sue said, “We all know something you don’t know.” The rest of us older girls got quiet, wondering whether Sue was planning to tell this girl about her tragic ending.
Vivian whispered to Sue, “Are you really going to go there?”
Dixie said to all of us, “Maybe her Mom should be the one.”
I looked at Sue. I could see that she was coming from a place of her own pain, and she was looking to inflict a bit of this, without realizing; just to let go of some of what was hurting inside. I’d seen this in hospital waiting rooms. Relatives blurt out terminal diagnoses or disease descriptions to block their own fears.
“We’re here to have fun,” I said to the whole group.
“We can’t keep this from her,” Sue said.
She reached out. Her hands attached to Lucy’s waist. Sue turned the girl to face her directly.
Sue spoke. “Forty years or so in the future, you will be in a fatal skiing accident in Colorado, way up high on a double black diamond run. They will find your body days later…”
“What!?” Lucy wiggled out of Sue’s grasp.
Lucy glared at us each, searching for some break in our demeanors that would signal this is just a stupid game.
“Lucy, look at me,” Sue said. “That’s a future you can avoid. I’m telling you this now so you can plan ahead. You are so lucky to know this. It’s simple. Ski Idaho next time around. Or take up golf. Don’t you see, you can live to be eighty, a hundred. Who knows?”
Lucy took a couple steps back and shook her head slowly, tearing. Then she pivoted, and raced away toward the locker room, ignoring the lifeguard’s repeated commands.
We turned to Sue, who was crying, quietly but in pitiful convulsions.
Sue watched Lucy flee. “Lucky little girl,” she said.
She faced us, raging in some new form of grief. “What about Jimmy, Kevin, Sue Anne, Margaret, and little Tim? What about my babies?” She folded into a near fetal position on her towel, where she sobbed loudly into her hands.
We understood that she was thinking about her five future children. She was mourning not for what was, but for what now might never be.
We lay back on our towels, our thoughts spinning. Dixie turned the radio on at a near whisper. We gathered our heads around it.
The radio news focused on Europe, where the time warp hit mid-morning. Millions of folks did not quietly wake up in young bodies. In an instant, a half-century of future memories crashed into their adolescent minds, while their bodies were active at work, at play, in school, on travel. Mid-stride, their brains suddenly contained two competing presents, fifty-two years apart.
By contemplating this situation, you can imagine the panic, the chaos. Most evident were traffic accidents. Autos, trucks, and buses, motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles: millions of conveyances all lost direction as their drivers struggled to sort through two simultaneous memory streams. Fortunately, human brain stems, when faced with a primal threat, will first freeze. Most driver feet found brake pedals, halting hard. Other drivers careened into nearby objects. There will be a death toll.
One commentator wondered about that parallel moment in the future. Did time just end? Did all these people who returned instantly die? Or, did they disappear, leaving cars and jest driverless. Questions with no answer.
For a couple hours, cities around the continent experienced something akin to a horror-movie scene where temporary insanity grips the street. People wandered about in public talking loudly to themselves, while they searched their pockets for non-existent cell-phones.
Hours later, as their current-day recollections regained control, these people sought out friends and relatives, they gathered on sidewalks and poured into cafes and taverns. They found one another in the new now.
I imagined that most of the self-inflicted physical injuries covered the gamut of “accidents while being distracted.” Missing a stair on a staircase. Cutting your hand preparing food. Banging your head on an open cupboard. Sitting back on a non-existent chair. Contusions, abrasions, lacerations, and sprains. Fortunately, the self-injured were young and mostly spry.
“Turn it off,” Dixie said. “We’ve got enough to think about. Sue, you should find Lucy and tell her you’re sorry. That news was way too hard for her.”
Sue stood up. She nodded in agreement. “Don’t know why, I just had to…” She strode away toward the locker room.
I said, “I think the ones who will best manage this… whatever this is, will be those who also listen to their young self. I have no intention to act my mental age. I want to be, really be, sixteen again. Only without the vast ignorance of just being sixteen.”
“Great point,” Vivian said. “Have the fun, without all the fuck-ups.”
“No regrets allowed,” said Dixie. “Here comes Sue.”
Sue and Lucy walked up arm in arm. They settled on towels. “I had to promise Lucy we would act like it’s last week. Vivian, tell us about about your date with Steve. Did he really try to feel you up at the movie?”
Vivian grinned. “It was during the scary part…”
We spend a good hour doing innocent girl talk, interrupted by brief dips in the pool as a morning warmed. Lucy managed a couple thin smiles.
Kids—to quote the beginning of a TV show in the future/past—this is how I met your father.
Sue saw him first.
“There’s Jeremy Stapleton.” Sue pointed at a thin boy dressed in chinos and a polo shirt hefting his golf clubs on the other edge of the pool enclosure. “He’s the guy who did, or will do, or whatever, The Next WaveMagazine.
“Yo, Mister Next Wave!” I shouted out. My older self was a long-time subscriber to that rag. It kept me in touch with the world of technology. I wondered if he remembered the future too. Be a pity if he’s really only a kid.
I’m going to let Jeremy’s version of what happened next be the official one. He was right about one thing. Something in his face and his posture made me want to take him somewhere private and get really private. He was just as skinny as he said. I might have broken him in half.
Chapter 13: Time Day 1993
1993
It’s Time Day again, the 1993 version. Most of the planet is celebrating the half-way point of return from the time slip. Half-way back, and we haven’t messed it up. In fact, the planet is moving in several simultaneous positive directions. Across the globe, we have been trading problems for possibilities in most people’s daily lives. The Doomsday Clock started in 1947 at “seven minutes to midnight”. It’s now “ten days to midnight”, and the annual announcements don’t even make the evening news.
While Jeremy, David, and Sophie were off changing the planet, I was focused on how this new world changed each of us as persons. What should we learn from having an extra half-century of experience? What should we teach our children?
Our sweet Rebecca arrived in December of 1974. She is Jeremy and my first, and now only child, including the future/past. We were as unprepared as all first-time parents were throughout history. Some of our timedrifter friends decided not to be parents this time around. It didn’t stop them from offering advice from their future/past parent days.
We weathered this tide of well-meaning information, and raised Becky as we figured we should. I cut back my shifts at the Berkeley Free Clinic for a couple years, and Jeremy shared child care by working at home.
In late 1971, with the roll out of national health care, all health clinics became free. The Clinic decided to keep its name. We were free when that was hard.
I became increasing alarmed by the psychological effects of the time drift, not just on the drifters, but on their realtimer family members and friends. I wanted Rebecca’s childhood to be as normal, and as joyful as possible. I was particularly concerned about very young timedrifters, the ones under five years of age. That sudden press of decades of memories on the still-forming child brain is something never before witnessed. We knew the brain was plastic. Now, we’ve discovered it’s also elastic. But how? And with what actual impact?
Before I arrived at the Clinic, they were seeing three and four-year-olds attempting suicide or having anxiety attacks because they remember the abuse they suffered in their future/past, and are living with their abusers in the new-now. Some social psychologists claim that childhood trauma accounts for more than eighty-percent of adult mental issues. Now these same adults were trapped in pre-school bodies, facing the same abuse.
In 1976, I hopped onto a new UCSF psychiatry residence program for licensed MDs. Two-years of in-house clinical work, followed by a year in practice, and then another medical board examination, and a new license. Since the time slip, the profession of psychiatry had incorporated the best tools and practices of the 2010s, including drugs patented and released by the Stapleton Trust. I was able to create my own therapy regime using cognitive-behavioral, somatic experience, and Buddhist psychology.
One of my own research projects in the 1980s sought to better understand the impact of memory-loading on the youngest timedrifters. After five years and several thousand interviews, my team discovered that the future/past memories were not simply stored in the neural systems of these tykes. Without a triggering signal, their recall was vague and ambiguous. If you ask them, “tell me about the 1980s?” They might say, “decade after the 1970s?”
Ask them if they diddone saw the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and they will go on a whole rant about when, where, and with whom. After that, they recalled this particular memory the same way they did memories in the new-now. We labeled this a “context-dependent-recall.” The results of our research has been used by cosmologists to link memories to theories about quantum entanglement-at-a-distance or dark matter.
* * *
Toward a post-nuclear family
* * *
No family is perfect, but the American nuclear family in the 1960s was almost always dysfunctional, often dangerously so. It actually does take a village to raise a child, more about that later. Unfortunately, most timedrifter kids in the US grew up within the blast radius of their nuclear family, even when the “two parents, two kids, and a dog” stereotype was not present.
Childhood everywhere is filled with daily events that shape our bodies, our hopes, our imaginations, and the emotional contours of our emergent personhoods. Many of these events are commonly traumatic (trauma with a lower-case “t”). Mostly it’s just the pain of doing something for the first time and getting it wrong. That’s called “learning.”
Kids fall down, we remember this; we tumble physically or emotionally almost every day. And then we get up again. Waking up in a child’s body with an extra fifty-two years of memory changes almost everything. Not that it’s more fun to fall off your bicycle. It’s just not as traumatic. And bullies beware. That scrawny kid you want to poke in the back might be someone who diddone mastered Muay Thai.
The future/past memories and stories of abuse and neglect—the shadows of future rage, violence, and divorce or abandonment—these can absorb all of the light of current-day well-being, particularly for the children. And not just for the timedrifters. Timedrifter siblings warn their brothers and sisters, their mothers and their fathers, of troubles ahead. The wrongs adults did to their children in the future/past arrive in the new-now as an unforgiven, and unforgivable, stain on their persons.
Realtimer parents are likely to be accused of actions they have not yet done, or even contemplated. Timedrifter parents shoulder the guilt of their own memories of future/past wrongs. They can see the pain they caused on the faces of their timedrifter children.
I forgave my own parents for their impulse to punish me for “misbehaving” when this simply mean me being super happy and dancing around the house on a afternoon when mom is “in no mood for foolishness.” My spankings no longer sting. I was, and am, really lucky to have them as parents.
Escape is the common solution for abuse-aware kids. Across the Bay Area, thousands of pre-teen kids have fled their families, hoping for safety in the homes of future/past friends, non-abusive relatives, or just on the street. Cities and counties lobbied for and got state funds to create new shelters for these youth, with personal and family counseling.
It is too early to tell, but the collective memories of future household abuses might provide a stop-gap moment where these behaviors do not self-perpetuate across generations. Most abuse against children comes from parents who were abused as children. This revolving cycle of domestic violence might just end by 2019. We can hope.
* * *
Things get Better
Population health-wise, things have never been better. Mortality and morbidity rates have been declining since Time Day. In the Bay Area, hundreds of thousands of residents have been told the clinical or proximal circumstances of their future/past death, often decades before this diddone occur. Be it war, crime, accident, or natural disaster: specific events can be added to a calendar now and then simply avoided. Disease is another matter. The best we can do is be really good about daily habits. The next best is what Wellspring Medical Technologies did for global health.
By 1971, several dozen of the most widely used, and sometimes the most expensively sold, pharmaceuticals on the market in the future/past 2019 were made available when WMT went non-profit. For example, HIV treatments that cost hundreds of thousands of US dollars a year in the old 2019, were now available for a hundred dollars. I would guesstimate that widely available WTF pharmaceuticals saved a hundred million of lives over the next two decades. Most of these patients were in countries that had no access to these drugs in the future/past. WTF made enough income from these sales to fund the first gene replacement treatments for disease in 1980.
Public health also got a boost from the memories that timedrifters carried back. Personal behavior change remains an internal contest of will and wants, of self-reflection and self-deception. Timedrifters saw their entire future/past adult lives like one long anti-indulgence advertisement. They had a coming-attraction preview of their own health issues: obesity, addiction, mental disorders, and diseases. Some of these could be avoided in the new now. The current future will bring its own medical surprises.
Realtimers also faced a kind of therapeutic intervention; being sat down and told you diddone die screaming in a hospital from preventable lung cancer is powerful ammunition for the “don’t be an idiot, change your daily habits” argument. That carton of Camels you just bought is not your friend anymore. Still, nobody actually wants to hear about their own death, particularly when they are, say, nine years old.
Last Christmas, we went back again to Timberville to visit the folks. I ran across Lucy Buck walking down Commerce Avenue, also home for the holidays. Lucy had died young in a skiing accident in the future/past. “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling, “This time around, I’m into surfing.”
With advanced health screenings and long-term behavior modifications, the great majority of realtimers will make it to 2019 this time around. My dad is already down to a couple single-shot drinks on weekend evenings, and a Dry January. His liver checks out just fine. And his golf game has improved.
Conversely, timedrifter kids tended, at first, to model riskier behaviors, perhaps concluding that their future/past longevity is inevitable. But then, a lot of riskier-seeming behaviors were not so risky; some of these children had diddone professional-level sports.
It’s also really weird that we can actually predict sudden natural disasters. While nobody died this time, thousands came to watch from a safe distance as Mount St. Helens erupted in May of 1980. Tsunamis are now spectator events.
The Bay Area’s Loma Prieta Earthquake in October, 1989, caused relatively little damage and a tiny fraction of the casualties of its future/past version. The elevated freeways that collapsed in the future/past had already been torn down. Homes in the Marina District were pre-retrofitted against soil liquefaction.
The real damage was to the first cross-bay World Series. Nobody here talks about the World Series this time. It was played in Chicago, with the Cubs against the Blue Jays.
Of course, each day still comes with its own dangers. Jeremy just got out of the hospital after getting clipped by a car a cross-walk near the University. Timedrifters tend to try new possibilities for their lives, and that opens up new risks. We are not all somehow destined to make it back to 2019.
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Smarties
A bit about the Smarties. Smarties were officially any timedrifter who was born between August of 1963 and August of 1964. These were three-year-old, fifty-five-year-olds back from 2019.
It took Madison Avenue about six months to cough up a new advertising notion aimed at pre-school timedrifters. In the Spring of 1968, Condé Nast published the first issue of Smartypants: fashion, culture, and politics for the oldest youngest among us.
Their premier edition featured future/past icons, dressed in boho fashion, and telling all the secrets of their future/past lives in conversation with each other. Little Quentin Tarantino tangled with Brad Pitt. Future/past Courtney Love (now Courtney Michelle Harrison) mixed it up with Wynonna Judd (now Christina Claire Ciminella). And finally, Sarah Palin (now Sarah Heath) sparred with Michelle Obama (now Michelle Robinson). The photo spreads were glorious, if somewhat disturbing for their pedo-potential, and the banter, exquisite.
The Smartypants fashion label crossed over between upscale department stores—with full store windows at Bloomingdales and I Magnin—and mass market, with twelve pages in the Fall/Winter Sears Big Book, replacing the Winnie the Pooh Collection. Our Rebecca loved her Smartypants kids outfits. Even realtimer parents of realtimer kids got caught up in the Smartypants craze.
Smartypants Magazine followed Smarty celebs as they navigated their early school years and contemplated their futures. First-grader Michael Jordon and Charles Barkley discussed new career ideas, mainly around professional golf. Both are now in a restaurant business franchise partnership: Chuck and Mike’s Steaks.
Johnny Depp and Mike Myers dreamed of forming their own rock band. They joined up with Smarties Lenny Kravitz and Eddie Vedder to form the group Mini Me. They have been on tour for a few years now, with several hit songs.
Smartypants companies had tapped a deep wellspring of nostalgia for future/past headline events and celebrities. Timedrifters drank in all this future/past gossip like it was a Starbucks caramel macchiato. Money was made.
Speaking of Starbucks, this time around, Seattle led the espresso cafe trend, but with another origin story. Thousands of “Last Exit” coffee houses have popped up across the US and Asia.
The Smartypants brand got stale a few years back, when twenty-something Smarty celebrities decided to get real about the new-now. Some of them disappeared into their own quotidian lifestyles. “Old 1990’s movie-star turned into new 1990s hardware-store-manager” stories did not sell fashion.
Others realized that their new lives would always be a pale imitation of their old ones, and needed therapy to cope. That’s where I came in. I’ve had several clinically depressed future/past Silicon Valley ex-billionaires as patients. Most of them blamed the Stapleton Trust. I schooled them on the role that random chance plays in all of our lives.
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Doogies
The US Labor Department was legitimately concerned that adding tens of millions of over-qualified children to the workforce would be harmful to the fortunes of realtimer workers. Child-labor laws prevented juvenile timedrifters from entering the job market with full-time work in factories and corporations. Many, including David and Sophie, took well-paying part-time gig jobs that escaped notice.
Most states had laws requiring public school attendance to a certain age. Guaranteed income and federal funding for “free university” classes in state colleges and universities helped the cohort of pre-pubescent overachievers spend their time in creative pursuits until they were old enough to vote.
In the field of medicine, the US instantly added tens of thousands of Doogie Howsers—timedrifter MDs now in their childhood bodies. For you realtimers, that’s the name of a future/past TV show where a super-precocious teen becomes an MD. Someone came up with a slogan for Smarty physicians, “Doctors Without Incisors,” which became their T-shirt of choice. I did my new-now internship at Stanford Health Services, where the future/past chief medical officer showed up one day, a nine-year old unpaid Doogie who wandered the hallways getting in everyone’s hair until he was banished.
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The now today
This brings me up to today. Becky is off to college at Reed in Portland. Her cohort is entirely realtimers. Many of the faculty are timedrifters, not a bad thing. She’s got a coop-produced laptop computer. She’s been on the web for almost decade now.
Becky is as alive as any young woman can ever be. Hyper-curious, outgoing, self-confident. She will read this and remind me that she has all of the self-doubt and image anxiety any young woman has, too. She conquered every new-now educational experiment thrown at her. She reads all the time. I think that’s Jeremy’s influence. He read to her every night when she was little.
In the future/past, Berkely was a crucible of revolutionary university life. In the new now, this energy went into the public schools. Rudolf Steiner would have marveled at how much personal choice and authentic peer-to-peer learning were available. Becky thrived in these circumstances, and picked up music, dance, theatre, and art without needing to prove her talent to any adult.
Her tears, when they came, acknowledged her emotional growth in those years when social ties are tested, sometimes cruelly. Boundaries are hit, sometimes broken. Repair is hard. Lessons are learned. She is as adult as any young woman needs to be to move out on her own. I refuse to take credit. But I am immensely proud. She’s the one who picked Reed College. She said it would be a challenge.
I’m going to leave Jeremy to talk about the current state of consumer technology. But I’m not going to leave Jeremy out of this report. I can report that Jeremy Stapleton has been a true companion and an asset to the planet. He came back searching for a lever with which to move the world. He used his insight to find this.
Jeremy is funny at parties and at breakfast. He brings a carnival of ideas to my days, and a gentle hand to my nights. He’s a great dad, and a good friend to his compadres. He certainly needs to pay better attention while crossing the street.
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Disappointments
Jeremy wants me to add something I’m disappointed about in the new now. I’m afraid I need to disappoint him. I’ve come around to the somewhat Buddhist notion that the natural world, in which we humans are enmeshed, is perfect. Well, perfect enough to defy the second law of thermodynamics for thousands of years. Perfect enough to evolve an astonishing abundance of life, including us.
Was the future/past also perfect? Yes. Does perfect allow for evil, for pain and suffering, for death? Of course. Mostly we suffer from not understanding our own innate perfection. We are born complete. But, there is always room for improvement.
I see a lot of confused, anxious, and depressed people in my work. Somewhere, they got lost. Standing alone on the dance floor of life, they’ve forgotten the music. My job is to help them rebalance their lives, so they can slow down and just live. Like I said, the planet is moving in lot of new, healthy, positive directions. I’m excited about the next twenty-three years. The music we need is much louder today. Maybe soon we will all be dancing together again.
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