I've discovered how to instantly travel through time, both past and future. Visit your parents.
Alone with my parents, with no siblings or children to anchor me in the present, I became the lonely eleven-year-old again, or a self-conscious fourteen, or maybe a sullen sixteen, trailing along after my mother, carrying grocery bags of stuff and sighing deeply. My parents reminisce about some cute (embarrassing) thing I did when I was ten, my dad says I'm a good little nurse, my mom gives me chores. They even call me by my childhood nickname (which I despise).
Then, suddenly, I'm the adult caretaker. Clearing up the AT&T bill, fixing the answering machine, driving everywhere, showing my mom how to use the cellphone, cooking meals and cleaning up.
Seeing my father in a nursing home (for his rehab) was a shock: sort of a ghost of a possible Christmas future. I wondered how he felt: completely lucid and healthy, surrounded by his age cohort but not of them in a way, but unable to leave. Good motivation to get through rehab and get back home.
All in all, an unsettling trip, reminding me to appreciate the present time once again.
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