Next Time? Florida

Kicking my boots off, I left them on the mat in a puddle of melting snow. Winter...my favorite; cooped up indoors twenty-four/seven, shoveling mounds of snow in below zero temperatures, digging the car out from under the latest pounding, and feeling like the world is closing in on me. You get the picture. If not, send me your address and I'll ship you some white stuff.

I boiled water for tea and flicked through channels for something to keep me from committing hari-kari with my snow shovel tonight. Ah, reruns of Friends or I Love Lucy? Lucy wins. Always had, always will.

Halfway through Lucy convincing Ricky to let her sing at his club, I nodded off, remote in hand, tea cooling on an end table.

"Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. You can't sing. You know this."

"Oh, Ricky! I can too. Just give me a chance..."

I woke up groggy, unsure of where I was. The remote was gone, as was the fifty-inch screen on the wall. In its place was a giant wooden cabinet with a twelve-inch screen tucked neatly in the center. Lucy's hair was no longer red-- it was definitely gray, as was all the furniture in their apartment.

Feeling around for the remote, I dug into the sofa cushions only to find a Bazooka bubblegum pack. The kind with a cartoon on the inside wrapper. I expected the gum to be hard as a rock. It wasn't.

I pushed myself up from the sofa, realizing my feet barely reached the floor. This was odd. I tumbled onto the pea green plush rug and found that I was back in my parents' old livingroom. My Dad's chair was in its usual spot, steam still spiraled from his coffee cup on the end table next to it, and a newspaper laid on the arm, as if he had just put it down moments ago.

I wandered to the kitchen, and saw the dinner plates neatly washed and drying on the counter. Freddy, our mutt, ran down the hallway to bark at me, like I was a stranger. There seemed to be a barrier between us that prevented me from reaching out to him. He continued barking and I wondered where my parents were. They must hear him.

I eased my way past Freddy and ventured down the hall to the first bedroom. Instead of the cake room that my brother-in-law had built for my mother's baking business forty years ago, a crib and toddler bed were where the stove and sink used to be. I recognized my little sister's rompers hanging off a hook on the door, and opened the closet to find my old school dresses hanging neatly, saddle shoes and black patent leather Mary Janes lined up like soldiers on the floor.

Feeling as though I didn't belong, I crept back to the livingroom for clues, checking the date on the newspaper; January 10, 1961. How absurd!

That meant I was six-years old and my sister, Jayne was a baby. Nothing about being six was good. All my memories ran to being forgotten while the baby took all my mother's attention and time. She had gone from being a well-organized wife and mother, who kept everything running like clockwork, to a harried, frazzled mess, who never got enough sleep and threw meals and bag lunches at us from across the kitchen.

My father was continually grumpy from the baby's constant fretting and screaming in the night, and my older sister, Joanne, was oblivious to anything that happened in the family because she was too busy with her school social life.

Worse yet, my only friend in the world had traded me for better companions she had met at school and I was left feeling alone in every way possible.

If given a choice, six would not be the age I would have returned to. However this misalignment of destiny happened, I was desperate to escape it.

Crawling under the living room furniture, I hunted for the remote control. It had to be here somewhere. Something sticky clung to my fingers. Great. a red lollipop, damp and stuck to the carpet. I was not going to test that.

Patting around next to the offensive pop, my hand brushed against something plastic and solid. When I pulled it out into the light I almost began crying.

The remote!

I pointed it at the gigantic wooden box with the tiny screen and clicked every button. Nothing. However, the lights in the room flickered, then dimmed.

Wonderful.

I looked closely at the buttons on the remote. Only three were lit up. Forward, Backward, and Pause.

While I'd been busy crawling around on the floor, my father had returned to his chair, sipping coffee and flipping through the newspaper, as if alone in the room.

I tried to get his attention, "Dad? Daddy? It's me. I'm home."

He didn't put the paper down. He said nothing.

I pressed Backward, watching with interest as he stood jerkily, and walked quickly back to the kitchen. I pressed Forward, and he comically double-timed it back to his chair. Then, I hit Pause and watched him for quite a long time, enjoying this time I had to spy on him. Alive again after twenty years, doing the mundane things I fondly remembered. A warm glow bloomed in my chest, thinking back on the stories he used to tell me in the evening, when it was just the two of us.

Reluctantly, I tried the Forward button, pointing the device at myself. Spirals of light sucked at me, pulling at my soul, dragging me from the warm, cozy livingroom with my father. Suspended in a thick, unfamiliar presence, I tried, unsuccessfully, to swim through the fog. The harder I kicked and pulled with my hands, the more mired I became.

When I tired of the useless activity, I stopped to catch my breath, and the absence of my struggles created a vacuum which forced me through falling clocks and hourglasses. Alarms rang, bells tolled, my ears ached from the cacophony as I traveled from six to seventy in thirty-seconds.

I landed in a snow pile with a splat, hands and bare feet freezing in the frigid temperature. The front door opened and my husband yelled, "What the heck are you doing out there? You're gonna freeze to death. Do I need to check you into a nursing home?"