I have a time machine in my kitchen

It's true. It's on right now, and the portals of time have opened wide. Time it was and what a time it was, it was, a time of innocence. A time of confidences. I am, right now, sitting in a van stuffed full of my fellow Blackford High Schoolers, and we are heading North to Canada to backpack for a week. The floor of the van is really warm, and Kim has just informed me that the only reason Tom and I love the song The Boxer is because it has the word "whores" in it.

And I blink my eyes, the machine does its thing and...

I am skipping down Fifth Ave. in NYC, and I am in love, and I am singing into my cell phone, and I don't care who hears me, and all is well.

And I go upstairs a few minutes ago which is also right now, because time has liquefied this morning, and I am watching some movie with Drew Barrymore and I am also in the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska meeting my father for the first time in my grown up life, and I am heading back to the airport three weeks later, and also, at the very same time, I am thirteen years old and it's the middle of the night, and some man I don't know is talking to me and I can't make out what he's saying, but my older brother is telling me it's my father.

My dog has just died and I am learning to drive and I am in college and I just got published and I just lost my mother and I am in the shopping mall and in trouble because my sister told me to take the coins out of the fountain and I did it and now mom is going to have to get me and on it goes...

Sometimes, like Billy Pilgrim, I think we all become unhinged in time- we go to what I used to think of as the Everytime- a place where all moments, past present and future, roll together in a torrent of emotion and old songs and movie quotes and photos, and while it is tempestuous and overwhelming there is a sort of order to it all- and just like any strong current, the only way to get through it is to work with the flow.

Hello darkness, my old friend. And Brian and Tom and Vinnie and Dan and Tim and Jay and Taft- hello old mentor wise man genius.

The halls of my memory are so crowded.

And it's now today and it's now yesterday and it's now forever.

I am I, and I am singing Man of La Mancha with Myles in the back station at Bryant Park, and I am holding my nephew up to the sky on the day he is born, and I am getting married in the town square in Prague, and I am going with the flow.

And it's yesterday now forever.

Again.