We Are Time Travelers Yearning to be Heard

Was Ray Bradbury the inspiration for this magazine and website? Is time travel possible on a porch or a digital screen? Does it matter? You’ll have to answer this one. I hope you say yes.

For my 13th birthday my grandmother bought me a Ray Bradbury book. Dandelion Wine. Ironically I already had it. A woman named Marilyn who owned a bookstore gave me a copy, but I never read it and left it behind when I moved in with my grandparents. It is different in that it is not science fiction, but the beautiful time of young boys in Summer. It takes place in 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois with a boy named Douglas as the protagonist. Douglas’ grandfather made summer wine from dandelion petals and other ingredients and serves as a metaphor for the distilling of sweet summer memories of youth.

Ray Bradbury spoke of this book often. It is his retelling of his Summer of 1928. He is Douglas and Green Town is actually Waukegan, Illinois. Many of the themes he writes about a summer almost 100 years ago still hold up. There is almost an entire chapter dedicated to Douglas’ feelings about getting a new pair of sneakers. The feeling you could run faster and jump higher and play games better.

The book is also the beginning of something darker. It is part of a trilogy.

The first book is Bradbury’s most personal and beautiful work ever written according to me and many critics. Then we move on to Something Wicked this Way Comes.

It is a horror story that I often suspect inspired King to write “It” and “Needful Things”. In the story a Carnival comes to Green Town run by the dangerous Mister Dark and an “elderly” dad and his son have to fight dark forces threatening everything.

Finally we move into Farewell to Summer which takes us back to Douglas and his friends facing a old guardian of the school board and town curfew who wants to reign in the boys and ruin the adventures. The boys fight for their right to imagine, dream, and be young by reminding the old what it was to be young. The beauty and the horror of youth and the role prior generations can serve to inspire or diminish youth.

This is Gen X Watch!

In Dandelion Wine one of Douglas’ friends introduces the boys to the Time Machine. Douglas thinks he might be going on an adventure through time. What he finds is a room in a simple house with an old man named Colonel Freeleigh. The old man tells the young boys stories.

He tells the boys the story of a great magician who died onstage. Then he tells them about his adventure in 1875 with Pawnee Bill as they saw Buffalo run across a field like a thunderstorm. He continues to tell the boys stories that he remembered of the Civil War. He does not remember which side he fought on. The Colonel knows no one wins wars. He also remembers the music.

The boys tell the old man that he is a living time machine. He likes that and tells the boys he can come back and visit the time machine anytime they want.

I am the time machine, Douglas, Will in Something Wicked and also Will’s father, a man in his 50s haunted by the trauma of the past trying to move past guilt of felt mistakes and shortcomings. The Green Town trilogy is why Gen X Watch exists.

Ever since I read about the living time machine I sought out the time machines in my life.

When my child was 4 I once saw a man in his 90’s sitting on a bench in a park wearing a WWII veteran hat. While my child played I sat by the man and asked him to tell me his stories. He did.

My great grandmother was alive until I was 19. Everyone in my dad’s family treated her like a helpless old woman. She could barely remember her own name, but she could tell you the stories of her youth and her grandfather’s stories as if they all just happened. I listened.

As my grandfather started suffering Alzheimer’s, on the weird days he had connection I drew from him every story I could.

I carry in my heart the beauty and the horror of first and second hand accounts of the Civil War, WWI, the Roaring 20’s, the Great Depression, WWII (which includes surviving the Bataan Death March, Normandy, and being a Japanese soldier captured by Americans and held as a POW).

I know the stories of falling in love, a woman who was raped as a young girl and her rapist mysteriously disappeared and the police never bothered to look for him, but her dad was never the same. She was certain her father killed her rapist and lived with that. I once had an old man sitting on a porch say hello to me as I walked by. I stopped and he randomly told me the story of being a young boy and knowing Jane Adams. His mother was a young widower and a Suffragette and Jane Adams looked after them to make sure they had what they needed to survive.

I carry stories of young love, misadventures of young boys a century ago, immigrants and political refugees who risked their lives to leave Cuba and Lithuania to come to America. There was the Muslim woman who remembers wearing now forbidden bathing suits in the middle east and enjoying her youth, and men, voraciously. I carry within me the lost stories of history. The stories that matter today because they are the stories of us.

Nostalgia is a mix of fond remembrances and trauma.

I am a man aging looking to be heard and tell my stories. I was a boy and a young man in over my head fighting the impossibly powerful Mister Darks of religion running the Carnival of horrors threatening lives. Then I am also a man in his 50’s battling the pain of feeling like I failed my child or women I loved due to my inability to do things when they needed someone to do the things I could not do. Haunted by these memories there are still the Dark’s threatening my child and their friends. And I have to reach beyond the trauma and the fear and fight for them and inspire them.

I am also an older man surrounded by the current generation reminding me what it is to be young and why we need to give them the space to grow and experience life without our judgement and restrictive curfews. They do not need our tough love lessons, they need our stories, support, and advocacy.

This is my third act in this life and I am a time machine. You are welcome to visit anytime you want.

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