15 June 2003

Time Travel

I have not told you about my talk with my older son Friday night, the rambling dinner conversation about the nature of time and the possibilities of time travel. It was related to Pink Floyd and the way Dark Side of the Moon synches up to The Wizard of Oz. That is too bizarre for words, and we gnawed at that over reuben sandwiches and fries in the casual dining room at Army-Navy Country Club. The uphot of the discussion is that we will have a contest to write a story. He is taking on the Old Man on his home court and I hope he kicks my ass.

This isn't it. But we are all time travelers, of course. Arcing across the Fourth Dimension, experiencing things impossible to imagine in the eternal now, things that just show up unbidden. Like travel to the Moon and HDTV and TiVo. We just travel slowly, almost imperceptibly, and we sometimes forget just how profound the journey is.

I was definitely a time traveler yesterday. I had a morning of errands that was quite extraordinary. I hit the dry cleaners, the tailor, got an oil change, did my banking and was at the Commissary in less than an hour and an half. The oil change alone could have taken that amount of time, or more, but it all worked as though I had a personal escort. Saturday mornings are for that errand running. I accomplished them in a manner that was almost as slick as the memorable day I drove to the Headquarters at Langley without encountering a single red light, not one, from lot to lot. I walked through the security kiosk without waiting and got on to the elevator and hit the button for the sixth floor and arrived at my desk without a single impediment, not one. Like some force had pressed me in the small of my back and with gentle but unyielding and accelerating pressure, overcome gravity and delivered me untouched by the world to my office. As though there was a manifest destiny compelling me to action.

And then I looked down at the papers strewn around the computer and wondered what it might be.

In the fullness of time yesterday I was delivered to the waters of the condominium pool for a refreshing dip against the onset of the humidity. Angry skies were out to the west. They would be overhead in time, filling the air with vioence and fury. Once in the water, time returned to its indeterminate nature, became elastic and slowed. In the water was John, from the Journal of Clinical Oncology and a brash woman named Bertha in a florid swimsuit and an equally florid attitude. You know the type, I think. A blonde of a certain age, loud voice, and an absolute certainty of her place in the world. I was forcefully acquainted with her current relationship, the second legal one, and her husband's role in the building in which I live.

He had been the Engineer here for thirteen years. The man for whom the essential services we unthinkingly expect was the daily job. The trash pick-up and the eight-story garbage chutes. The electrical power bus, designed for the requirements of 1975 and now overheated with the requirements of HDTV, and the satellite uplink and the roof and the cell phone repeaters and computers, broad-band connectivity, TiVo, stereos, refrigerators and freezers. It blows out periodically, the old electrical bus, leaving us in darkness. Not as bad as Sarajevo, perhaps, but still a cautionary tale for anyone with a lot of frozen food in the coming sodden Washington summer.

I would hate to be responsible for an ancient power panel hooked to the regional electrical grid. Power lines as big as fire hoses and couplings that could serve water as well and elemental fire. Things have to change with the times, and the power panels are gradually upgraded as they explode in sparks. Bertha told me and anyone within earshot about how the pink brick was chosen for our eight story building. It was the personal selection of the woman who had built the neighborhood, wresting this part of Arlington County from placid field and wood and transforming it to the Buckingham community. She transformed this patch of farmland along Route 50 into a bustling area of apartment complexes and quaint little strips of shops to serve them. In her time, which pre-dated the rapacious development that now sprawls west to the Blue Ridge Mountains, she was the queen. Her reign lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s when her death a sqaubbling heirs splintered the area, changing it by turns from Little Saigon to Little San Salvadore.

With a flourish Bertha produced her trump. "You ever think about the security systems here? All the cameras on all the doors? That was the State Department that did that. It was because Speaker of the House Carl Albert lived here."

Carl Albert, I marveled. Carl Albert was elected as a Democrat to the Eightieth and the fourteen succeeding Congresses , 1947-1977, moving up in rank and aithority in every one of them. He finished as Speaker for the Ninety-second through Ninety-fourth Congresses. He died January 4, 2000, in McAlester, Okla.

But when the Speaker lived here, I bet he had a place to park in the basement.

Later, I ran into some other people who knew the Speaker. I attended a dinner commemorating the 85th birthday of Frank, the former Chief Counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee and confidant to the late, great Chairman H. Edward Hebert. I was there to fill out the table. My friend Cathy is Frank's daughter, and her significant other is running around one of the 'Stans tracking bad guys. He is the Special Agent who cracked the Starbucks execution murders in Georgetown a couple years ago, the ones the conspiracy nuts tried to link to the Clintons.

We were getting to know our tablemates when one of the Birthday cards was passed around. It was very clever. It was store-bought, but modified and personalized. There was a fan of paper glued into the inside cover and it talked about the number of things that had transpired since his birth in 1918. The list of the Presidents alone was a thing of wonder: Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, RMN, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush again.

Astonishing, when taken as a river of our century. We laughed and talked and ate the fine Italian fare. The table of retired lumiaries included Congressmen and artists and lobbiest and retired military officers and their spouses. They enjoyed their cocktails and wine. I was seated next to the Comptessa, a charming woman of with an engaging manner. She reportedly had been roundly hated for her frank beauty the other wives for several decades. When she was young, she had been whisked out of Budapest ahead of the Red Army by her wealthy father, leaving the estate behind to the rampaging Shock Army troops. She was taken to a village in the Dolomites and then to the Riviera and eventually to Geneva, where she met Susan. Susan had a mass of blonde hair piled atop her head and retained a puckish glint in her blue eyes behind the glasses of age.

Susan had landed in Le Havre in 1945 with her father. She was a ten-year-old girl. He was headed to re-establish the European Telecommunications Union in Geneva, and though her English is a rich Virginia, her French was as perfect as complete immersion can make it. She did not come home to America for thirteen years.

"You landed in 1945?" I asked. "But we blew the crap out of le Havre. It was a big Kreigsmarine U-Boat base!"

"Yes it was" answered Susan. "And yes, we did." She took a sip of her Whiskey Sour. "It was a long time ago. But I remember it like it was yesterday."