Time Travel Via E-Mail

I had the strangest thing happen tonight. I have had problems with my computer so I rolled it back a week.

When it was finally back up, I discovered this message from my yet to be born first child letting everyone know about my recently arrived sixth grandchild.


-----Original Message-----
From: Alyssa ………..
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 1970 7:13 AM
To: ………………..
Subject: It's a Boy!

Come see my handsome new nephew...
http://ernstopia.blogspot.com/ --
Blessings, Alyssa
*****************************
Tuesday, January 6, 1970, 7:13 AM.

If this was central time, I would have two minutes to get to my desk in the Personnel building at Eglin AFB, a Systems Command Air Force Base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Five weeks and two days, my husband and I will pack up and ship our earthly possessions and our 1969 Austin America (our first and last new car) would be filled and ready to drive out the gate to go out into the big unknown world.

I would grab my coffee cup, checking to make sure nothing was hiding in it then go across the hall and wait for the red light to come on indicating the coffee was done and we had to get to work. I would check off my ‘Short’ calendar – thirty-six more days and a wake up. In the next few weeks I would finish buying every McCormick’s spice I can find at the Commissary. Thirty-seven years later, I probably still have a couple in my spice drawer (contents replaced, though.)

Some time this morning I would walk over to the BX (Base Exchange) and meet Bob to pick up mail. He might pick me up for lunch since we would often go out to a bayou to eat. At 1515 we would go back to our duplex, jumping through the front door to avoid the scorpions that lived above it, then change into something more comfortable.

Dinner could be a lovely yellow meal - mac & cheese, corn and cornbread muffins or something quick out of my Cooking for Two cookbook. We might take a walk with the neighbor's Irish setter who loved to catch things we threw out in the water even when it was cold (Florida cold).

If I knew then what I know now, I would not turn in my wonderfully soft, blue Air Force blanket and I would not sell all of my uniforms to ‘Ma’.

I would take more photos – lots and lots more photos. Photos of the different places we lived, places on the base, the little beach we would walk to a couple of blocks from our duplex, the beach – the sugar-white sand and the teal blue water.

I would also learn how to change the film in Bob’s camera. That may have prevented not having one photo from the time we left New York until we arrived in Tacoma six weeks later. He thought I was changing the rolls and I thought he was. It turned out that the film didn’t catch when he changed it just before we left East Patchogue.

We clicked and wound and clicked and wound as much as we wanted and not one of those clicks did anything. We lost the photos of his cousins, uncles and aunts in Akron and Indianapolis; the blizzard in Iowa City Iowa, amazingly rugged cliffs in Wyoming, slots in the restroom in Elko?, Nevada, shots of Alcatraz , Sharon, my best friend from high school, the Siskiyou mountains and all that in between.

I would look in the mirror and really see how much in shape I am.

I would get to know Bob’s relatives better that we visited on our trip. I didn’t know that we would not be back to see most of them.

I would try to sell our foot-long Plecostomus instead of crowding it into a one-gallon tank and carrying it thousands of miles cross country.

Most of all, I would try to live more in the moment and not be quite so concerned about the “What if….s” that often kept me from saying “Yes!”