Time Travel

I am a time-travel junkie. I love time-travel movies, books, and TV programs. One of my favorite series of all time was Quantum Leap in which an astronaut keeps getting bounced around in time, inhabiting the bodies and lives of people with big problems. The cult movie that is still going strong is Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Recently, I have become addicted to the Outlander series of sagas set in the Highlands of Scotland and the colonies at the start of the Revolutionary War. I read them until I was bleary eyed and didn't give up until I hit one with 1,400 pages.

Recently, I happened upon a teen movie called Seventeen Again. It’s about a guy who has completely screwed up his life and dreams of going back to the moment when he was on the brink of great things and blew it. His best friend accuses him of living in past. And he responds, “Of course I’m living in the past. It was the best time of my life. I want to be there.” He gets his wish and ends of back in high school—not in the past but in the present. Instead of meeting his old girlfriend, whom he later married, he is in school with his own teenage kids. He’s been a lousy husband and father, and in all the crazy, circumstances of going back in time, he’s trying to change history. In a happily-ever-after-moment, he succeeds.

It was a funny, touching, romantic chic flick, and I loved it. One reason is that I have the same kind of memories of my years in high school and college. They were great … well, maybe not as great as I choose to remember them; but I don’t really care if they have improved with the passage of time. When I’m having a bad day, I can time travel back to a simpler era when I wore poodle skirts and danced to "Rock Around the Clock" and "When I Fall in Love."

I get chills just thinking about it.