My Time Traveling Son!

Before Andy was even born, I was relatively certain that he'd invented time travel.  We had picked out his name, and when I googled it just to make sure that there weren't any Andrew J. Berger serial killers or Fox News commentators, an image of my son popped up- or at least a pretty spot on predication of what my son would look like. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and seemed to awkwardly rock a kind of a skinny, dorky look.  He wore glasses- clearly myopic just like his mother. He was a professor in another state, and when I looked at the picture, I  had a tumbling feeling in my gut.  My son had invented time travel.  This was him.  And he had come back to the past to fix a wrong or to apply an academic solution to some future problem.  Who knew- his mission could be multi-faceted. Maybe he'd show up in my life just in time to push me out of the path of an oncoming bus.  Or into it, depending on what kind of mother I was about to become.

Over the years, my suspicion has grown.  Last year, Andy become obsessed with inventing A TIME MACHINE.  That's right.  He has worked hard on his blueprints, mapping out the machine in crayon and talking earnestly about it with his school friends.  Now, I'll be honest.  These time machine plans are a bit rudimentary.  There's usually a pretty big, unevenly drawn circle in the middle of the page where one would assume the time traveler would sit.  Then there's some wires wiggling out.  A couple months ago, Andy asked me what the most powerful battery was.  "Lithium ion?"  I guessed, only semi-confident that I wasn't just making those words up.

"Lithium ion," Andy repeated.  "What does it look like?"

"I think they're rectangular," I replied intelligently, and Andy scribbled in a rectangular lithium ion connected to the wires of his latest time machine circle.

"There," Andy said, satisfied.  "Laminate this, ok?"

Of course, time travel is the ultimate form of entertainment.  Andy and Alex have been captured by the time travel plot lines of Captain Underpants, and I myself often look up "Best Time Travel Books" on the Goodreads website looking for my latest fix.  Sometimes I have to look up "Decent Time Travel Books" because I've already read all of the best ones and now I'll just take something mediocre to keep me going.

"I think I would go back to... 1639," Andy said one day at dinner when time travel was once again the topic of conversation.  He was throwing out a completely random date.  "Yes, I would go back all the way to then.  I'd probably have to wear something old in order to blend in.  Maybe I could borrow something from Daddy."

"Yeah, good thinking," I agreed.  I know for a fact that some of Chris' T-shirts go back 20 years, and they're not even cool ones.  If anyone would keep four hundred year old clothes, it would be him.  "Alex, when would you go back to?"

Alex had his answer ready.  "I would definitely time travel to when I was four," he announced.  "I would time travel to when I was 4 and go find Daddy and tell him to buy the right Skylander Trap Force portal."  This, of course, was in reference to last week's video game disappointment.  You know, the one in which the aforementioned Daddy bought the wrong Skylander Trap Force portal. Alex, with his dry, non-ironic delivery is either a stand up comic in the future or everyone's favorite office coworker at some low to medium level job in which his droll comments at the water cooler are basically what keep all of the other associates from hanging themselves each night.   He never fails to unintentionally crack me up.  To wit, we were recently at Great America, sitting inside the Mystery Van Scooby Doo ride.  I called it a bus when describing it to Emily, and Alex, looking disdainfully around at all of the sticky surfaces, was quick to correct me.  "It's not a bus, it's a van.  A mystery van. Because there's lots of mysteries on the floor."

"That's probably a good era to travel back to," I replied to Alex now.  "Like four months ago, in the pre-kindergarten period.  That was truly the golden age."

Andy, never quite amused by Alex, just ignored us and asked, "What exactly is the time-space continuum?"

Oh boy, here we go. I cut into my chicken and began to wax poetic on the very fabric of time, explaining the intricacies of the universe and of course, the most important thing about time travel, which was that you could never accidentally kill your grandmother.  "Just think," I said, "about the paradox created if you did something and your grandmother died and then I wasn't born and then of course YOU weren't born."

Andy's eyes got very wide, and Alex, who I had assumed checked out of the conversation five minutes ago, poked around his plate and piped up, "Yeah.  Maybe we shouldn't do any time traveling. It sounds pretty unsafe."

You know, it does sound pretty unsafe.  Would these wise words convince Andy?  Later that day, I googled his name just to see.  Andrew J. Berger- my grown up son, the professor- still came up first in my search.  He was still here, existing in the present.  My time traveling son who figured out the exact precise way to connect the lithium ion battery to the time travel machine.  You did it, boy.  Now even though we've all been born and it's technically okay to kill your grandmother- it's probably still best if you don't.  But maybe you could go back a few weeks and drop Daddy an anonymous note about that Skylander portal, just to be a nice big brother.