I was just another sightseer on my family’s trip to Pikes Peak.

Swimming partners under a Southern sun were busy with a makeshift diving board.

Bolder still, I went through space and time to meet my 30-something mother in Guatemala.

Birthday time machine

Dec. 2, 2015

By Jenny Morris

I got a time machine for my birthday. Then ignoring every literary caution, I hurtled headfirst into a past life.

Like all time travelers, I risked bumping into myself at every turn. But no matter. Three-year-old Jenny stared straight at me with no reaction.

Surrounded by artifacts of childhood, my 6-year-old self never blinked.

I got a time machine for my birthday. But it didn’t really take me back. It brought the past forward — a feat just as miraculous for all but the last handful of human generations.

As I fed slide after slide into my digitalizing gizmo, I copied pictures from a simpler world. But not one I want to go back to for more than these few moments. 

Like all children, the me-child frozen in those 35 mm still shots was always looking for the future. 

I won’t disappoint her by staying in a time she was ready to leave.

Besides, why live in the past when at 52 I’m exactly where I want to be?

Then I joined her again outside Canterbury Cathedral.