My Alternate Time Traveling Reality

In my alternate time traveling reality, my parallel life, I get to be 54 at the same time as my mother, Lucy.

Yeah she had hearing then and I’m all deaf now and shit but I bet she had some awesome ASL chops before she really needed them.

I want to chat, dish, schmooze with Lu, woman to woman, about all that gooey shit that makes life grand.

I wanna talk pottery -- she was way keen on Terra Cotta, my mud of choice. Painting -- she was into the impressionists, not the expressionists but they were all about color and light, right? I’ll bet big dimes she’d have been WAY into the color field dudes. Maybe not Motherwell but Rothko and Barnett Newman -- OH yeah. 

BOYS! As I crashed into my 20s she all of a sudden felt comfortable, OK -- less uncomfortable, talking about sex. That is, she brought the subject up NOT me. Lucy nudged and needled me more than a few times about my BFF Kevin.  Mia madre was impatient. She wanted me to jump his bones and jump ‘em good -- figured he was just too shy to make the first move.That’s not quite how she worded it but it’s bloody close.

I want to be 38 in the same year Lucy was 38. That was the year we lived on the corner of Waterman and Butler in Providence, Rhode Island. It was the year of the Great Northeast Blackout. It was also the year that Help!, The Beatles’ second movie, came out. I imagine I was probably psyched to see it but, being just seven, didn’t figure it’d happen. I never even asked if she would please, please PUH-LEESE Mommy, take me.

And then she announced, one day after I came home from my second grade hell at Saint Sebastian’s, that she would take us to a theater on the Brown campus where it was playing. I was thrilled down to the subatomic level, giddier than a pack of rainbow colored soap bubbles chased by a herd of wee calicoes. I was 99 kinds of psyched.

We get to the auditorium and it’s jam packed with teenage girls...big people. Few were sitting down to begin with and then, THEN, the movie started. As one, they were all on their feet, many standing on the seats. The absolute second Ringo’s be-ringed hand entered the screen the shrieks, the cries, the squeals began and increased spectacularly when the camera panned out to take in the entire Fab Four.

Mein gott, I couldn’t see or hear a thing. I yanked on my mother’s skirt and asked why. I said, ‘I can’t see, I can’t hear the movie’ and ‘how can any of them enjoy the show if they’re all yelling.’ Heh, Lucy was standing too. She didn’t pay me much mind -- in fact I think she shushed me. I realize only now that's because SHE was standing and craning for a better view of Paul or John too.