How to trace time

Time may change me, but...

The other day I had this flash of memory that was so specific I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I saw myself on a summer day in 1996, walking down Third Avenue, either having just gotten a frozen yogurt or on my way to get a frozen yogurt (as I mentioned to Tony when describing this memory, “Any time travel I do will involve frozen yogurt”). I was 26 years old.

That summer I had been temping at a bunch of places, one of which was Parents Magazine, where I think I was temping just when this memory takes place. This temp job was significant only because I met Joe Rosenfeld, who became my friend for the briefest of times, but who has remained a strangely memorable though absent character ever since (so much so that, when I first joined Facebook approximately 50 years ago, I requested Joe as a friend, and he took so long to respond—merely because he was hardly ever on there—that I named a character Joe Rosenfeld in a story I was writing and then did this in every story ever since. I have even used the name repeatedly in stories for work, which delights me every time).

Not long after I met Joe Rosenfeld, he walked up to my desk and said, “They’re moving ‘The X-Files’ to Sunday nights; what are we going to do?” And thus, we became instant friends. Around this time, my uncle sent me some haikus (I know the plural of “haiku” is “haiku,” and yet) written about the Unibomber (I think they were from “online,” whatever that meant in 1996), which I showed to Joe, and then after that anytime we needed to communicate with each other it was only in haikus written on post-it notes (gosh, remember how carefree it was to be so young?). But my time at this job was pretty short-lived, so either I had already moved on to another job and ran into Joe on the street before or after the frozen yogurt, or I was still working there. Joe remains sort of lurking in this memory is what I’m getting at.

But the memory is not about Joe at all; it’s about me. My life was about to change, but I had no idea. I was, at the time, living in Astoria, Queens, with my dear friend Leah (who funny enough, 29 years later, lives less than a mile from me in Albany). In a couple months I would start grad school at NYU, and not long after that I would meet the man who would eventually become my husband and then, eventually, my ex-husband. I would move to Brooklyn and get a job at an educational publishing company, which would unexpectedly become my career. I would turn 30, get pregnant, and move out of the city for good, all in a single year.

This is me in November 1996. Leah took this photo on our trip to New Orleans. I was on the phone with my about-to-be boyfriend. My life had already started going in the direction it was headed by then.

Naturally, I knew none of this as I walked down Third Avenue that day, my mind full of 20-something thoughts, the whole world ahead of me. For a moment, as this memory came to me the other day, I wanted to be 26-year-old me again, if just for a minute. I wanted to experience that feeling of walking past the tall buildings on Third Avenue, where I spent a bunch of my early working years, with so many significant decisions in my life still ahead of me. I wanted to not know anything yet. I wanted the feeling, that I didn’t even feel then, of having every possibility open to me. I wanted the streets to feel the way they did then, as just ordinary streets, and not, as they do now, as portals into the past. I wanted nothing in my life to change; I just wanted to visit myself on an ordinary day, to remember those streets, to remember how little I didn’t know yet, to remember my dumb and useful 20-something life.