Another Time, Another Place

Part 1 - "regress"

I like to think that I have seen everything.

"Been there, done that" is a phrase that has often passed my lips.

But that day in the basement made me question my entire outlook on life, reality, and the natural order of things. Just for a moment, I had a vision of an entirely different, less ordered world.

It all started when I wanted to build a workbench in a corner of the basement. This corner was filled with boxes from previous lives. I don't mean lives in other dimensions or reincarnations. No, these past lives were in different cities, houses bought, lived in and forsaken when the job took us elsewhere. Each move added to the collection of boxes that went into storage. Boxes carefully packed, numbered and cross-referenced to master lists that were lost long ago.

Boxes that eventually found their way to the corner of the basement of our retirement home where I wanted to put a workbench.

Occasionally, contents were marked on the outside. "#14 - M Bdrm" or "LR Bkcase #23". These were easy to deal with. Nearly all of it went to Goodwill. There were a few treasures found; a book my wife made with pictures of family generations, yearbooks from our grade school years, some original pieces of art. But most of it was tchotchke. It was the boxes marked "Kids Toys" that were the problem. I should have just dropped them off at Goodwill, like the others. But I opened one of them and showed it to my wife.

"Oh my God, I made that little rag doll for Maureen when she was tiny."

Two Barbie doll sets were next. Then a wooden train. "You shouldn't just dump this stuff. Ask the girls if they want any of it". My wife was more optimistic than I.

As I suspected, our older daughter, Lindsey, texted back, "Just pick out something representative and save it for me."

The younger, Maureen, called. "You can't throw it out. That's our childhood. I want those toys for my grandchildren".

I pointed out the obvious, that her kids were still teenagers. "I'm not hanging on to this until your kids have kids. If you want this stuff, come and pick it up."

Which was how I found myself, weeks later, sitting in the basement with my grandchildren, Libby and Tim, surrounded by flattened boxes, crumpled newsprint, and three piles of toys: keepers, charity, and junk. We had two boxes to go.

Tim dragged a box to the middle of the floor, "This one's heavy."

Tim's job was to open the boxes and unwrap. After that, for the most part, he lost interest. Libby then took over and sorted to the piles.

"Whoa, what's this?" Tim used two hands to lift a large gray and chrome boombox from its packing.

"That's your mother's version of an I-Pod," I told him.

"Does it work?" He rummaged in the box and brought out a power cord.

I fitted the cord to the back of the radio and Tim plugged it into the wall. There was a crackling noise and lights on the boombox flickered on and off. Voices cut in and out.

Then we clearly heard a voice that was more familiar to me than my own father's. "The entire Columbia mission lasted two days, six hours, twenty minutes, and fifty three seconds." Walter Cronkite was talking to me from the speakers of a long dead radio. "And that's the way it is Tuesday, April Fourteenth,1981.

Chills went up and down my spine as I listened. Somehow we had bridged the space/time gap. We were listening to a broadcast from 41 years ago. An announcer was extolling the virtues of a modern Buick but I wasn't registering. I heard the hiss, the crackle, and the clipped fidelity of the old time radio broadcasts and I was transported. I can't imagine the look on my face but it must have alarmed my grandson.

"Mom, come quick," he hollered.

My daughter, Mo, came into the room as I was trying to explain to the kids the miracle of what we were hearing. We were listening to a radio broadcast from the past that had been bouncing around the universe for decades.

She walked over to the boombox and pushed a button on the top. The voice stopped and a door flipped open, revealing a cassette tape. "I liked to tape the radio when I was your age.," she told her son. Then, as she left the room she added, "we're not keeping the boombox."