Unstuck in Time

Aaron has come unstuck in time, much like Billy Pilgrim at the beginning of chapter two in Slaughterhouse-Five.  There’s a kind of snipping sensation when his eyes lose focus and take a rest so that his internal vision can take over the controls.  Don’t try to talk to him when this happens.  You will be just some disembodied voice, like a medium from another plane of existence trying to break through.  He can, and likely will, ignore you.

It is the act of writing that he is experiencing.  The trigger is more often than not a particular memory or, more accurately, the *feeling* of a memory that begs to be re-felt and, in the re-feeling, shared with people who might want to read about such things so they can feel it too.  It is a reflection of our shared experience of the world.  We are all connected, so they say.

Check his backlog.  For some reason a crow is a recurring feature in these stories, especially the ones that reach back into his childhood.  Aaron is not sure why this must necessarily be the case but it seems unavoidable or even inevitable as a stand-in for himself or other key players.  Maybe it’s a symbol for something mysterious or inexplicable, like “all people are connected.”  His favorite, though the title might be a bit too on the nose, is “The Crow.”  That one is a doozy and really happened to his younger self.

What has sparked these thoughts as of today?  Well, for one, he is re-reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five due to this year being the 50^th anniversary of its publication.  He just so happens to be 50 years old himself and is at this very moment writing in 3^rd person in case you were wondering.

And something that happened yesterday as well...  Aaron becomes unstuck in time, but only by one day in order to share something strange that happened that is destined to be a felt memory.  His son has gone to the neighborhood Rec Center to play basketball and upon his return the 14 year old boy is obviously upset about something.  He comes into the kitchen and plops down on a stool and hits his not-quite-adult-sized fist onto the table.  

“What’s wrong, buddy?”  Aaron asks, speaking as his father.

“Nothing.”

They go back and forth with no information being exchanged until Aaron takes a stab at guessing what might be wrong to try and break the fruitless cycle.

“OK, I think you are angry at yourself because you saw an old lady stumble and fall at the Rec Center and you walked away and did nothing.”

The son stops staring into space and focuses on his father with a quizzical look.

“Am I right?”  Which is the only thing Aaron can say in response to such a look because he was not expecting it.

“Dad, I was walking home and I saw an old man fall out of his wheelchair in his driveway and he was saying ‘help, somebody help.’  I didn’t know what to do.  I saw a woman come over and she called 911 on her phone but I just kept walking.  I’m so mad at myself.  Why didn’t I stop and help?”

Aaron assures him that feeling upset at himself is a good thing and a sign that he cares about other people but that there was nothing to be done apart from that woman calling 911.  What the father is really thinking as these reassuring words are coming from his mouth is, “How in the sam hill was I able to interpret my son’s emotions so accurately without knowledge of what had actually happened?!”  He suspects time travel.

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