Early this morning, I’m sitting here listening to Beegie Adair, a marvelous piano player who is a master at playing songs long gone by (she can be found on You Tube), thinking of a half-asleep thought/dream I had last night.
I found myself thinking about a beginning of a book — the third in a series I have never published. The first two are about a middle-aged woman who crashes her car and wakes up in the 1880s. The first book is about survival, the second love.
Last night I thought — what if I wrote a third book from the point of view of her 73-year-old character?
What would she have to say? What would her life have been, living in a world that already played its part in history?
She would not have been able to tell anyone about the first landing on the moon; about World War II or computers or covid. It would have been madness to talk about vehicles that move hundreds of people through the air to other continents or technology that enabled one to have instant answers and communication with a touch of a button.
She needn’t share any of her knowledge of the future — she would have learned that what she knew didn’t matter anymore. Not if she was happy.
Yet she left behind a daughter and a husband. How could she not wonder … what pain did she put them through by disappearing? Did she have grandchildren? What happened to her husband? Did her daughter grow up to be an executive of an influential business or a back street junkie?
The one thing my character has in common with all of us is that we are a result of our decisions. Some may be corrected to run a more favorable path in the future, some may lead to further destruction. But our future (for the most part) is in our own hands.
Choosing to stay in the past cut off her ability to affect what she left behind. No more chances to strengthen relationships or mend fences. No chances to see what she could have become, because she changed the rules of the game in ways she never dreamed.
My character will never know how her decisions affected the world she left behind. I guess she will never know how her time travel affected the world she chose, either.
As Beegie Adair plays Once Upon a Time on a grand piano, I am left sentimental and melancholy. I cannot change the things that have happened in the past 73 years, nor will my passing change the next 73. But for the time I’ve got left here I hope to change every now into something positive and loving.
It will be my contribution to a never-ending story.
Maybe I will write that third book. I have a lot of knowledge I can share with her, along with a lot of hope for the future.
After all, that’s all any of us have.
Humoring the Goddess 