Time Travel

I have one or two more days of limiting my subject matter to parenting, depending on if you factor in the day I skipped without explaining or confessing. A mixed bag, I would say. I didn't feel guilty writing about parenting, as I declared that I would in advance, but being the kind of person who feels a little let down in a restaurant after ordering due to the termination of the decision-making factor, I also felt a little constrained and irritated by the confines of my pledge. I guess that's point of an experiment: to see what happens.

Tomorrow, to make up for my skipped day, I will write about the five minutes I spent in a cab today that felt like an hour, as I'd planned to now. But right now I find myself compelled in another direction.

Today I started reading A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in many years with a child who'd never read it before. He'd started reading it without me, and is a little on the young side for the book, so was understandably a little confused. We plunged in, and for a few moments the boy, an inordinately polite little guy, sat beside me as I fell in full force, forgetting about him, the room I was sitting in, the Upper West Side on a muggy summer afternoon in 2008. I was about eleven, in the hammock in our front yard, under a crab apple tree that dropped blossoms for weeks on end like soggy snowflakes, holding the book above my head in a kind of a trance.

My favorite childhood books so often had plucky girl heroines, but Meg was different from Anne or all the Betsys or Jo or any of the others. In fact, the strongest memory I have of reading this book is of how different it was altogether from anything else I had read: not exactly science fiction, which was not my genre, and not exactly a thriller or mystery, also not my genres, and not exactly a coming of age. It was somehow all of these and none of these, and when I snapped out of my reading fog and remembered my patient student, I asked him, "So what did you think of it, what you read?" and he looked a little nervous to tell me and then, finally, said in a small voice, "I thought it was strange."

"Do you like it?" I asked, genuinely curious. He nodded, quite vigorously.

"I don't understand a lot of it, but I do like it," he said. I nodded too. "Strange" seemed just about right. So we got online--when I would have called my uncle, a mathematician of sorts--to read about tesseracts, and as I stumbled a little trying to explain the four-dimensional cube within a cube, the boy interrupted me, unusual for him, and said, "But isn't the fourth dimension time?" I must have beamed at him because he looked taken aback.

"Exactly," I said. "I think you're ready to keep reading."

And as I walked back home to my own two girls, who have so many heroines to discover, including brilliant, defiant Meg Murry, I felt actually a thrill of anticipation on his behalf, as well as a little wistful on mine. A wrinkle in time, indeed.