Time Flying (15 page)

Even though I knew full well Coach MacLaren was going to at the very least, have a serious heart attack, and at the worst, die (again), being closer to him this time hit me harder than I thought it would. Standing at the gravesite four days later, I reflected darkly on the predicament I was in, able to change so much, but powerless in so many other ways. The inspiration hit me to look for answers in the same place I had the night I drove back to Cincinnati after reading the letter from my grandfather.

Gary.

This time, I knew I wouldn’t have to engage in a conversation that spanned a dozen cell phone calls, because well, there
weren’t
any cell phones yet, and he wouldn’t be traipsing around the Texas outback. He’d be in his dorm room at M.I.T.

Before the Big 10 season got started, the team played a game not far from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where M.I.T was located, so I snuck out game day morning for a quick trip to meet my best friend. Gary was going to love this.

I found my way to Cambridge, and the Registrar’s office, staffed on that day by a college basketball fan, who recognized me instantly. I explained that I was looking for my “cousin,” Gary Danner, a student at the school, but don’t have any contact information for him, no dorm address, or even a phone number. I remembered Gary telling me he lived in the dorms all four years at MIT, so I knew I would find him on campus.

Except I didn’t.

He wasn’t at MIT, or as my new friend, the Boilermaker-loving Registrar’s Assistant told me, after consulting the school’s computer network that was experimentally connected to other schools, there was no Garry Danner registered anywhere he could find.

I thanked my new friend and fan for his help, and wandered out, wondering how the hell this could be? I had only been back in my past for a couple years, but already could tell, outside of people and events I interacted with,
nothing
changed. If some sort of randomness existed that could change things without my influence in this timeline, I hadn’t seen any evidence of it yet.
How could my actions here change where Gary went to school?
I wondered.
Maybe Gary didn’t really even go to MIT Maybe it was all a lie!
 

As much as this possibility disturbed me, it seemed to be the only explanation. Garry was a year younger than me, so he would have been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for three of the four years I attended Purdue. He should have been here at this time.
Did he have a different name?
I remembered seeing his diplomas, undergrad and graduate, both in the name of “Gary Richard Danner,” his middle name being the same as my firstMIT. Garry is a genius, so if he forged the documentation of a graduation from the prestigious MIT, I figured
so what?
Intuition told me, however, something that simple wasn’t the answer.

I took a cab back to the hotel near the campus of the college we were playing,  just in time for a light lunch before we went to the arena for an afternoon workout. The game was that night.

I didn’t try again to find Gary, not really sure what to make of the whole situation. So, except for no Gary in this timeline and the changes arising from Amanda and me being together, the world went on as it had before. I didn’t have another episode taking me back to 2007 until my first experience in the Dunker, so when it did happen again, it was quite a shock. I never told Amanda any more about my experience, which probably seems quite strange. But you have to realize while I lived through the 70s and 80s again day to day, the thought I had imagined the future grew stronger and stronger. I found myself doing my “remember 2007” exercises less and less, and though so much of what I saw in the news I had seen before, many things in my life were different this time, imagining this was the real life and the other one in 2007 with Molly and Samantha was fantasy did not prove terribly difficult. I would be lying , however, if I said the ache in my gut over the family I left in 2007 ever eased, let alone disappeared.

By the time Amanda and I graduated from college in 1981, she in the spring on time and me the following winter (basketball cost me some time, despite my doing a couple summer sessions), I had come to accept if this life proved real, I would be here awhile, since Thelma told me she spent 30 years in her past. If I ended up staying here for that long, I figured so be it. I would live this life as the only one I had. And so I did.

Amanda and I got engaged a month after I graduated, just before Valentine's Day, 1982. She taught Ballet at a dance school in Indy while I worked for an Engineering firm supporting various divisions of General Motors. We had gone to Amanda's parents' house for dinner the night before Valentine's Day and when Amanda's father, Frank  and I found ourselves along for a few minutes, I asked him if I could ask Amanda to marry me. He smiled, shook his head, and said, “I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to ask, Rich.” He held out his hand, which I grasped as he shook mine vigorously. “Absolutely,” he replied.

I told him I planned to take Amanda to dinner the next night and propose, which Frank Tully thought sounded like a great idea. He even insisted on paying for dinner.

Amanda and her sister still lived with their parents, so after dinner and some conversation, she walked me to my car, the same Plymouth Fury I had owned the first time I lived these days. I leaned against the passenger door of the car, parked on the street outside the Tully’s house on the West side of Indianapolis, and Amanda slipped into my arms, tucking her head under my chin as I pulled her in close. We stood that way for a minute or so. The weather, unseasonably warm, but still chilly, so Amanda's arms snuggled underneath my open coat, wrapped around me. I closed my eyes, drew in the scent of her, a little musky, since she had come home straight from teaching three dance classes in a row, but with the remnants of Taboo mixed in. To say it stirred my interest is an understatement, and I began to feel the effects of her being close by, and we hadn’t been able to spend much time together in the past week.

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

Amanda looked up at me, the same predatory look in her eyes I had first seen in the music hallway in high school several years before, as she sang “Makin' Whoopee” to me.
Oh, for God's sake
, I thought.
I've got to derail this, because there is no way
…

Still looking up at me, Amanda pressed in closer, dropping her hands to my butt and pulled me to her, causing some parts of me to make more direct contact with her. “Hmmm,” she said, looking down, “what in the world…”

“Amanda, can I ask you a question?”

She stopped, relaxed a little and again looked up at me. “Sure,” she said, “what?”

“Well, I love you. And I want to marry you. Will you marry me?”

The look on her face remains, to this day, burned into my mind, priceless, in all its cliched, open mouthed glory. Never before had I, or anyone I knew of, seen Amanda Tully at a loss for words. I guess for everything, there is a first time, though and my quickly expanding parts forgotten, her arms moved to around my neck, she pulled herself up, reaching for my mouth with hers, and I got my answer.

Gene still paid for dinner the next night.

I entered AOCS (Aviation Officer Candidate School) in June of 1982, and we married in July of the next year. By 1990, we were the proud parents of two children, both boys, a rarity among Naval Aviators, who for some reason, most often produced female children — something to do with the electromagnetic fields, high g-forces, or some other environmental influence we were exposed to while flying. In 1990, Aaron was five years old and Michael turned three. Navy life and living in Washington State proved comfortable and enjoyable. Amanda owned a small dance studio in Bellingham where she taught Ballet, Tap and Modern Dance, and I flew in Intruders, keeping the world safe for Democracy. Entire weeks would go by without my thinking of 2007, and then would be at home in the den of our small bungalow and glance at my Macintosh computer and it would all flood back in. Or, there would be something on television about the World Trade Center towers and the past/future would take over my thoughts. For the most part though, I lived without constant reminders that from my perspective, I lived in the past. In 1990, news didn't come at you like water gushing from a high-pressure firehose as in 2007. The News aired at 6pm and 10pm, CNN was on cable, but didn’t resemble what the network had become by 2007. MSNBC had not launched yet, nor had Fox News or CNBC. I think if all of those outlets had existed, I would have been reminded constantly that I had seen all of this before, but because what I experienced, for the most part, stayed local in nature, life appeared to be all new. I could almost forget the truth of my life in this time period.

Among my squadron mates, I alone knew we were preparing to go to war in the Middle East in the next few months. Everyone in VA-145 was aware of the possibility, and several were certain shots would be fired and we would be among those doing the shooting, but I was the only one who knew. My flying partner, A-6E pilot Lieutenant Commander (like me) Patrick Maney one of the certain ones, and about as gung ho as they come, ready to deliver ordinance to Saddam Hussein, and make him sign the receipt. Pat, 5 feet 8 inches of irritatingly cocky Navy combat-air jock, was no fan of the rich Arabs of Kuwait, but he had a serious dislike for Saddam. As odd as it sounds, I think the dictator's habit of wearing uniforms and medals he hadn't earned was what truly irked Pat, who had worked hard to earn his uniform and “chest candy” and didn't like pretend-warriors. I would listen to his harangues at least once a week, which ran the gamut from simple anger over oppressors in general, to, to passionately and often funny, all depending on the news out of the Gulf that day. To most people, military included, the Iraqi dictator appeared somewhat “squared away” in his uniforms, whether he was addressing the government leaders of Iraq or shooting a rifle into the air from a balcony, Pat insisted Hussein looked like 'a bag of ass.'

When he got spooled up, the motivation to describe to Pat the scene of his nemesis being pulled out of a hole in the ground in Iraq in 2003 was tremendous. I looked forward to witnessing Pat’s satisfaction as he viewed the news accounts of Saddam being pulled out of his rat-hole, looking like Howard Hughes’ crazy uncle.

I pushed myself out of the pool, having once again extracted myself from the Dunker, and watched as the contraption slowly climbed back up the rails to the locked top position, ready for another rider. A couple more dunks and we'd be done with this nostalgic little program revisiting some of the experiences of our early training, designed to, as much as anything, give us a sense of all we've accomplished. I had to admit, the project did give me an interesting sense of the depth of my experience in the service. But, once the nostalgia wore off after the first couple weeks, the time in Pensacola became tedious, being away from family and our normal routines. The irony of this not lost on me, this experience similar to what I had bee going through for the past 15 years with my time travel. Sure, the nostalgia was interesting at first, but I realized early on I would need to do things different this time, or I would die of boredom watching the same reruns of Barney Miller and M
A
S*H, not to mention getting messed up again on painkillers.

But, the Navy didn't give us much opportunity to be creative with these training exercises, so in the end, they just bored us. Of course, my enjoying the process wasn’t the objective. They had training and bio-mechanical experts watching us, evaluating how experienced officers handled the tasks they spent a lot of money and effort training recruits to do. Like all things in Government service, somewhere in all this there existed a point which usually need a little digging to uncover.

A couple hours later, dressed in service khakis, Pat and I relaxed in the Officer's Mess having dinner, not interested in spending our last night in Pensacola in town with a bunch of rowdy junior officers, and I wondered if they watched and recorded that, too. We held transport passes to go back to Whidbey the next day, both of us eager to get back to our families. I'd been away from Amanda and the boys for 3 weeks, since they had flown back to Washington after a week-long visit here to the sunshine. Pat's wife and twins hadn't been able to come, caught up in work and school.

We talked, as usual, about the upcoming deployment and as I insisted Saddam would set his oil fields on fire, an officer, a full Commander, walking through the room about 10 yards away from us, caught my eye. As he passed from behind a table, my eyes dropped reflexively to his feet. He wore black navy oxfords, not the brown oxfords of an aviator. From my vantage point, I couldn't quite see his warfare badge, but he was so familiar. Where had I served with this guy? Then it hit me.

“Walter Steinberg!” I shouted, drawing the attention of a small group of officers at the next table, and causing the black-shoed officer to stop and identify the source of the voice calling him. I had gotten up, advancing on the puzzled  Commander, who I now could tell  wore a Medical Corps warfare badge on the left side of his chest. Not quite as tall as me, but thinner, with older style black framed glasses and the beginnings of grey through his slightly longish (for a naval officer) hair. He stared for a few seconds, then recognizing me, his faced broke into a huge smile and his hand extended.

“Rich Girrard!” he said as I pumped his hand.

I dropped his hand, nodding at the epaulets on his uniform, “Holy shit, Doc, pardon my language, sir, you're running away from me. You go get a Surface badge and you'll be driving my boat!”

A wry smile from Steinberg. “I don't think so. They keep promoting us to keep us out of private practice. But Jesus, who needs to have to buy malpractice insurance?” he asked. Almost 5 years had passed since Walter and I met at our 10th High School class reunion. He'd gone to college, graduated in 3 years. The Navy put him through Medical School, counting on him to be a Neurologist for Uncle Sam when he finished, which he did. Apparently, from the number of accommodations on his chest, and the gold eagles on his shoulders, he was a good one. I’ve known Walt Steinberg in both timelines, and I can attest to the fact he’s not a master politician. A very nice, sincere genius, but he tells people what he thinks and believes, not what will get him promoted.