WHEN WOULD YOU GO?

I find the idea of time travel fascinating. It was a key element of storytelling in one of my all-time favorite television series The Twilight Zone, the original created by Rod Serling not the lame imitation of a few years ago. Classic time travel stories take a person unexpectedly from the familiar surroundings of their own time to places either in the past or the future.

Rev. Samuel Madden is considered one of the first writers to tell a time travel story, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: Being original letters of state under George the Sixth written in 1733. Others from Mark Twain to Washington Irving to Charles Dickens to Isaac Asimov to Robert Heinlein to Woody Allen have joined Madden and Serling in writing about time travel.

All those stories seemed wonderfully fanciful. But maybe not. Quantum theory suggests the possibilty of time travel. Who knows if it might be possible to step through a time portal and find yourself suddenly in another time, another place?

Which leads me to the point of this: when would you go if you could travel anywhere in time to the past or the future?

I love history so there are many historic moments in the past I would love to visit. Some of them are:
· As a Christian there are many moments from the Bible I would love to visit: the Garden of Eden, to see Noah building the Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, and the confrontation of David with Goliath. Most of all I would love to be there at daybreak on the first Easter morning when Jesus emerged from the tomb.

· One of my heroes has always been Davy Crockett. I would like to be in the Alamo when Davy and the others make their heroic last stand against Santa Anna’s army.

· I would love to be there on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong steps off the landing pad of Eagle and onto the surface of the moon.

There are also moments in the past that are only meaningful to me that I’d love to visit—or revisit.

· How thrilling it would be to witness the moment my parents met for the first time. I’d love to see them as teenagers who meet having no idea what the future has in store for them.

· I’d give anything to go back in time and sit around my Mom-Mom Collins’ Sunday dinner table with my family. Though we were poor, that table was filled with wonderful homemade dishes of every description, with her fried chicken at the center. The joy and love around that table was priceless.

· I’d love to be in the Midway Drive-in Theatre on a hot early June night in 1968 when I met Karen, my future wife. It would be embarrassing to see how awkward and slightly intoxicated I was but it would be worth it to see how gorgeous she was—and still is.

Time travel is intriguing to think about. Regardless of the mechanics—a visit from Christmas Ghosts or sitting in a sleigh surrounded by blinking lights—the concept is awesome to consider. These are some of the times to which I would travel. Let me ask you: when and why would you go in time? I’d really be interested to hear from you.