I traveled back through time on Sunday, through days and hours, months and years, in a machine made of melody and gossamer ribbons of sound. I didn’t do it intentionally; it just sort of happened. My true intent was to stay in 2014 and attend the 200th anniversary celebration kick-off service at my old church in Washington, D.C. But I did not stay in 2014.
It had been a rainy and warm-ish day on Saturday, a rarity for D.C. in August, so we Vermonters were almost comfortable as we approached the church on Sunday morning. The heat and humidity would not assault us for several more hours at least, so we were thankful for small blessings. The outside of the building looked much as I remembered it, and as we approached the door on the back side corner, I remembered that I needed to ring the bell, look at the camera, smile seductively, and wait to be buzzed in. Once we stepped inside, however, I became immediately lost. I had forgotten how to navigate through the small labyrinth that is the basement of every church, but I had my wife with me, and her middle name is “GPS.”
With Tenor Mom in the lead, we quickly found the choir room, and everything looked exactly as I recalled, and yet totally different at the same time. There were the boxes where I had once stored my music, and the seats were in the same spots, but the poster with all of the choir members’ pictures was gone, and a few things had been moved around. It was like a bizarro world choir room.
Part of the bicentennial celebration was that alumni choir members were invited to sing at this service, which was the reason we were down there in the first place. This meant that we saw a lot of familiar faces, but it was unclear as to which ones were faces of people who had stayed at the church over the past decade, and which ones were now, like us, choir alumni. From what I gathered, almost none of the people I actually recognized still went to the church. The room was full of unfamiliar singers, mingled with familiar folks who were walking around in the same haze of time in which I also walked. This was not time travel. This was more like a dream, where at any moment I could suddenly be on a boat with an old co-worker trying to make sandwiches for a group of lion cubs. Or I could wake up.
Our old choir director walked in to a chorus of hellos and cheers and, once hugs were exchanged with many, she took to the piano to get things started. The anthems we were doing were old favorites, and there had been prior rehearsals that I had not attended, so we touched a few things up as I stood in the back of the room with my old voice teacher and caught up a little in between the singing parts. It was starting to feel a little more comfortable as I put on my robe and grabbed my old folder, but I wasn’t there yet. People and places and clothes and things did not make an effective time machine on their own.
Then we marched upstairs to our positions, waiting for the service to start, and for our cue to process down the aisle. The church is different now, in that it live streams its services, so we were lined up in a run-off room with a large video screen of the sanctuary and extra seating. They didn’t need it that week (D.C. in August is fairly empty) but I’ll bet they needed it on a lot of other weeks. The pastor, not the same one that had been there when I had left, greeted everyone in the room, and online as well, thanking them for being present. Weird. Welcome to the future I guess. Maybe I had traveled forward in time, which was why I was so confused. I looked in the mirror. I looked the same as I had the day before, and yet something told me I also looked ten years older than the last time I had looked in that mirror. I was completely out of the space-time continuum at that point, and floundering listlessly through the dimensionless ether.
There was no time to consider the implications of any of this, because the music started and we were off. I knew as soon as we rounded the corner that I was truly a Vermonter now, because as I stepped into that enormous, cavernous space that I had been in hundreds and hundreds of times before, I suddenly felt almost ill. It was so big! And empty. I felt as though I might float off into space, or become lost in the void as I followed the robes in front of me to my old seat in the choir loft. I had no idea where I was, or what was going on. Familiar memories walked around and said things into futuristic microphones, and I tried to relax and go with it. Looking out over the space from the choir loft felt better than walking into it from the back. Maybe because we were up higher, or there were people physically closer, squeezed into the pews alongside of me. I decided I was going to survive and just ride it out. I was in 2014, and this was how things were done now.
And then the music started. We stood up, walked to the center of the rows, and began to sing. That was when it happened. I was instantly transported ten years into the past. My body became younger and lighter. Everyone out in the congregation was replaced by the people who had been sitting there a decade earlier. I looked to my right and saw the people that had always been there, and to my left were the rest of my section, all of them friends. The choir director bounced up and down and got us going, so I sang with all gusto, throwing out a few extra riffs and solo licks as if I was in my early twenties and once again thought that life was all a big game to win.
Actual time travel is a funny thing. Getting there is a quick process, an instant snap to the past, but getting back home takes longer, and you are changed by the process. I sat back down in my pew as the service ended, slowly returning to my older body, but with an energy and a peace of mind that I had not had prior to the temporal trip. I felt more connected, to myself, to the past, and to the present. Once you experience a thing like the past, you see the bigger picture. You begin to make connections that you never noticed before. You become transcendent and evolved.
After the service I said goodbye to my old friends, but this time not in even a bittersweet way. I said goodbye to them in a way that felt grateful for the experience of the day, and hopeful for the possibility of the future. I would see them again. And all it took for a little understanding of what was happening then, and the things that had yet to happen, was a little journey to the past. I had been working on time travel for years, but it turns out that I was just missing the key ingredient of music. Aspiring chrononauts take note.