Limited Perspective

I was stopped at First and Broad the other day. I worked in a building on the southwest corner of that intersection more than twenty years ago. That building has been torn down and replaced. Waiting for the light to change, I thought, what if I could go back in time to my little office? I could almost see myself right there, just inside the new building, only in 1998. A couple of days or so later, I came across the meme posted here. “You can easily return to the past but no one is there anymore,” it says. It’s a joke, of course (or is it?) but that got me thinking again. If I could go back in time to exact spot of my old office at First and Broad, I’d be at the new building, not the old one, unless I could fit the whole intersection into my time machine with me. And all of you, assuming you would not fit in there either, would still be up here in 2022. There’d be no one to talk to in 1998. So to get to the old building, and see my old (younger) friends, I’d have go to back not just in ...

If you look up the idea of Chekhov’s Gun, you read about how a writer should avoid making false promises and should not write checks the story never cashes. But I think the bigger mistake would be more like having pennies from heaven. I thought of this today when I watched the first episode of Maid on Netflix. The show involves a character called Alex and her two-year-old daughter Maddy. Alex is in an abusive relationship. One night, Maddy’s father, in a drunk rage, throws a glass, which shatters against the wall. Later, Alex finds shards of glass in Maddy’s hair. It’s the last straw. She leaves in the middle of the night. Late in the episode Maddy is holding her Little Mermaid doll, which she calls Schmariel, out the car window, making her fly (which I just noticed as I am typing this is full of meaning!) when she accidentally drops it. Maddy cries and screams for the doll. Alex is rushing to make a ferry. If she doesn’t make it, she will probably lose her job. Despite the ris...