^{John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was fatally shot while traveling with his wife Jacqueline, Texas governor John Connally, and the latter's wife, Nellie, in a Presidential motorcade. Forty-eight years later, I still remember him as clearly as the day I met him.}

In April of 2002, I emailed the editor of Washington Post Magazine and pitched an idea for the story on time travel. To my surprise, I was contacted a few days later and was told I was being given a shot at writing the article for the Sunday edition of Washington Magazine. Upon submitting my draft, I was contacted, politely thanked, and paid a $300 kill fee. A few weeks later, they published an altered version that was polished, intelligent and stale. 

They left out the best part; the part about time travel. Here it is:

A search of the Washington Post’s Entertainment Guide website for museums in the D.C. metro area yields well over two hundred hits. You can view everything from art to insects. There are museums dedicated to dimes and fire and tobacco. There’s even a “Great Blacks in Wax” museum but you’ll find no reference, none whatsoever, of any such place dedicated to Time Travel. This is odd, for I’ve found one exists…many in fact. One only needs to know where to look. As you might expect, such an obscurity cannot be bound by the traditional setting of a museum, per se.

It was by chance, while I was living in Atlanta, that I picked up a book entitled “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury. The story is about a boy named Douglas Spalding growing up in the fleeting days of the American trolley car and his acute awareness for life.

In one chapter, a boy named Charlie Woodman comes running, breathless, to his friends Douglas and John Huff telling them he's found a time machine. Upon questioning him, they find that the time machine can only travel to the past, but hey, Charlie says, you can't have everything.

Skeptical, they accompany him to an old, seemingly abandoned victorian home, covered in vines. Charlie knocks and enters, announcing their arrival. It is Colonel Freeleigh's house. An old soldier, living alone.

After a brief greeting and introduction, Charlie simply states the year and event..."1875, Pawnee Bill"... and the time machine comes to life, recanting the details of witnessing the massive buffalo herds of the wild west or a civil war battle, transporting them back for an eyewitness account.

Reading that, my view of the elderly changed for life.

Fast-forward twenty-five years. I am entering a Rockville Long Term Care facility on a sunny Saturday as a volunteer for HOPE worldwide, a non-profit organization that spans the globe meeting the needs of lepers and AIDS patients, orphans and the elderly. Today is Bingo day we’re told, and we’re here just to chat and help anyone who needs or wants help with the Bingo cards or chips.

Unlike the rest of my group, who arrive smiling and seat themselves at the first available table, I circle the room making terse greetings and avoiding eye contact. Even our children have already started conversations. I find I am still a bit wary of being trapped even after all these years. I am searching for something specific. Something along the lines of warmth and clarity maybe.

I connect with a pair of twinkling blue eyes and take my seat across from a woman named Lee. Seated next to her is a man in a straw hat named Bill. Outside the Activity Room, Lloyd strolls by giving me a nod. He’s not really into the whole Bingo thing and is headed outside for some fresh air…filtered through a Lucky Strike.

In the first thirty minutes I realize again, I have to come back. Lee, I find, has worked on Broadway with people like Marlon Brando in a production called A Flag Is Born. She’s worked with Dave Garroway on the Today Show, for the U.S. government producing documentary films and delivering plutonium secrets and that’s just the beginning.

While I am wondering if perhaps Lee is delusional, a man comes to me, a regular visitor, and asks quietly if I’ve been to Lee’s room or seen the picture of her with JFK. I nod no and close my mouth with my hand. Bill tells me he was a photographer and curator with the New York City Museum of Art, inspired by Ansel Adams and mentored in Ottowa by Yousef Karsch. Lloyd was there at Iwo Jima.

I make another trip back a week later and find Lee has gone out to lunch with her son, an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. I leave a note. Another week passes and I return to find Lee and Bill in the dining hall listening to a woman play a harp. This is going to be harder that I assumed. These people don’t just sit in their rooms waiting for people like me, although many others do.

I decide to try to schedule myself in. Mornings are good for Lee and after 3 p.m. for Bill. Lloyd thinks he can work me in anytime after lunch.

Two days later I return and find Lee coming down the hall from breakfast. She sees me before I see her and she calls out my name. She is waiting for an attendant to take her back to her room and we start a conversation right there in the hall. Ten minutes pass and the attendant has not returned, so I wheel her back to her room and one by one she introduces me to the people in the photographs that fill her room. They are all amazing, accomplished people.

There are princes who live in genuine 4^th century castles in Italy. There is French art and a painting of Aurora Borealis and a miniature sculpture of David that she commissioned that from an artist in Italy when she was there with Garroway as she calls him.  

Italy I ask? I was in Rome once with my sister.

Lee’s eyes fix on me and she begins to speak. Suddenly, I am right there in Rome, on the Today Show set, with an artist named Beverly Silverman. During the shoot it becomes delightfully apparent that Beverly is not wearing a petticoat under her flimsy dress and needs one. I close my eyes to have a better look at this wanton vixen. Lee surrenders hers and notes cheerfully that she never sees it again.

Then the photo album comes out and I see page after page of a lovely girl, the center of attention in a sea of men. Cameramen, photographers, scaffolding, gaffers, lighting and equipment and spectators surround her on the streets of Rome and Pisa and Florence.

Men dressed in Roman soldier garb hold her laughing, overhead. There are dozens of crisp black and white photographs of her and Garroway and others whispering in her ear at café tables. Then the streets are closed and we can’t get out of the city, we try one street and another and finally a third narrow cobblestone street. We are driving a Morris Mini and with a bump we realize that Lee is driving us down a flight of marble stairs. The car is stuck and we are laughing hysterically, we lift the front as she guns it in reverse. I return from Rome to see the photo of the car wedged on the stairs.

Then, in 1961, she mysteriously falls her from the window of her fourth story apartment window in New York. She tells me she was thrown by an intruder. Miraculously, she survives, but is in a coma for six months and believes she is healed by her dreams. In her dreams, she visits the Museum of Modern Art in New York City again and again to see her two favorite works.

Two years after the accident, we find ourselves at a function with a Presidental Committee founded by Truman. Ironically, it is on accident prevention she notes. What a better authority than her to be the Information Officer of such a committee. We are at the National Auditorium and Kennedy is in attendance. He is the first president to do so. As he is leaving, he recognizes her and calls her name.

“Lee”, she hears. “Is that back exercise very strenuous?”

The first thing we notice as we shake his hand is his color, his complexion. His striking appearance, the color of his face. His presence is so vivid! And his eyes. The bluest eyes that are ever possible.

Lee pauses to take a breath. She is flushed. At this late stage of life,  the spark of passion can still be ignited, I realize.

We are carrying a copy of The Little Prince as it has become a bible of sorts to us and he notices the book. He and Jackie are both avid readers though Jackie reads everything in French.

He has read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, Flight to Arras, but is not familiar with the The Little Prince.

“Words are a source of misunderstanding”, she quotes. "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

He smiles. We press the book into his hand and after refusing he accepts it and thanks us.

“Mr. President” the Secret Service interrupts “We must be going.”

“Can you walk with me”, he asks.

JFK asks us to walk with him! And indeed we do. As we are standing on the steps outside his limo, we are interrupted again.

“Lee, Bernie needs to see you right away.”

We sigh. Jack looks at us and with an understanding smile says;

“We live busy lives, don’t we?”

We watch him get in the car and drive off and notice through the window that he is flipping the pages of The Little Prince as he drives off.

Suddenly, I am back in my little chair blocking the doorway of her room. I am flushed with excitement. I am scribbling notes I cannot read with a gold Cross pen that I accidentally stole in 1988 on my honeymoon in Australia.

I try to offer something in our conversation. “I’ve had this pen since my honeymoon” I tell her, holding it up for her to see.

She is reminded of her husband and other people and places and we’re off again. She shows me an email she has received from Hugh Gallager, he compares her to Liza Minelli and says he is delighted with her recent recovery. For six months, she tells me, she was a different woman. She ranted and screamed and has no recollection of it, only what others tell her. I am barely aware of the people stepping around me, stopping in to fix the bed and the computer until a visitor who has come by once already sits on her bed, clearly annoyed with me, announcing he will come back tomorrow. She pats him and apologizes and I quickly excuse myself. Two and a half hours has passed and it’s lunchtime.

I have traveled the world and back in time. I have just met, face-to-face, JFK and people whose presence exists only in the minds of the living and pages of the history books.

During visits to other facilities, my family has spent time with Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary and a servant of Queen Elizabeth, meeting both of them in the process.

Theirs is no mere story, moreso a collection of souls whose only memory of their days remains in us, whose gift of firsthand witness to past events and people, we cannot pass on.

With each passing year, I realize I too am becoming a time machine of sorts, much like Colonel Freeleigh. 

^{copyright©2011raymondroske}

^{(reprinted from an earlier post)}