Nanowrimo 2015 - Day 4

I'd like to take a moment now to share with you just how special my parents are not just to me, but in general.  It was thanks to the faith of my parents that I went down this path that led me to become a time traveler, which, for the most part, was basically the best and most amazing job ever, at least until.. well, we'll get to that later.  I want to focus on my parents for now.

My mom, Catherine, was the sweetest most concerned soul you'll ever meet.  She wanted everyone she ever met to just be happy.  If she asked how you were doing and you just said, "Okay" or "Fine", she would wrinkle up her brow and ask you what was wrong.  Sometimes people corrected themselves, said they were doing great, that nothing was wrong.  But sometimes the person would take that opportunity to just unload about whatever really was bothering them.  Those were the moments when my mom shone.  She would listen to them all the way through and then somehow know just what to say whether it was, "I'm so sorry you're going through that" or "I can promise you it gets better", she seemed to know whether the person just wanted her to listen or actually wanted a point of encouragement or even advice.

My mom is not just kind, she is beautiful as well, far more beautiful than I am.  She has this short, wavy black hair and these deep hazel eyes and look like they contain knowledge of the whole world within them.  And I'm not just being cliche when I say that her smile lights up a room.  I am 100% confident that it was that smile that first drew my father to my mother.

My father, Thomas, is not as involved in the lives of others as my mother is.  He cares about people, its just that my mother cares so much that he sometimes appears closed off compared to her.  He says what he feels needs to be said when he feels he needs to say it.  He's perfectly happy to sit with a thought or idea for weeks before voicing it.  I can only assume that there are great number of thoughts and ideas that he's never voiced at all.  In that way, he's a very different kind of thoughtful from my mother.

My dad is also exceptionally smart.  He's an engineer.  I don't say specifically what kind because it changes from time to time.  He knows more about math and science that I would ever hope to know.  Back when I explained the science of time travel to the best of my ability, I remember seeing his face light up in wonder, as if what I was saying made things so much more clear.  It barely made things more clear for me, but it wasn't for me, it was for him.

Now I'm not a dummy, and neither is my mom, but compared to my dad you might think we both are.  Yet he never makes you feel that way.  He's really just an ordinary guy who happens to be ridiculously smart.  You could say that he's the brain and my mom is the beauty.  Now my mom's smart, too, and my dad isn't ugly, but it's weird how they just shine and compliment each other.  I feel like my dad is even more handsome with my mom around and my mom seems even more insightful with my dad around.  I know its stupid to say they complete each other, because I know each of them would be a complete person without the other, but I don't know how else to describe it.  It's beautiful, and it makes me understand why my mom is so anxious for me to find someone of my own.

I love my parents.  I love being with them.  They're so amazing that, frankly, they make a lot of other people seem boring and lame in comparison.  That's the curse of having such great parents:  your standards are set a lot higher for your own friends and lovers, or at least that was my excuse.

But apart from my person hangups, my parents are genuinely a joy to be around.  They're parents, so they worry about me, especially my mom, and sometimes that can get old, but I still wouldn't trade it for the world.  I hear plenty of stories about people who grew up with crappy parents to know just how good I have it.  That's what makes it all the more hard that I can't tell them everything about what I do.

Like about shooting that elephant.  When I came to visit, I really wanted nothing more than to tell them about this bizarre occurrence.  But Maria had made me promise that I wouldn't.  "At least not until the historians finish up their research," she told me.  My parents had taught me to be loyal to the agency, and to trust them, but what they didn't know at the time was that I had told them to tell me that before Maria had me shoot the elephant.

As much as I enjoyed traveling through time, I enjoyed staying still and spending time with my parents perhaps even more.  It was a wonderful break from the intense and strange during which I could hang out with mom and dad and catch up with some old acquaintances while just taking it easy.  I listened to some books, watched some classic movies, and even did a little painting.  I was never much of an artist, but I enjoyed it and it was fairly relaxing.  My mother had been an art teacher for a portion of her life and she enjoyed teaching and mentoring me.  She always knew this wasn't going to be my career, but she was always happy to help and encourage me in this hobby.

I certainly wasn't one of my mother's best students, but I was definitely the one who had stayed with her for the longest duration of time.  I had painted many things over the years, and my mother still had a few of them hanging in her home.  Others were at my house, mostly in a pile.  I didn't paint to put things on display.  I painted to relax and to reflect on my thoughts and feelings.

My mother had actually sold a few of the paintings she had produced in her earlier days, and claimed a couple of mine could have sold for money, but I didn't like the thought of what I had painted being in someone else's home.  I think if I were to sell my art, I would want to do it somewhere else in time, but I wasn't allowed to use time travel for personal gain like that.

Anyway, painting was something my mom and I enjoyed doing together and that we did quite a bit whenever I came home.  But near the start of this particular break, I just wanted to paint something on my own.  I started by reflecting on the things I had painted in the past:  trees, flowers, fruit, cats, a self-portrait, and attempt at a portrait of my mother and father that was not particularly good but that my mother still insisted on hanging in their study.  What was I going to draw now?  I decided I wanted to paint something beautiful and simple.  I started with the yellows and reds and faded up to the purples as I painted the sunset.  I started with the sky part because I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to sunset to be set, but after I finished the sky portion, I knew where it should be set.  Without thinking about it a whole lot, I painted an open grassland with a single gnarly tree just off to the right.  When I was done, I was a little surprised to realize I had painted the exact setting of my latest mission, minus the dead elephant.

I was reflecting on this and feeling a little nervous about what it meant that this was what I was compelled to paint when the voice of my mother behind me startled me.  "That's beautiful," she said.

I glanced back and smiled nervously.  "Thanks," I said, hoping she wasn't going to ask me a question about what I had painted as she usually did.

She did ask a question, but it surprised me.  "Is it a sunrise or a sunset?" she asked.

I relaxed and smiled more genuinely.  "I guess I don't know," I said, reflecting, "I assumed it was a sunset when I was painting it, but it could be a sunrise, too."

"I think you should consider it a sunrise," she said.  Then she stepped forward and asked, "Are you okay, sweetie."

I looked into her concerned eyes.  I couldn't just flat out lie to my mother, so I just said, "I can't talk about it, but you shouldn't worry, mom.  I'll be okay."

I knew she would worry.  She was my mom, and that's what she did.  But I knew she would respect what I had just said.  "Okay," she agreed, "but if you ever do need to talk, your dad and I are here for you."

"Thanks, mom," I said.

She smiled, stepped forward, and gave me a kiss on the forehead.  "Dinner will be here in 20 minutes," she said, and she walked out of the room.


That was the most nervous incident of my one month stay with my parents that time.  Strangely, it felt good to have painted that painting, let my mother know subtly that I wasn't 100% okay, but okay enough, and to then try to move on.  I painted a couple other things while I was there.  I wanted to paint something happy, so I painted a kitten licking a puppy.  My mom loved it.  I'm pretty sure it made my dad roll his eyes.  In response to that, I painted something I figured he would enjoy more:  a classic "steampunk" style airship with gears and contraptions and stuff.  I spent the last two weeks of my visit working on it on and off, and was pleased that my dad smiled when I gave it to him.

Before I got to the end, though, I had other things I did, too, and lots of nice conversations with my parents, too.  They were able to talk about their lives and work a lot more than I was, and I enjoyed hearing about my mom's co-worker who was clearly keeping a secret that she was bound to find out or my dad's latest bridge building project and how one of the interns was so surprised when my dad followed up on one of that intern's ideas.

My dad also enjoyed sharing puzzles and riddles with us at dinner.  Nearly every night during my
stay, he would give me a puzzle or riddle and then the answer the next day, starting after the first week.  It was a bit of a throwback to when I was a kid and he would do this.  I was happy that he decided to do it, particularly because he did it after I had mentioned how nice those memories were from my childhood.


I cherished that month with my parents, but all good things must come to an end, even when you have the power to travel through time, so on that last day of my stay, I gave my father the painting and he smiled.  I smiled, too.  And then, my mother gave me the sunrise/sunset painting I had painted at the beginning of my stay.  "I thought you should have it," she said, smiling as if she knew something.

"Thanks, mom," I said.  And then, on a strange hunch, I asked her, "Did you ever figure out what secret you co-worker was hiding?"

She shook her head.  "No, actually I didn't," she said.  "Sometimes, I guess, there are things we just aren't meant to know."  I coud have sworn she winked at me as if she actually knew something, but I ignore that and I just hugged her and my dad and waved good-bye.

It was actually Saturday when I left and I didn't have to go back to work until Tuesday, so I went home for a couple days first.  I did not hang the painting up, but I leaned it against the wall and continued to feel a little awkward about it.  It reminded me of why I had painted it and that I was nervous about going back to work for fear of what they would make me do next.  But I realized that what really bothered me was what was missing from the painting.

That was why, on Monday afternoon, I went out and bought some gray paint and on Sunday evening, I set the painting up on my eisle and painted in the part that was missing:  an elephant, not shot and dead like I found him, but bold and strong and brave and alive, like I found him, trumpeting up into the sky as the sun rose/set, whatever the case may be.


When I went back to work on Tuesday, I was nervous about what my next assignment would be.  I really didn't feel up for killing another animal.  I hadn't taken the time to reflect on it much before, but I had never killed anything bigger than a wolf spider before it came time to kill that elephant.

You can imagine my relief and total confusion when the mission I was given was seemingly completely innocuous, but more than that even, kind and helpful.  But what was confusing was that it was such a small and insignificant thing that I couldn't believe that they were having me do this.  My mission?  To go back to the year 2011 and help some random little girl get her cat down from a tree.  I wanted to ask, "What on earth?" I wanted to say, "I didn't have pets growing up, how can I help?"  But I didn't say either of those things.  I looked at smiling Maria and I just said, "Yes, ma'am."

I have to say that as weird and as seemingly pointless as the mission was, it felt surprisingly good to help that little girl get her cat, whose name I learned was Lila, down from the tree.  The cat tried to scratch me, but failed, and once it saw the little girl, it seemed to much more okay with getting down out of the tree.  The girl thanked me and gave me such a smile that I felt good about everything.  It was still weird and I really wondered why I had done this, but I decided there must be a good reason and that combined with the fact that it was a pretty easy job that made me strangely happy allowed me to sleep surprisingly well that night.  Not to say that I didn't usually sleep well, but that night, I slept even better.


From then on, my missions continued to be strange, but seemingly benign and totally non-objectionable.  I was sent to help an elderly woman carry her groceries.  I was sent to pose as an Uber driver (one of those fake taxi things that started in the early 21st century) and transport some college kids home from a bar.  I was sent to an evening continuing education class for science teachers and told to just take lots of notes.  For that one, I was stuck in the past for four weeks.  That one was especially weird because I had a full assumed identity, something I'd never had before.  The closest prior to that had been the random Uber driver gig when the academy had to help me fake my background check and gave me a fake name of "Jenna."  For the four weeks in "school", I was Jenna again, but this time with the last name of Jones (so creative, right?) and with a more elaborate back story about being a middle school biology teacher.

I had been pretty decent at biology, and at science in general, thanks mostly to my dad.  However, there was one particularly disturbing thing I learned, as part of my prep for this assignment, that they used to do in biology classes in the past was actual live dissections, or rather in person dissections.  I was assured this was not of live animals, but still, they had to actually touch the carcasses.  I was truly worried that something like that might come up in the teacher training, as I called it, but I was assured that it would not.  It wasn't like they were going to call a teacher up from the class and embarrass them like teachers did with students.  I certainly hoped they were right.  When I took biology, everything was completely simulated.  3D video renderings of dead animals were quite enough for me.

Fortunately, the lack of dissections was one vital thing that the historians had been right about.  But they didn't know everything about how the class worked, which I guess was why they sent me back there to observe.  Which, by the way, just observing is one of the supposedly safest but most frustrating things you can be sent to do as a time traveler.  And when I say "supposedly safest", I mean theoretically safest.  In theory, you keep interactions to a minimum and do nothing that has the potential to mess up a timeline.  Yet, thinking back to the other seemingly unimpactful missions they had me go on and now being told to try not to be impactful, it was all a bit confusing.  I mean, if being an Uber driver for some drunk college kids that would have just gotten a ride from another Uber drive had I not been there had an impact on something, how could me sitting in this class and living in a nearby apartment for nearly a month possibly not have an effect?  Still, they assured me that if I just went to the store once to buy all the food and supplies I needed, then stayed in the apartment (watching and recording TV and taking notes on how various programs of the past made me feel) all day, and went to class in the evening, then everything would be fine.  Minimal interaction.  Have your backstory straight for when people ask.  Get through the four weeks.  And come home.  That was what they told me.  What they didn't account for was other people trying to talk to me.

There was this one other teacher student in particular who was always trying to talk to me.  I don't know if he was trying to pick me up or what.  I had heard stories about "pick up lines" being a thing in the past, but I didn't really know much about them so it was really hard to tell.  He would say things like, "Hey, how are you this evening?" before class started or "Well, what did you think of that lecture?" with a hint of sarcasm after the class ended.  Didn't seem like my understanding of a "pick up line", but some people in the past were weird so it was hard to tell.  I tried to just smile politely and give simple answers like, "Fine" and "It was fine."

There was no conceivable way he could have thought I was interested in him, yet apparently somehow he did, because on the second to last day of class, he asked me, "Hey, you want to go get dinner Saturday night?"  I knew that was a request for a date.  Even in the future, that was still a request for a date.

I was surprised and confused when he asked me, even though I understood what he was asking.  I'd been asked out before, and I'd always said no because my commitment was first to my training as a time traveler.  Once or twice, a fellow time traveler had asked me out and I'd just been able to say, "No, I don't think that's a good idea" and they totally understood.  For whatever reason, I was initially at a lose as to what to say to this guy.

I thought about what I knew about him.  I knew that his name was Connor, that he was 24 years old, and, in my own opinion, that he was decently good-looking, if not a little young.  I could just tell him he was too young for me, since I was pushing 30 as this point, but this felt dishonest.  I don't know why it took me as long as it did to turn him down, or why I didn't come up with a better story when I did, but all I said, after what was probably twenty seconds of silence, was, "No, sorry, I can't."

Of course, he looked a little disappointed and asked the obvious question of, "Why not?"

This time I didn't stop to think like I should have and I just blurted out, "Because I won't be here anymore."

It was obvious that he wanted to ask more, but I must have given him a look of shame or something because he looked a little nervous and said, "Okay, that's fine.  Maybe another time," and he turned and walked away.

The final day of the class, he nodded at me when he saw me, but he didn't greet me.  We took an exam that day, and he didn't ask me how it went.  He just finished and left before I did.  Since I was supposed to observe, I figured I should stay to the end of the test, yet it was hard to concentrate on my supposedly critical observational work when I was thinking about how I wished I could go after Connor and give him a better explanation.

But why should I care? I wondered to myself.  It would be stupid for me to go out with him, even if I wanted to.  We're from totally different times.  For all I know, he could be some ancestor or other distant relative of mine, and what a mess that would be.  So with a sigh, I refocused on my assignment and tried to forget all about Connor.

That night, my last night on assignment, I went back to my apartment and nearly cried.  I didn't know why.  It made no logical sense.  I had completed my mission.  I had done a good job.  I had even learned some interesting stuff about how people viewed science education in the year 2009.  There was absolutely nothing to be sad or upset about.  Yet, that night, I did not sleep as well as usual.  I had strange dreams that I only know were strange because of a vague foreboding sense that I got when I woke up.  All I really remember about them was that Connor was in them looking as surprised and confused as I felt when he had asked me out.

When I got back to my own place and time at the academy, Maria was there, as always, asking me how things had gone.  I handed her my pile of research and said, "Good."

She tilted her head a bit and looked at me inquisitively as she asked, "Anything strange happen?"

I looked up from the ground I had apparently been staring at and thought of Connor and the vague dream.  I knew this was exactly the kind of thing I was supposed to mention, but instead I just said, "No."

Maria smiled, seemingly reassured.  "That's good," she said.  "These long missions can be trying at times and I know this was your longest one yet.  Why don't you go get some rest and we can talk more about it tomorrow."

I have to tell you, I wasn't really looking forward tomorrow, in fear that she really did sense something was up.  Fortunately for me though, Maria did not have my mother's sense of when something was wrong and when tomorrow came, she had nothing more to say on the subject.