By Tim Hanson

“Daddy! Can’t catch me!”

My daughter shouts this over her shoulder as she races down the sidewalk, her beloved Paw Patrol backpack, over half her size, not slowing her down one bit as she sprints past neighborhood dogs barking their approval. When I was her age, it wasn’t crime-fighting pups occupying my every thought; it was time travel. I grew up in the eighties, so I was just one of many envisioning himself Marty-McFly-ing across time, visiting pharaohs in ancient Egypt, riding dinosaurs through tropical jungles, and trying out all those technological marvels awaiting us in the future. And if I encountered any egregious happenings along my journey, no sweat! I could just fix them.

“Come on, Daddy! You slowpoke!”

Zigzagging back and forth, I would be the author of creation, crafting and revising history as I saw fit. I’d just begun my schooling at St. Francis Xavier, so I knew calling myself a god was blasphemous, but that’s how those dips into my imagination felt: all of it—the past, future, and now—were mine to be experienced, to be preserved, and yes, to be changed. If only I had a time machine!

“You’re gonna lose, Daddy!”

Most kids let their obsession with time travel fade for the next big thing, and so did I. Marty stepped back so Zack Morris could take his place, so the Power Rangers could then take his, and so on and so forth. Going back to these shows and movies years later was nostalgic, but I never felt the same tug as I did then—not even for Marty. That is, until I became a father.

“Penny! Stop when you get to the road!”

When Penny was born, my obsession with time travel returned with great ferocity, but my understanding of it was more mature. Marty was wrong, I discovered: yes, we can go backward, we can go forward, but we cannot change anything. The timeline is not just obdurate; it is unwavering and without sympathy, no matter how tragic or catastrophic it can be.

“Penny! Did you hear me? I said, ‘Stop at the road!’”

Before Penny, my anxiety was bad, the author of a thousand bleak futures all beginning with “what if.” Now, those futures have increased a thousandfold, a wildfire of possible tragedies, where the sound of an oncoming car or the squeal of tires are like a million gallons of gasoline poured down upon those flames from on high.

“Daddy! Catch me!”

Every morning, I walk with Penny to school, where I also work. It’s a small town forty minutes west of Madison, Wisconsin, with rolling hills, endless cornfields, and a single K-12 school, where Penny learns at one end of that spectrum, and I teach at the other. Having grown up just north of Chicago, I know most people here don’t share my anxieties about future timelines, refusing to travel down those shadowy roads, naively convinced that because their downtown is only a block long, nothing bad can ever happen here. I know better, though: I’ve often walked those future roads and returned, hellbent on ensuring the events at their ends never come to fruition.

(A semi not seeing the little girl racing across the road.)

(A van dropping its own kids off, the driver distracted by the shouts and cries of my future students.)

(A high school student busy finding the best song to usher him into the school parking lot and not seeing the kid running haphazardly across the street.)

“Penny! Wait!”

As a boy her age, I would’ve told adult me: “No worries, sir. I’ll just travel back a couple minutes and stop her from running into the road. No sweat!” If only it were that simple, if only I had a time machine outside my memories and anxiety.

“Daddy! I’m running to the other side!”

“No!”

Is she teasing me, just as I’d teased her grandmother when I was her age? She’s wearing the same mischievous smile I wore then, a smile so wonderful that I usually can’t help but smile in return, so perhaps. But does she understand why she can’t cross the street on her own? Did I explain it well enough for a five-year-old to understand? I travel back to the eighties, to a year ago, to a day ago; I walk these past timelines as both son and father, seeking answers my present self demands, and I journey forward to a future where she looks up and laughs at my worries, and then to a future where she runs into the street and I hear a deafening screech and the thud of metal on flesh…

No, not that. Not ever.

I sprint down the sidewalk, huffing and puffing and crying out for her to stop, and I swear I can hear the sound of a future truck flying by, its horn blaring, its engine roaring…

But no, no, she waits. Penny stays right at the sidewalk’s end, our school just across the street, and when I arrive next to her, I tell her not to run so far ahead, not to rush….

And then I’m rushing: to a year from now, five years from now, a decade and more. To when she’ll graduate from this school and move away, to where I can’t call out to her to slow down, to watch out for cars and all the bad things that could cross her path. 

“Daddy,” Penny laughs. “I beat you!”

And I laugh too, no longer ten years from now or thirty years ago. I’m here, now, and I outstretch my hand which she takes without hesitation. “You sure did,” I say. “And what do we do before crossing the street?”

Smiling, Penny looks back and forth. “Look left. Look right. Look left.”

“All clear?”

“All clear!”

And for now, we safely cross the street. No matter what came before and what will come after, I am eternally grateful to have this moment.