The Day I Discovered Time Travel

Ani DiFranco

The Ani DiFranco song ambushed me at a moment when, too sure of myself, I let my mind sprawl like a lover on a divan. I had a channel of women singer-songwriters on my preferred streaming service, playing a regular selection of Dar Williams, Indigo Girls, Patty Griffin. The channel played Ani regularly, but mostly her late-nineties stuff, when she was pushing thirty, tracks like “32 Flavors” or “Untouchable Face.”

Instead, the channel played “Both Hands,” from her eponymous debut, recorded when Ani was only nineteen. I hadn’t heard that track in nearly twenty years. I still have my CDs I bought before college, though like most people, I only blow the dust off them occasionally. They’re part of a world I no longer occupy, a world I occupied only loosely even then. A world I frequently intend to revisit, temporarily, but never quite do.

Until I did. That song played, and I was instantly transported. Like Marcel Proust’s famous macaroon, the song had magical powers. I didn’t just remember being twenty-three, frustrated and disappointed while waiting for my life to commence; I was literally there. I was sitting on a concrete porch in a small Nebraska town, with a battery-powered boombox, watching kids play soccer on the schoolyard across the street and thinking: now what?

“Both Hands,” a lament of self-discovery in a poorly chosen relationship, could only have been written by a teenager. But the recording I first heard, from Ani DiFranco’s first live album, was recorded when she was twenty-six, deep in the thicket of what we euphemistically call adulthood. I’ve seen this before, though with DiFranco, I was too young to understand. Songs by youth, about waning adolescence, hit harder from older, wearier voices.

I grew up surrounded by images of Baby Boomers extolling their lost youths. The first generation to grow up in the embracing womb of pervasive television, Boomers have icons that let them time-travel the way I did. One of my earliest memories of TV is a PBS documentary about how cushy the idiot box was for boomers. It ballyhooed diverse nostalgic images, from Leave It To Beaver and Felix the Cat, to Woodstock and Cronkite at Da Nang.

The blogger as post-adolescent
hippie wannabe. Probably age 25,
somewhere around the year 2000.

I wanted that connection. I wanted to exist on a continuum of nostalgia like I saw praised on public broadcasting between Big Bird and Doctor Who. When I finally rebelled against my parents’ performatively countrified upbringing, I embraced a hippie-era ethic of crunchy rock, long hair, and groovy vibes. I’ve written about this before. But I wasn’t really time-traveling then, because the world I glommed onto involved only filmed images and photos, which I’d witnessed fairly recently.

Things have changed, though. I’m at the age when I can say “twenty-five years ago” and refer to something that happened when I was already an adult. After passing through a long, lingering hippie-dip adolescence, Ani DiFranco was the first contemporary artist I landed on, recording for a mass audience right now. She ushered in my fondness for indie rock and folk music, contra my parents’ country & western, or the classic rock with which I rebelled.

So there I was, simultaneously in my office, doing my grown-up job, and also on the porch of my first house, listening to Ani and feeling smothered by ennui. Powered only by my brain, I’d slipped outside the bonds of present responsibility, the beige-tinted walls of adult sobriety, and traveled into a version of myself that both somehow was, and wasn’t, considered an adult. But I wasn’t there in the past; I could only watch from outside.

Suddenly, those PBS documentaries praising Boomer childhoods made sense. The intended audiences, then pushing forty, weren’t gleefully watching their younger selves; they were coming to grips with the choices they’d made. Watching myself from outside, I realized I was seeing someone whose life appeared empty of direction, but only superficially. I had millions of choices ahead of me, but I could only live in one direction. Once made, those choices were forever.

As the song ended and I returned to myself, a thought struck me: God and healthcare willing, I’ll someday look back on this moment the same way I just looked back on myself. And I’ll ask myself the same questions: did I make the right choices? Did I do something to make my future self proud? The only difference is, this time I’ll know I’m being watched.

Sorry, Doctor Who: time travel is overrated. It only makes me aware of the present.