“How about time travel,” my friend asks from behind the wheel of his Honda CRV. “Where would you go if you could visit any place in the past?”

“Any place, huh?” I ask, stalling for time.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in late spring. Two buddies and I are crammed into a car on our way home following a long overdue “guy’s weekend” at the lake. Our 48 hours without work deadlines or familial obligations have elapsed. Yet we’re not quite ready to let go, and so, we’ve silenced satellite radio in favor of the kind of talk generally reserved for sleepovers.

Ask me about time travel a year ago I might’ve answered with stepping foot on the set of John Carpenter shooting his seminal slasher film Halloween. But it’s been ten months since my father died in memory care. And with my mother already gone, I’m officially an orphan.

“Well,” I say when it’s my turn to speak, “it ain’t the building of the pyramids, but I think I’d want to go home again. Where I grew up, I mean. Drop in for a few hours.”

I imagine it’s 1988. A late Saturday afternoon in November. Early dusk. Just an ordinary day, which when visited through the dust of time, now seems a little extraordinary, too.

Outside of my childhood home, the branches are bare. The leaves bagged and lined up on the boulevard. There’s a breath-fogging chill in the air. Inside, the house is warm.

”

I CAN'T KEEP FROM THINKING THERE'LL COME A TIME WHEN EVEN THESE SOJOURNS TO A BUDDY'S CABIN UP NORTH WILL TAPER OFF. WHEN OUR NUMBERS, TOO, WILL GRADUALLY DWINDLE.

ANDREW PATRIE

I’m thirteen and perusing the shelf in my bedroom—a row of VHS tapes onto which I’ve recorded horror films from HBO: Night of the Creeps, Re-Animator, Deadtime Stories. I grab a tape and head to the living room, the lamplight’s honeyed glow all around me. I insert the tape into the VCR--a machine which lasted until well after I moved out--made when everything, even parents, seemed built to last.

The curtains are drawn, and I am alone, though I can hear my mother in the kitchen filling the dishwasher, apron still sashed to her waist. I can feel my father’s vibrations from his workshop below me, the sawdust like dander in his hair. I catch the scent of Pepper, our family dog, in the blanket I shove over on the couch. It is enough knowing they’re around. I don’t need to see them. I might press PAUSE and never want to leave.

I know to resist the tug of the past. Grief is the ghost light that calls us to shore and then wrecks us over the rocks.

Yet I might’ve stayed in that memory all afternoon, if the bumpy road hadn’t jolted me back to the car with my friends. All is quiet save for the engine’s hum. I try to change the mood, but grief is also the light that reveals life’s invisible ink, that common frailty scribed into our DNA. I can’t keep from thinking there’ll come a time when even these sojourns to a buddy’s cabin up north will taper off. When our numbers, too, will gradually dwindle. I close my eyes, refusing to travel too far into that future. Better to stay in the moment. Feel the car wheels in motion beneath me. Pretend we’re all still built to last.