Free Time Flying by Dan Garmen Page B

relieved and happy to see them. Back to normal. April turned to May, which seemed to last about a week before June's warm, sunny days meant the end of the school year. I was strong, and those 20 pounds I had packed on during my inactivity melted off. In my 30s and 40s, battling being a few pounds overweight and the lingering painkiller addiction I never completely controlled, I would often have dreams about running. In my dreams, I ran, and ran and ran, without tiring, exhilarated at the freedom and the sheer pleasure of the physical activity. In real life, I had always hated running, because I had never been 'slim,' but also because running was always used as punishment. Not hustling enough during practice? Run. “Suicides," usually, where you would have to start at the baseline, run to the free throw line, back to the baseline, then to half-court, and back. Four stages — free throw line, half-court, other free throw line, full-court, all in thirty-seconds. If you didn't hit that mark, you kept running until you did. Saturday practice meant foul shooting, where we would shoot a hundred, and the more you missed, the more you ran. How could you love something constantly used as punishment, unless you were a masochist? I’m no masochist, so I hated running.
    Not this time, though. A couple weeks after I woke up back in 1976, I decided if I was going to repeat this portion of my life, real or not, I wouldn't repeat all of my mistakes. So, I started running.
    Trails snaked through the acres of woods around our suburban house, so I started slowly, working through the pain of my damaged left leg, as well as the general discomfort of being 20 pounds heavier than I had ever been. By the first day of June, the pain had become infrequent, and I weighed 190, which worked well for me at 6’3”. Determined to do what I had not done the last time I experienced 1976 - play basketball my senior year of high school — the work came relatively easy. By the end of June, I even started going to the gym, mornings and late afternoons, working for my Dad's company in the middle of the day, making for a busy, but happy time. I thought of 2007 a lot, still at a loss to explain the whole experience, but life in 1976 had become so routine, it was getting easier to not be distracted by the mystery. At night, while lying in bed, and often while running and working out, I would, in my mind, run through things from my life in 2007. I reminded myself of my address in San Diego, my phone numbers, my email addresses, the URLs of the websites I liked, the technical specs of the various Macintosh computers I owned. I thought about anything that didn’t exist in the mid 70s, worried if I forgot about the future, it might somehow cease to exist, and my wife and daughter there would no longer be real. I didn’t want to face the thought of Molly and Samantha disappearing from my mind. All else could go to hell, but not them. I tried, in my mind, to relive in detail, experiences with my family. My daughter's first birthday party, her second, the first Christmas we spent with my parents. I refused to allow them to not exist in my life. I even considered looking Molly up in this time, but since she would only be only 12 years old right now, I figured that was a bad idea.
    So, I tried to keep my future life fresh in my mind and worked on the current one. I wondered whether my actions here would have any impact on that future life when I returned (which I desperately hoped I would), because I was doing things I had not done the first time, applying both hindsight and a lot more maturity. It was a fascinating thing, especially the relationship with my father. Cold and distant when I first arrived back here, my working to overcome the physical and emotional problems that stemmed from my injury seemed to earn a lot of respect from him. I remembered the coldness and distance, but never realized what caused it, until I came back with as much life experience as he had