In a moment, everything changed. We had just settled onto the large, comfortable couch in our TV room. I had propped my feet up on the ottoman. My wife and I were going to watch a movie that she had picked up at the video store on her way home from work.

I remember that it was a Friday evening. My wife Deborah and I take turns cooking a special meal on Fridays. It was my turn, my Friday to cook. I had made a nice poached salmon with fresh green beans and yellow squash. I’d sliced up a small loaf of fresh French bread. I bought fresh fruit cups in a light, flaky pie shell from a local bakery and picked up a nice bottle of California red.

I still don’t know what happened. I am (was) a forty-seven-year-old Sales Engineer for an International Aerospace Company. My wife and I, having recently sold our house and downsized, have a nice, new townhouse in the suburbs. Our two children are grown and out of the house. The youngest attending school on the west coast.

We had eaten dinner and cleaned up. Then we had gone into the living room with our wine glasses, and the rest of the wine, to watch that movie. One of the “Bourne” series.

I remember all of this quite clearly.

However, I have no memory of getting off the couch. I have no memory of watching the movie. I draw a total blank after entering the living room and sitting on the couch.

The next memory I have, the next moment in time, was waking up on a Monday morning. Waking up in the bed and bedroom that I lived in when I was growing up! I’m here to tell you friends, I hope you never have to experience the cold, stark terror that washed over me on that Monday morning.

Even though it had been more than thirty years since I last woke up in that bed, in the little room that I shared with my younger brother, I knew immediately where I was. The color of the wall I opened my eyes to, the sounds and smells of that house. It was the house my family lived in for twenty years. It is always the place I think of as home. It’s where I grew up.

I heard my mother call up from the foot of the stairs to my father, as she had done every morning, that it was time to get up, and I started to shake uncontrollably.

“This can not be happening. I have lost my mind.” I thought. I don’t know how, or exactly when I took leave of my senses, but surely, I have gone mad.

I rolled over to look across the room where my brother should be. There was the distinct form of a sleeping person under the covers of my brother’s bed. Tears sprang into my eyes and ran down my cheeks. My brother had been killed in a car accident over twenty years ago!

More than twenty years ago based upon the time line I was on when things changed. Eight or ten years from the “right now” that I was currently existing in. Depending of course, on what year this was.

Eddie rolled over just then, looked at me and his face formed a puzzled expression as he said. “What’s with you dufas? You forget to do your homework again? You look scared.”

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I’m sitting on the grass of a small park inside a traffic circle in the center of town. It’s been a full month since I “woke up” here in the past. It’s fall of the year 1963. I’m fourteen years old again, but have all of the memories and experiences of a forty-seven year old adult man living in the next centruy. I am leaning back against a tree as I watch the automobile traffic go around the traffic circle. My attention is momentarily diverted by what are to me great old, classic cars passing by. I am holding hands with my high school sweetheart, Marilyn LeDoux. She has small warm hands. She smells like Doublemint gum.

The thing is, we never sat in this, or any park, and held hands. I had a serious crush on Marilyn when I was fourteen, but never worked up the courage to ask her out. I’ve already begun to change the past, and I feel in my heart that it might not be a good thing.

I’m forty-seven years old and I’m holding hands with a thirteen year old girl! It literally sends chills up and down my spine. I have to make a conscious effort to block that reality from my mind. To her though, and everyone else, I am a fourteen year old boy.

“I was hoping that you would ask me out.” She said while looking into my eyes.
I have to look away.

Hoping I’d ask her out? When I was last here, thirty some odd years ago, I didn't have the courage. I was scared to death of her. Scared she’d say no, I guess, and embarrass me. Here she was hoping I’d ask her out.

Courage? Confidence? I’ve got plenty of that now. I’ve done a tour in Vietnam with the Naval Amphibious Assault Group. I'm trying desperately not to be downright cocky.

I spend my days amongst teenagers, children to me. I’m older, wiser and more experienced than most of the teachers at our school. I’ve become somewhat of a teachers pet actually. I have a paper route for God’s sakes!

I sometimes get carried away talking about my view of what the future will be. I’m actually talking about what the future really is, but no one knows that. Some think I should send my ideas to a Science Fiction magazine.

“You have quite the imagination, Mr. O’Brien.” Miss Connelly, my English teacher, remarked recently while handing back an assignment. It was an essay in which I predicted a jukebox the size and weight of a deck of cards. It held more than two thousand songs and videos.

“Two thousand songs?” She asked while grinning at me. “This device would have to be a lot larger than a deck of playing cards.”

The jukebox over at the nearby “East Side Café” was about four feet high, four feet wide, weighed approximately four hundred pounds, and offered maybe fifty songs. (45 RPM Records)

“Who even knows that many songs, and what “videos” would one have on this device?” She added grinning again and raising one eyebrow.

I got a B on the assignment. I decided not to try and explain I-POD’s and the MP3 format. They would look at me with what I have begun to think of as the "idiot's grin." As if they know that I'm hullcinating but have decided to play along.

In that moment when everything changed, I was left with knowledge and information that no one on earth had at this time. What should I do with this knowledge?

I know about a lot of things that are going to happen. Good things and bad. I could have, for instance, started telling my class mates about the British music invasion.
But I wanted to wait and see if this was, in fact, the same past that I journeyed through previously. Were events going to unfold the same way this time?

These high school freshman classes are a piece of cake. I was a C student when I came this way thirty years ago. I’m an A- B+ student now. And without working too hard at it. How does that change the future? And, here I am courting Marilyn LeDoux. Do I still meet Deborah? Do I get married to her? If not, what happens to my two daughters?

The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show last Sunday night.

It’s mid November now. I know that in about two weeks the president of the United States will be assassinated. Should I tell someone? Would anyone believe me? Should I leave an anonymous note somewhere? Odds are it would happen anyway and then the authoritiy types would be all over me. I'd likely never see the light of day again.

Talk about everything changing in a moment. In a moment, in the very near future, in Dallas Texas, the entire course of history will change.

What should I do?