Somehow the Time Machine has turned, as often as not, into the kind of time machine into which I climb and go visit the past, and collect evidence, and then return here to the future present and present my findings of note, if any, to you. Weird. When I was very small, I mean tiny, just at the misty borderlands of real consciousness, we lived in Ft. Wayne Indiana. Two or three years old, maybe? This was, if my oh-so-sketchy memory serves, BEFORE my mom and dad split up, which is in some rough way the bleary smudge between what I can and cannot remember. The memories I do have from this time are wispy - frail and gray and indeterminate - crudely drawn from the outset, and now worn so smooth by years of care and use that any substantial resemblance to reality can only be attributed to luck. Anyway, when we lived in Ft. Wayne, in the house next to the Pep station on Tennessee Avenue, there was a restaurant nearby that we would go to from time to time (or maybe only once, for all I know) called the Taco Inn. I have very positive, but basically featureless, impressions of the Taco Inn - a wonderful, magical place with delicious tacos and fried ice cream and happy parents. There was a treasure chest and I think some paper mache cacti in the front window, and when you were finished eating, or maybe even while the rest of the family filled in the corners with their last bites of dessert and sips of coffee, you could go reach into that front window display and open the treasure chest and get out a plastic ring or false moustache or a pencil or deck of old maid cards. Heaven. Again, since this was (I think) before my Mom and Dad got divorced it could be that there is a much more simple memory buried in there and that somehow over the course of time I have made that tiny piece of grit into a pearl. Who knows? At any rate, the point is not that the Taco Inn was a wonderful place, the point is that I thought it was a wonderful place, and maybe there is no mechanical difference. The Taco Inn was a legendary part of my childhood, and it loomed all the nobler the farther away from it I got. Finally, when I was, maybe 9 or 10, living in Massachusetts, we went to Indiana to visit family and I talked everyone into going to the Taco Inn for dinner! Oh, was I excited. When we got there the neighborhood had gotten pretty bad. Taco Inn was long since shut down - in it's place was a dingy, nearly boarded up used medical supply shop. With grubby wheelchairs and bedpans and a dusty old prosthetic leg in the window. Treasures for someone, perhaps, but not for me. I cried and cried. The wicked world had betrayed my golden memories with the dinginess of actuality, and it was an overwhelming loss. My brothers didn't even make fun of me. I was the youngest and I got a little bit of "Crybaby!" directed at me from time to time, and crying on a public street would be pretty fair reason to throw that particular stone, but they were silent. They could tell how hard I'd been hit. I suspect that they saw it coming. More, I suspect that they had each already lost a Taco Inn of their own along the way. Everyone does. While writing down that memory, I kept feeling like I had already written down that memory. I searched the Time Machine but couldn't find it. I think, again, my memory is playing tricks on me. Maybe I just thought about it writing it down. My mom compresses memories together. She is completely unaware, except for my insistence, that she does it but she smooshes disparate events together. The day I got so mad at her for repeatedly calling me "Buster" was the same day I borrowed John's bike without asking, and had it get stolen, and it was also Drew's birthday. Only it wasn't. Those were all different days, and her brain has condensed them, without her consent. What edits are my brain making, undetected? What alterations and excisions are my memories being subjected to? At the bus stop this morning I revisited an old fear. I am just exactly the right height for the side view mirror of a city bus to hit me in the head. I have this fear that I'll be at the bus stop, or maybe just walking down the street, and a bus will come by and just tap me, just nip me in the temple as it goes by, and I'll be rendered senseless. I'll probably walk around for a while before anyone figures out who I am and by then it'll be way too late. I'll be physically functional but effectively gone. Erased by the tender kiss of a 20 ton neurosurgeon.