A STORY ABOUT TIME

Science has been talking about this for centuries -- an actual time-machine. Serious breakthroughs are being made in its pursuit. But while the experts in the labs crunch the numbers and bend the light waves, the rest of us out here can take time-trips whenever we choose to ignite the booster-rockets of our brains.

Such travels call for precise navigation. We need to understand the times and the characters waiting for us. Among our prospects might be ancient Egypt to discover for ourselves what was that aura about Cleopatra that entranced an emperor and altered an empire....or perhaps the empty tomb of Jesus of Nazareth to experience what was this astonishing belief that a man could raise from the dead....or possibly the tavern next to Ford's Theatre that fateful night when John Wilkes Booth gulped his final drink to steady his trembling hand.

Each of us will have our own particular itinerary. And our own particular hopes of how we might alter the plots. I see myself arriving at the port of New Orleans in the year 1899. There just outside the harbor on a gray September morning rests the good ship Marseilles out of Palermo, Sicily. Among the eager passengers are eight from the little hill town of Corleone. Among these, my 3-year-old Father Vincenzio. The Spatafora family of farmers are hoping to land, then quickly migrate north to Chicago where cousins await them.

It was not to be....!

As any time-traveler learns, you can visit the past; but you cannot change the past. What is waiting for these passengers is a vile but invisible enemy: Another Yellow Fever epidemic. Still a generation before a cure, this ancient delta disease is once more ravaging the city. The port authorities order the vessel not to dock. The captain has two equally disagreeable options: Return to Sicily or land anywhere a coastal port will permit them.

Here I sit at the controls of my time-machine without any control over these frightened immigrants. One, a small scared boy who will someday become a man, a husband, a father. But where? when? how? and with whom? If he is now turned back to Sicily, there will be no chance to meet my Mother living in Chicago, or to have me, or for my little life to affect all the other little lives that wait just up ahead for my possibility.

My machine's control proves worthless...! My science friends are wasting their time...! But wait, the little port of Pensacola signals the wandering Marseilles it's OK to land there. Thank God, all will be as it was meant to be.

However, not at my hands nor at my controls. Both of these are to be found elsewhere...