“If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?”

It’s such a broad question I struggle to find an answer. I suppose most people would respond that they’d ask for a tree that grew money, or a genie, or super powers. All of these answers seem too easy—too selfish.

I stir the straw of my drink three times, as if I’ll find an answer in the contents of my watered down lemonade. The liquid and tiny ice cubes spin around and around in circles, like an underwater tornado.

A wrinkled old man sporting a pair of thick black-brimmed glasses at the table next to me is reading The New York Times. Although his face is matured and spotted brown from years in the sun, his eyes are bright. He greets a kind, crooked smile to a golden retriever that eagerly sniffs the man’s wing tip Italian leather shoes. He lifts up his grey fedora, revealing slicked back white puffs of hair. Out of the right pocket of his sports coat, he whips out a comb and pushes back what left of his hair he has.

The mannerisms displayed by this man are one of a character in the background on a 1920’s silent movie. This stranger gives me a brilliant idea.

“I’d want a time machine.”

“Where would you go?”

My mind races.

1920s: Laughter, over the spunky jazz music, fills the air. Flutes of prohibited sparkling champagne clink, spilling liquid gold onto the white marble floor. Women classily strut by in their flapper dresses, their necks wrapped in pearls. Those on the dance floor are waltzing, doing the foxtrot, and the charleston. Perhaps this is the most poetic time in American society. Welcome to the Roaring 20s.   
1950s: Sally goes home from school to a picture-perfect, white, picket-fenced house. Mom puts a fresh homemade casserole on the table. This is the Baby Boom Era, when family values were important; everyone had a sense of togetherness.  Welcome to the 1950s. Mom happily goes to the florist, wearing her hair curled into ringlets, using her polite southern mannerisms to charm everyone who comes her way. Johnny takes  Sally on a date at the drive-in movie theater. The Civil Rights Movement is sweeping America, finally moving towards equality for all colors of skin.

1960s: Crowds of people sway their hips and move their bodies wildly to the live music being played by the most appreciated guitarist in rock and roll history.  Flower children are dressed in minimal clothing, smelling of earth and grass. Sweat drips down the face of a god disguised as a human, Jimi Hendrix. Welcome to Woodstock Music Festival, summer of 1969.

1980s:  The raw popularity of polaroid shots. Not attempting to perfect the photo over and over, just being given one opportunity to remember a moment.

I would go to the influential moments throughout my parents lives: seeing the town my dad grew up in, the smile on my mom’s face when she bought her first car with her own money, my dad’s first kiss, my mom’s sixteenth birthday, my dad telling his parents he dropped out of college to live on the road, the day my mom got into college, the day my parents met. The day they each realized they were in love. The day they had their first fight. The last time they hugged each other. Although they are living separate lives, they are the humans who placed me on this earth. They have lived so much life I could not fathom to imagine inside my head.

“Everywhere. I’d want to see everything,” I answer.