Recently, she said she was thinking about time travel. She’d heard a radio show about it and shared a quote she loved, a description of the past as “a vast encyclopedia of calamities you can still fix.” She’d memorized it, she said, because it made her laugh. And then it made her cry. Because she’ll never live long enough to have this list of calamities that other people acquire by the time they reach old age—relationships they’d want to mend, career paths they’d want to take, mistakes that they’d go back and “get right” this time.
