Back to the Future

I recently learned from Wade, who recently learned from the internets, that we recently passed the date Marty McFly and Doc allegedly* type into the flux capacitor ("Where we're going, we don't need roads"): July 5, 2010.

*There's been some controversy over this. Research here if, like me, you can't find a more productive use of your time.

I don't need a DeLorean for my time travel. Instead, every year as summer afternoons shorten into fall dusks, I make my way up Parley's Canyon, turn off at Kimball Junction, and head to Park City for the Annual Lindsay Family Reunion. When Three Kings Drive, shrouded in hanging pots, curves behind the Alpine Slide toward the golf course, I feel like I've gone back in time.

All at once I'm a little girl watching hot air balloons with her grandma in a red sweater, a mom holding Scotty's hand has he shouts "bus!" for the first time, and a high school graduate pining for her Netherlandian missionary.

I guess thirty years of tradition can take a place out of time. But while some things never seem to change (days filled with Rook games, afternoons at the pool, feeding the ducks), for others alteration is inevitable. Families grow, people move, time passes. This year my parents hosted a Park City reunion of their own, gathering as many of their chicks as they could in a sort of family reunion 2.0.


But the biggest change this summer was Grandpa's absence. Since his passing in June, we've missed his booming laugh, his chocolate malts, his loving tributes to Grandma--but somehow in Park City those things were there, too. I thought of him so much at the Alpine Slide, where every year (in his aversion to heights) he chose to wait at the bottom and cheer us all down the hill. He always watched most anxiously for Grandma, the fastest, gamest octogenarian in a sled.

And that's how I imagine Grandpa now, standing in the twilight at the end of a long journey, waiting and cheering and supporting his family on to a place and a time out of place and time, where our past and our future are bound up in eternal love.

What a family reunion that will be.