Time Travel

In a movie it is a sunset or sunrise, transatlantic voyages, the passage of a locomotive, a bridge, that symbolizes change, transition, and the stirring that hope is the journey.

My work as a guide, helping people enjoy their time, is a lot like being an escort to the past and because I wasn’t born in New York a guest always asks, how I got here, as if I was beamed into their presence from the “Star Trek Enterprise.” It is even more evident when my group discovers that I don’t own a vehicle nor cable TV, I can hear hand held devices hitting the floor.

Trying to avoid becoming obsolete in my own time I do acknowledge the purpose of new technology. Graduating from high school in 1984, there is a slight Orwellian paranoia as our universe becomes less and less tangible to me; this web and its infrastructure is a network of invisible highways, avenues, and threads that offer simulation, surveillance, and transportation and you don’t have to leave your home.

I don’t understand it but I find it fascinating. Like all strange new things there is transition and this may be the ultimate in time travel, and like a merry-go-round, or a roller coaster sometimes we just hold on to whatever we can manage.

Maybe I was born at the wrong time and the pleasures I get out of living in New York City are the best of both worlds. From 1869 to 1883 witnessing the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, it was a grueling process, I understand, but the web of cable networking suspends and supports the future and today an Icon. The only buildings of that day to be nearly as tall were the spires of churches and when the bridge was completed it became the tallest structure on the entire eastern seaboard. Today, it is hard to imagine the bridge standing so dominate against a more demure city.

I can look at photos of the bridge before the city exploded around it and know that the photo is a first in hand held images captured by a machine and circulated around the world with great excitement and I can hear the clamor of pedestrians, bicyclists, and the clip clop of the horse-and-buggy as this bridge changed lives and brought a more conscious enthusiasm for adventure.

Join me, let’s “trip the light fantastic, on the sidewalks of New York.”