If I could turn back time.

Cher sang that.

Cher has likely turned back time by the use of plastic surgery. Oops! I’ve broken a cardinal rule. Men are never supposed to mention a woman’s plastic surgery. That’s Rule 771.148. She has been subject of more than her fair ration of jokes. There is no need to pile on. Cher is a beautiful woman no matter what.

We all have days when we feel as useless as a brick parachute. When I’m a few degrees off center, I don a hat made from aluminum foil, climb to the top of a stepladder, face north and touch my tongue to the terminals of a 9-volt battery. That causes a strange tingle in the little toe of my left foot. I do this because I have too much time on my hands. That’s not true. I don’t have too much time on my hands. I scramble to do what I do.

I’m not a coffee drinker, but imagine there had been an accident at the coffee laboratory. A slight error while testing a new formula resulted in magical coffee beans. It’s not a Jack in the coffeestalk thing. There was no giant involved. One cup of that java would take you back 10 years. Two cups would send you 20 years into the past. A coffee machine would be a time machine. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

How many cups would you drink? Perhaps you’d sip just enough to take you back to a time when you had fewer aches and pains or subtract enough years to lose the hitch in your gitalong. Maybe you’d go way back because you believe that if you’re going to rattle the skeletons in the closet, they may as well dance.

Everyone lives a life worth telling, but are lives worth repeating? Bad choices make good stories, but would you want to relive some of those painful moments from a time when the outhouse had no handle to jiggle? Do you long to return to the years when you slaved away at the bean mine in Lima, Ohio? Many things that are funny in retrospect were brutal in process.

Do you want to go back to a time when Groundhog Day was your school’s lunch menu and front porches were the cellphones of their day? Or to that time you helped the neighbor stack hay in the haymow of the barn and a mouse ran up your pantleg. You shrieked and leaped from the haymow to the ground, breaking your best ankle. At the hospital’s emergency room, the doctor asked you what had happened.

“I was attacked by a mouse,” you blubbered, noticing a nurse choking back a chortle.

The doctor smiled that friendly way that lets you know that you’re an idiot and said, “A little mouse isn’t going to hurt you.”

You set him straight, “It will if it can make me jump out of a perfectly good barn.”

I don’t think you’d want to repeat that splendid part of your history.

Returning to bygone days might not be a walk down Happy Street. It wasn’t only happy people who lived in the past. There were those sad days of so much crying, that you had to battle the current.

If you do have the chance to go back in time, just make sure that you don’t land on a date before the statute of limitations had run out on you-know-what. And take a jacket.

We are stuck with this day. We don’t get to do yesterday over. If we’re not happy now, we probably weren’t happy then either.

When I was a boy, I loved peanut brittle. The problem was that by the time the stuff found its way to our farm, it was pleasant-tasting concrete. The other day, I ate some cashew crunch. It looked like peanut brittle, but tasted even better and it was easy gnawing. I didn’t need a time machine to make me happy.

I don’t know of any time machines other than photographs, books, stories, music, old-time radio and ancient TV shows. They can transport us to those thrilling days of yesteryear, but only momentarily. If hindsight were 20-20, we’d all have perfect vision.

The Talmud says that we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

I think life was better before popcorn was microwaveable, so I might drink some magic coffee.

If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.

 

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday and Sunday.