Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick

"First you need to invent a time machine," I say. "So you can go back there and give all the cavemen a hard time about indoor plumbing."
Freak goes, "You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember."
Which is something I'll always remember, him saying that and me trying to figure it out.

I read that out loud three times this week. Each time I read it, I wanted to stop and reread it over and over again, but I had 20+ students who would give me a hard time if I started to wax eloquent on what that quote means to me. (By the way, one of the rewards of teaching is watching 78 children read like me: gripping the book, eyes wide, hanging on every word. I also feel like the book is successful when a number of wanna-be cool middle schoolers are sniffling over one of the characters dying.)

Anyway, I love that quote. I think I like it because I often want to turn back time and go to different worlds again. Sometimes I want to go back to that water tower in Zimbabwe where we would spend many a brown-out night by watching the shooting stars, only I couldn't see the shooting stars because my eyes are too bad. Sometimes I want to go back to being behind the counter at a fast food chain, serving chicken at 80 miles an hour. Sometimes I want to go back to having 15 commentaries open on one huge table in the library as I try to write about the whole book of Hebrews. Sometimes I want to go back to that night in Busay when I stepped out of the dark house and saw a real-life planetarium in the sky above me and the next day I read a verse about the stars in the sky and I marked the date in the margin because I'll never forget that sight. Sometimes I want to go back to the times when my grandfather was still alive and well and he would call me "ReBAYcca" and swing me up on his shoulders like we were just as amazing as Barnum and Bailey's circus acrobats.

But like Freak says, we don't need that time machine. God doesn't allow us to go back in time. But He gave us a memory which is almost a time machine.