Time Traveler

Alison and I took a walk into Broad Ripple this morning and she spent the "to" portion telling me about her DragonVale adventures. It's a game she plays on her iPad, which began on mine, so she has a double dose of dragons for whom she has strategic breeding plans (no actual copulation is involved), food production and revenue streams.

I could recount to you the types and monetary value of her 35 dragons and dozen or so habitats... OK. I know you're fascinated, too: There are sky dragons and water dragons, earth dragons, swamp dragons and fire dragons and ice dragons and.... Names run the gamut of Gusty (wind dragon) to Rubble (he's a mountain dragon) and my favorite, Tsunami (a water dragon.)

It's a mile into Broad Ripple, ergo I know a mile's worth of dragon lore. Don't you wish you were me? :)

Part of the deal with breeding dragons is that you have an incubation perior that can last from minutes to days depending on how exotic your dragon is. Back when my iPad was her only path to the world of dragons, I'd often find the clock was off. Sometimes by days. It was really annoying. I'd reset it only to find it off again next time I checked in.

And then I discovered that Ali was time traveling. She started doing it when she was playing another iPad game called PocketFrogs. Turns out these critters have an incubation period, too, and Alison was manipulating time so she could hatch her batches of frogs in record time.

She'd tried it with DragonVale, but it turns out that dragons are smarter than frogs and they smack you around if you try to hatch a dragon out of the proper time sequence.

"You're kind of tricky," I said.

"No, I'm smart. There's a difference," she explained, quite seriously.

It was funny to me that we were talking about time travel because it's the subject of my latest Book Club book -- 11/22/63.

The book itself is fascinating, depressing, uplifting, often hard to put down, but sometimes difficult to keep at.

If you could change history, would you? Should you?

I know there have been times in my life that I would love to have a do-over because I did it so badly in round one. But, with apologies to Darius Rucker, it was the mistakes (and some right calls) that brought me here to this.

"This" being a long walk hand-in-hand with my daughter on a cold winter's morning. Sure, my mind might have wandered a bit during the detailed dragon descriptions, but my heart didn't.


It couldn't. A little, gloved hand had a firm grip on it.

I wouldn't take a trip back and risk missing that.