Meg Evans

I ran a Halloween road race on Saturday afternoon with my husband. Because of the pandemic, that meant we ran our 5K at a nearby park by ourselves and uploaded our times to the race website afterward. We missed seeing the usual crowds and costumes, but it was at least nice weather for a run, with plenty of sunshine and colorful leaves on a newly repaved path.

By Sunday morning the weather was not so nice. The first thing I heard when I woke up was howling winds, and the temperature was forecast to drop steadily all day. I got myself a cup of coffee and some toast, and then I sat down on the couch and changed the picture on my digital art display to a country lane with falling leaves on a windy day.

Because I hadn’t done any other running this year, my legs felt a bit stiff. I have been rowing regularly, but that works the leg muscles differently. While drinking my coffee, I thought about the common New Age advice to visualize future circumstances as a way to bring them into one’s life. Maybe I ought to be visualizing myself as having wonderful future fitness?

At that point, my imaginary older self Kass suddenly popped out of my subconscious mind and into the country lane picture. She was dressed in the black tights and purple shirt that I had worn in the park on Saturday. Unlike most of my encounters with past or future selves, I wasn’t in the picture but was observing it in a split-screen way, with Kass under the trees and me still in my living room.

“Or, you could get up off the couch and walk around the house for a few minutes to loosen up your legs,” Kass suggested, in a tone midway between helpful and snarky. “Besides, what more do you need to visualize when you already have perfectly good future selves—including yours truly. And my fitness is nothing to sneeze at, if I do say so myself.”

A gust of wind sent leaves tumbling along the lane as I imagined it (although in reality, the picture on the art display was not animated). Kass tugged at her shirt and unfurled a superhero cape, which hadn’t been part of my ordinary, non-costume clothing on Saturday. The cape billowed out behind her.

“Well, okay, Kass, I didn’t have you in mind at all. No slight intended,” I said. “You’re many years into my future, and when I thought about fitness I meant something more near-term, like a few months from now.”

“Seriously, you’re in that much of a hurry? What’s wrong with having great fitness when you are older? You know, it’s a good thing I developed more patience since I was you. Sometimes I really need it to deal with a younger self who is so lacking in basic logic.”

With an exaggerated sigh, Kass turned away and started walking along the lane, making sure to tromp heavily through the leaf drifts and make the most noise. A tailwind flattened the cape to her back. When she got around the bend, the wind abated for the moment, and she turned to face me again.

“The trajectory of small changes is the main determinant of where you’re going to end up,” she observed. “That’s not rocket science—well, it is actually, if you happen to be calculating a rocket’s course. But while we’re talking about fitness, you have been getting more exercise regularly all year because of the new rowing machine. Therefore, you have better fitness now than you had last year, and in a few months it will be more improved. No magical visualization is required. If you really need inspiration from a future-self superhero, though, I’m always happy to oblige.”

“Thanks,” I said, with less than robust enthusiasm, while making a mental note never to ask for anything of the sort. I figured Kass knew what I was thinking, anyway—but, of course, that was her problem.

When I write blog posts about my past or future selves, I generally don’t plot out a detailed structure first. Rather, I visualize myself in an imaginary setting, and then I look around to see what turns up there. It’s often a random, stream-of-consciousness narrative.

That was especially true when writing this post on a rainy Saturday. I pictured myself walking outdoors on a similarly dark and wet day, wearing jeans and a light jacket with a hood. An asphalt path, with puddles here and there, meandered through a public park. The rain had stopped for the moment (as it had in real life), and the path had started to dry.

On my right, I saw a wide expanse of neatly mowed grass and well-tended trees and shrubs. A stream ran along the left side of the path and soon broadened into a lagoon, with dune grass and a sandy beach. I could hear the ocean not far away.

Someone was fishing in the area where the stream met the lagoon. She wore a baseball-style cap with brown hair tumbling over the shoulders of an olive-green T-shirt, along with khaki shorts. When she turned her head toward me, I recognized her as Kass, my 76-year-old future self.

She hadn’t shown much concern for polite greetings in our previous encounter, so I didn’t feel at all guilty when I grimaced and said, “Fishing, ew. Don’t try to convince me I’m going to turn into someone who loves fishing when I get older.”

Kass didn’t take offense. She just laughed and said, “Depends on what you’re fishing for. Right now, I’m casting a net into the collective unconscious and seeing what kinds of interesting cultural symbols turn up.”

She reeled in her net, which contained just one lonely domino. Reaching into the net, she picked up the domino and tossed it into the sand at her feet.

“Okay,” she challenged me, “what would you say this means?”

Not much came to mind right away. “Well, I had Domino’s pizza for dinner on Wednesday.”

“Uh-huh.” Kass didn’t quite yawn, but she looked bored.

“Playing dominoes as a child.” I tried again. “Or with dominoes. Making them into pretend walls or into paths leading to a castle, that kind of stuff.”

Kass gave me an encouraging smile. “That was always fun.”

I considered it for another minute or so, glancing up into a sky that had started to brighten. A tiny patch of blue could be seen just across the lagoon.

“The domino effect,” I said finally. “Tip over the first one, and they all start falling. Right about now, it certainly feels that way, as if the world is on the brink of huge changes. But will the changes be for the better, or not?”

Kass chuckled again, in a good-natured way. “Oh, I’m sure you must already know the answer to that, don’t you? It all depends…”

Lifting up her fishing rod, she walked around from one spot to another on the sand, making a big production of finding just the right spot to cast her line back into the water. By the time she spoke again, I knew exactly what she was going to say, and we finished the sentence in unison.

“…on where you stand.”

After another damp, overcast morning here, I was wishing for a tropical vacation with plenty of sunshine. Because that didn’t seem likely to happen any time this year, I decided to visit my imaginary future self, Fannie, and ask her to tell me about a fun vacation she’d had.

She was sitting comfortably at a table on the balcony of her townhouse, surrounded by flowers and small potted trees, when I showed up. There was a pitcher of iced tea on the table, and she poured some for both of us before starting to tell the story.

“I particularly enjoyed a trip I took in 2042,” Fannie began, “when I traveled to several countries in Africa and Asia. On a warm sunny morning, when I was feeling jet-lagged and sleepy, I dozed off beside the hotel pool in a lounge chair. When I woke up, I thought at first that I might still be dreaming when I saw an elephant standing right there across from me, with its trunk in the pool.”

“I’d known people who retired to Florida and found alligators in their yard or pool,” Fannie went on, “but an elephant? I had no idea what to do. Was it dangerous? Would it charge at me if I made any sudden moves? I sat as still as possible while I tried to work out what I should be doing.”

She took a sip of iced tea and continued, “Then a hotel staff person came outside and began scolding the elephant and waving a broom at it. I didn’t know the language she spoke, but the tone sounded just like someone telling a misbehaving puppy to mind its manners. The elephant backed off and casually strolled away, as if trying to look innocent. The staffer turned to me and said in English, with a smile, ‘All good, no worries,’ as calmly as if such encounters happened every day. Maybe they did, for all that I knew.”

“Your vacations certainly have been more interesting than mine,” I said. “Oh, well, maybe one of these days I’ll have epic adventures abroad.”

“Of course you will,” Fannie replied, with a cheerful laugh. “I’m your future, after all.”

Early in the week it was dark, cold, and blustery around here, with the temperature far below normal for the middle of May. It felt like winter had decided that it was never going to yield to spring. I didn’t even feel like going outside to get the mail and newspaper. The thought of planting annual flowers left me totally unenthusiastic. I was having a tough time picturing a good future, in general.

Given the lack of real-life places where I could go to cheer myself up, I decided that an imaginary visit with Fannie, my 119-year-old future self, would be the next best thing. I found her standing in the garage of her townhouse, next to her flying car. She wore blue jeans with a bright pink blouse, and she had shimmering pink hair to match.

The garage door was open. A warm spring breeze blew in, carrying the fragrance of flowering trees and shrubs. Fannie gave me a friendly smile and said, “Well, hello there! I was just on my way out to pick strawberries at a nearby farm. You look like you could use some more time in the fresh air, too. Hop in the car, and we’ll be off!”

Picking berries on a sunny spring day sounded like the perfect way to put the winter blues to rest. And a ride in the flying car, too—what could be better? I walked around to the passenger side, got in, and started looking for a seatbelt.

“It retracts completely when the car is off, and then it automatically dangles in front of you when the car is turned on again,” Fannie explained. “That design is an improvement on those annoying automatic seatbelts that nobody ever wanted to buy. Hildegarde, set destination: Wildland Historical Farm.”

Lights blinked on all over the dashboard, motors whirred softly, and the seatbelts made their appearance as Fannie had described. “Destination set,” a female voice replied, with an accent somewhere between Midwestern and Scandinavian.

“Hildegarde?” I asked, buckling myself in.

Another light came on as I spoke. Evidently, by saying its name, I had put the car into a mode to process further spoken input. “Proceed to destination,” Fannie said cheerfully, and the car started backing itself out of the garage.

“The car needed a name,” Fannie continued, now speaking to me, “and I thought it was a good fit. Definitely better than all those nameless cars you had over the years, which you referred to as ‘the white car’ or something equally dull. I may be a future version of you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t improve on your more boring habits.”

“Okay, that’s fine, I didn’t mean to criticize the name,” I said with a shrug, not at all inclined to argue when there were a lot more interesting things to do. The car steered itself onto a concrete takeoff lane in the center of the townhouse complex, lined on both sides with blooming purple wisteria. It accelerated quickly and launched itself into the air.

I gawked like a tourist—which I supposed I was—as we soared above tall buildings with flourishing roof plantings. Some also had vertical greenery along the walls. Bright-winged birds swarmed everywhere, almost as if we had been flying over a jungle instead of a bustling metropolis. At first I expected some birds would come smashing into Hildegarde’s windshield, but they all stayed at a safe distance.

“Today’s cars have effective bird-avoidance technology,” Fannie commented, as I turned my head to watch a yellow-winged flock veering away. “They’re designed with features that make them look and sound like raptors on the hunt to any nearby birds. Collisions with wildlife are rare.”

We had reached the edge of the city by now, and the buildings rather abruptly gave way to a mix of woodland and blooming wildflower meadows. This landscape, although pretty, left me with a strange sense of disorientation. Where were the roads, the farms, the small towns? Had there been some sort of natural disaster?

“Where are we?” I summed up my confusion in a simple question.

“America the Beautiful, minus the amber waves of grain,” Fannie informed me. “Almost all food nowadays is factory-grown in vats. It’s much more cost-effective than traditional farming, and safer too—we don’t have to worry about parasites, pesticides, foodborne illnesses, pollution from fertilizer runoff, or pandemics caused by viruses from livestock. Also, the nutritional content is standardized, so we have more awareness of what we’re eating.”

A herd of brown cattle, apparently feral, went thundering by as we flew over another meadow. Huge clouds of butterflies, disturbed by their passage, rose up from the flowers.

“Approaching destination, prepare for descent,” Hildegarde announced.

At first I couldn’t imagine where we might be going, in such a wild landscape. Then a tidy parcel of cultivated land came into view beyond the next hill, with a road on the far side leading to a highway in the distance. Trucks, which surely had to be automated, streamed by on the highway at a steady pace, with an occasional small car or motorcycle among them.

“People are healthier now and living much longer,” Fannie went on, “and some of our new foods don’t seem much different from what they replaced. For instance, I can’t tell tuna made at a factory from the real thing. Still, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and then spent many millennia as farmers—so there’s an instinctive sense of loss, I believe, that comes from having our food supply so disconnected from anything we do in nature. That’s why I like to get out and pick my own fruit or veggies every once in a while.”

Touching down smoothly in a lane along the edge of the farm’s parking lot, Hildegarde retracted her wings and pulled into a nearby space between two similar vehicles. On the other side of the lot, an ordinary-looking, non-flying school bus had just turned in from the access road.

Fannie and I walked into the strawberry enclosure. A young woman greeted us cheerfully and gave us each a basket. Two robotic folding chairs promptly detached themselves from their nearby charging stations and started rolling along behind us while we looked for a good place to pick.

“How about here?” Fannie stopped next to some tasty-looking berries. The chairs stopped also, and she pushed buttons on one of them to adjust its position and height. I did the same with the other, and we both sat down. Just then, a group of chattering preteens and their teacher walked in from the parking lot, and Fannie smiled.

“I always like to see the children,” Fannie told me. “They’re our link to a good future—however different that future may look.”

Putting berries in my basket, I found myself smiling too. Maybe this hadn’t been quite what I imagined a strawberry-picking trip would look like, but it certainly had put me in a better mood.