RIVER CITY JOURNAL: A TRIP BACK IN TIME? IT'S A LOT EASIER THAN YOU THINK

You want to know my definition of the good old days? No need for a TV remote because there's only one channel.

Time travel has never been a big deal to me. When the "Back to the Future" movies came out and that other one about the high school reunion, I didn't get it. The sci-fi movies about machines that take you back to the past or into the future have impressed me the most with their inability to make it look convincing.

Then there's that TV show where the guy gets an early edition of the newspaper with tomorrow's news. Now here's something I know about. It's hard enough to get yesterday's news in tomorrow's newspaper. No way am I going to pay much attention to a TV show that claims it meets deadlines before they happen.

All the movies and TV shows about time travel make a big deal over how you can't change events without creating a disaster. They want you to think about what would have happened if someone had whopped a kid named Adolf on the back of the head way back when and made him join the Boy Scouts and get a paper route.

But, of course, that didn't happen. Adolf went into the uniform business and grew a moustache.

Or they want you to think about what would have happened if this guy from Nazareth had won the bid for the big school construction project in Jericho instead of taking up preaching and winemaking.

But, of course, that didn't happen either.

I think a lot of parents get a taste of the past when their offspring come home for a visit or move back into the house. Suddenly the bedroom you keep looking like a home-decorating magazine spread because you think unexpected guests will hold lint balls against you forever turns into a storage depot for piles of unironed clothes and wet towels.

Some of you know what I'm talking about here.

Having said all of that, you're going to find it hard to believe that I took a trip to the past this week. I really time traveled. Here's what happened:

Let me start by telling you that I have been a television junkie since the day we put up that tall antenna on the south side of the farmhouse on Kelo Valley. The first TV show I saw on the black-and-white set from Luna Hardware was "Superman," which came on in the afternoons just as I got off the school bus. I'm pretty sure it was "Superman." The reception was so fuzzy you had to listen for clues like the theme music to be sure.

My idea of ideal TV viewing is one channel that has all the shows you want to see. That's the way it was in those early days of TV. I'm pretty good at flipping the remote through the gazillion channels we have now. But I am proportionately frustrated by the lack of programs I want to see.

My wife thinks there's even less worth watching than I do. She finds other, more useful things to do with her time. I still try my best to find something to watch. Then I fall asleep. My wife knows that as soon as the channel flipping stops, I'm out cold.

I've been trying really hard recently to use my time more productively too. I've read a lot of books. Some of them were good. But there is always that period between a good book that you've just finished and a new book -- a book that might not be so good or compelling. That is what I call the I-Don't-Want-To-Read-But-There's-Still-Nothing-On-TV period.

The other night I was suffering from IDWTRBTSNOTVitis. My wife was into another book or browsing through the latest of her multitude of trial magazine subscriptions. I was standing in front of the bookcases bulging with books and knickknacks.

"What are you looking for?" my wife asked.

"Something to read," I said, which sounds a little like the drowning duck who tells you he's thirsty.

I looked at the stack of oversized books turned sideways on one shelf because they are too tall to stand up. These books are the high school and college yearbooks from our past. We keep moving them. We keep putting them in the bookcases. We never look at them.

Because I really didn't want to read anyway, I pulled out my high school yearbook from my senior year. I swear I haven't looked at it since the day I brought it home. A long, long time ago.

I spent more than an hour with the faces and places that were my life then. There was an aerial view of my favorite hometown. Gosh! How familiar it looked. I could name every store, church and filling station. There were pictures of the old grade school and the old high school, both gone now. There were all my classmates, including the handful from Mrs. Rayfield's first-grade class at the old one-room Shady Nook School on Greenwood Valley over the hill from Kelo Valley, the ones who stayed in school and graduated from high school.

There was a picture of the high school mixed chorus: 180 boys in suits and ties and girls in fluffy formals with a gob of puffy petticoats. "Imagine that," I said to my wife. "There were 180 of us in the mixed chorus. There were probably only 250 in the whole high school."

That was the doing of Mr. English, of course, the legendary band director who was completing his 15th year at my high school during my senior year.

Then I saw the yearbook dedication. It honored Mr. English, who went on to teach quite a few more years before he retired.

During my time travels back to my senior year, I didn't try to change a single thing. I wouldn't if I could. I had a great time when I was a senior. And I had a great time visiting all these years later.

Yes, it was a great time. I know that because there was something worth watching on TV. I wouldn't change that either.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.