Welcome back to Time Travel Wordcraft. Thank you for meeting me here at the Wedgwood Broiler in Seattle, Washington. “The Broiler,” as it exists today, was born 50 years ago in 1969. While it was born fresh on the heels of the Summer of Love, it exudes more of a 1950’s vibe. I love this place with its fading throwback charms. I have family who lives nearby, and I spent a lot of my teens and twenties in this neighborhood of Wedgwood. The spelling—of Wedgwood—is without the second letter “e.” Mrs. Albert Balch (wife of the Broiler’s original architect) was so fond of Wedgwood China Dinnerware that she chose “Wedgwood” as the official name for this quaint little suburban neighborhood.
The Wedgwood Broiler specializes in comfort food. I’m just ordering a cup of tea, but please feel free to have whatever you like. I like to come here when I need a little comforting, and this occasion is certainly one of those times.
Our monthly visits together now must come to an end. But before we close and lock the door to the Time Travel Writing Lab, I wanted to take some time to explain what I’m going to be doing for the next year. If you’ve read my column on any regular basis you will be familiar with my technical engineer, Ada.
Ada Byron Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815. The daughter of George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron) and his wife, Annabella (Lady Byron) Wentworth. According to the internet and Ada’s family stories, the first words her father said to her as an infant were, “Oh! What an implement of torture have I acquired in you!”
Not even a month after Ada was born, Lord Byron left both his wife and Ada. He never saw Ada again. Lord Byron did write about Ada in his poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third. In it he wrote, “Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child! Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart? When last I saw thy young blue eyes, they smiled, And then we parted, —not as now we part, But with a hope.—”
Ada and I began our alliance when she found her way to my time travel closet through her experimentation with computer code. Keep in mind—she was doing this in 1850. She traveled from London 1850, to my lab in Seattle in June of 2017. That’s when we began our collaboration. During the time that Ada has worked with me, she has explored the outer reaches of spacetime. Traveling to the past and to the future, Ada has seen her own future and she knows she will die on November 27, 1852.
You need to understand that when Ada came to work with me, her timeline in 1850 remained intact. Ada made many trips to my writing lab in Seattle within the years 2018 through 2019. Then, she would return to her life in London in 1850-1852. Time passed for her just as it would have if she had remained in the year 1850. It’s just that she spent some of her time in a different time. In short, time is running out for Ada. She will die on November 27.
Before she passes, Ada would like to see her father.
Ada has a plan to go back to the summer of 1816, to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where her father ran off to just six months after her birth. In Geneva, it was considered “the year without a summer,” and it was persistently cold and rainy. There with Lord Byron was Mary Shelley and her soon-to-be-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s friend and personal physician, John William Polidori.
It was there, late at night inside the Villa Diodati, that Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and the doctor John Polidori would engage in conversations about galvanism—the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current.
Mary Shelley sat there taking it all in as the rain beat relentlessly against the windows of the villa and flashes of lightning would expose a momentary cruelty to the otherwise graceful candlelit rooms. It was there where Frankenstein was conceived.
Ada has rented a house for the two of us near Villa Diodati. Her plan is to go over to the Villa, introduce herself to her father and…. I have this part written down, so I want to quote it exactly. Ada is going to say to her father, “Lord Byron, I am Ada Byron. I am your daughter. I have broken the laws of science and God to decipher the codex of time. Right now, another fatherless Ada Byron exists, only six months old. After I leave you, know I will go back to London in 1852 to die. But, before I do, I have traveled through time to see you and to ask you for my father’s embrace.”
Ada tells me she has some more information she will pass along to him to convince him she is who she claims to be, but she hasn’t been forthcoming with that. And of course, I wouldn’t press her on the matter.
After Ada meets with her father, I’ll travel to London in 1852 with Ada, where she will die. She will be 36 years old. I want to be there. Ada has cooked up an elaborate story to tell her family and friends about who I am and my association with her and her work.
After Ada passes, she wants me to remain in London so that I can collect the time travel code from her office closet. Ada had set up a time travel closet, although she refers to it as a portal. Following her plan, I’ll then transport back to the time travel closet in my writing lab, using the transport charms we’ve used in the past. Once I’ve done that, Ada wants me to travel back to London in 1850 and attempt to bring her back to the year 2020 in an effort to reanimate her own life. If we are successful, she wants to start a new life in 2020.
I have to confess that I have some misgivings about this whole plan, but these are her wishes and I want to help her in any way that I can.
Ada’s already made arrangements to be buried next to her father. She tells me she has dreams that on judgment day, she and her father wake from their graves, turn to see each other and share a long embrace before they ascend to heaven together. She believes—no, she feels, feels it in her bones—that the embrace she will experience with her father will feel so natural and come so normally, because they will have already embraced on the grounds of the Villa Diodati.
This time next month, I will not be 30 days forward from this moment in time. I will be 169 years backwards in time. So, this is goodbye my friend. But I have something planned for the December Time Travel Wordcraft post, so I hope you’ll come back next month.
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