WHERE WERE WE? I wondered. Then one of a pack of school boys turned my way and said, “Don’t you know, you’re in 1968!” Is that why everything was so weirdly sepia-toned, as if we had all stepped out of one of those ancient, musty smelling album covers, like Waiting for the Sun by The Doors, or Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. by The Monkees? A strange place was 1968, one foot in the past, one in the future. People’s hair was merely growing then, but had not yet achieved its 1970s freak-flag length. Wide collars, floppy hats. What was I even doing in this murky picture of the past? I was standing outside a school on a street. The boys from 1968 turned and went one way, and I went the other. A girl in a plaid dress passed me by.

It was autumn in 1968, a rainy autumn, or was it a rainy spring? It was cool, moist, there were wet leaves on the mottled asphalt of the street. I walked and walked and soon I was in my old neighborhood on Long Island, which wouldn’t be built for another 17 years or so, but here it was, and the houses were all finished. Jocko and his family were outside their home, which was across the street from my old house, and the sun had just come out. We used to play right over there, in the sand dunes between his house and the neighbors’, and wrestle in the mud. One time he even sprayed us with his sister’s tropical perfume, which made the hornets and the bees of the neighborhood go wild with lust. This time, he was kneeling before a stack of roofing tiles while his brothers did the hard work. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Are you doing okay, man?” I said. Jocko looked up at me, good-natured Sicilian that he was, and said, “Yeah, of course. Just this renovation job is taking forever.” It was. The façade was missing. I could see his room up on the second floor, the wind gusting through. “Where do you sleep at night?” I asked Jocko. “We have to sleep here,” he sighed. “But it sure does get cold at night.”

In the back of the house, I found stacks of utility uniforms, the kinds that construction workers wear. These piles formed elaborate patterns, so that it almost looked like they were a deck of playing cards. I was baffled by the uniforms and knew not what to make of the find.

From there, I walked on.

Eventually, I wound up back at the school where I started. It was a brick building, like all of the school buildings in the district, which had been, per chance, constructed in 1968. I stood there waiting outside of the school while other parents waited for their children. Just then, my friend El Scorcho, a Latin folk singer with a faint moustache I knew from Estonia, arrived. He came down the hill on his bicycle to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel. He too was here in 1968, and his clothing was of the modern fashion. He wore a brown leather jacket, his black hair was becoming unruly, and he smelled of incense and marijuana. As soon as he saw me, he slowed his peddling and came to a stop. “Oh, you’re here too. You’re in 1968 too,” he said. “What are we doing in 1968?” I asked him. “Beats me,” he said. “I’ve been stuck in 1968 all week. But do you want to get some tacos? I found a place that’s good. Jim Morrison even goes there.”