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exactly the same time he had left work —when Jackie and I returned from school. All this in the futuristic-sounding Lincoln Mark IV, in silver “moondust” metallic paint with matching silver leather interior and silver-grained vinyl roof, a V8 engine capable of escape velocity, and opera windows through which the present hurtled into the past.
    It seemed to me at the time that all that time jumping took its toll on Dad. To my young eyes he appeared older than most of my friends’ fathers, who didn’t have to battle the time continuum twice daily. In a decade of excess seemingly engineered for subsequent embarrassment, they sported Florida-shaped sideburns and wide lapels while Dad preferred three-piece suits and an astronaut’s haircut generously flecked with white. Mom seemed to appreciate neither the grounding of Dad’s common sense nor the boldness of his time traveling. (It wasn’t always apparent what Mom wanted, and it remains unclear today.)
    Before he was a time traveler Dad was an athlete, a cross-country skier who had even made the U.S. biathlon team. To the untrained eye, biathlon might seem a pointless mix of cross-country skiing and target shooting. In fact, the sport is not without purpose, the challenge being to test an athlete’s ability to go from heart-pumping activity to the completely restful state needed to hit a target. The lesson Dad took from this seemed to be to live his life the opposite way—modulating everything away from the poles toward the center: neither heart-pounding exhilaration nor peaceful focus would be his purview. Wherever possible, Dad avoided transcendent highs as much as debilitating lows, preferring instead to live in that dull middle where nothing was terrible, nor would it ever be great. He shunned conflict, which might have resolved some things but instead avoided shouting; he stopped reaching for big, uplifting moments rather than risk failure and disappointment, or even the letdown of the quiet moments that lurk between the triumphant ones.
    But back in 1964, before he had chosen the wide stripe of the middle, Dad traveled as a member of the U.S. biathlon team to the Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, where he finished forty-seventh. (Even the best American biathlete has never finished higher than eighth at the Olympics. Apparently we’re built, like a muscle car, for power and speed, not emotional complexity.) Whenever I’d asked about Innsbruck Dad never talked about his own experience but about his roommate, Tommy Baker, the highest-scoring American, who finished sixteenth. According to Dad, Tommy also fucked a Russian figure skater, an East German luger, and all three women’s downhill medalists from Austria. Those are perhaps odd details to share with a child, but the larger lesson didn’t escape me that Tommy excelled at both physical endurance and hitting his targets.
    And while Tommy joined the Alaskan National Ski Patrol and became a bush pilot for Alaskan Mountain Air, Dad chose instead the path of least resistance and low reward closer to home. I remember even as a teenager being aware of the limitations of Dad’s emotional genes, and while not wishing Tommy Baker was my father—I adored Dad, and suspect Tommy was not the first one home at 4:00 P.M. to greet his children every day—I did occasionally wish Tommy Baker had secretly slept with Mom and gotten her pregnant with a dashing, reckless version of me.
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    The ride home from the breakfast I failed to keep down is made in complete silence, a reminder of how effective at shaming me mute Dad could be over scolding Dad or especially shouting Dad, which tended to make me laugh and therefore threatened to unleash red-faced super-angry Dad. We coast past “Crawlywood,” hilariously named by preteen boys in mocking homage to distant Hollywood. Its furtive acreage dense with trees and underbrush provided a welcome