I remember the first time I encountered the fringe of science fiction. I was in fifth grade and my desk was close enough to the classroom bookshelves that I could see a shining white spine and make out the words "A Wrinkle in Time", and L'Engle.

     I didn't know what that meant. Time was just time, no fabric to wrinkle or strings to intersect, time just was. You either knew that or you didn't, and everybody knew it. You could watch time pass on the spinning red second hand of the clock; you could watch the sun move in the sky, but stopping the clock or the sun didn’t stop time. We were practical people living in an Illinois farm community. We all knew that you couldn’t buy back the day so the notion that you could grasp the intangible and wrinkle it like and old shirt was outrageous and confusing to my uninitiated perspective. "I like to understand things" said Meg, and so do I, so I had to read that book.

     Fifth grade is before you are taught geometry, what dimensions are and how they are represented. I didn’t know that there were three physical (x, y, z) dimensions (or nine if you read Heinlein) and that you could use equations to map surfaces defined in them. At this point receiving the basics of Euclidean Geometry were like being handed the key to the Philosopher’s Stone. With one dimension you can draw a line; with two dimensions you can represent a flat surfaces on paper such as squares, circles, triangles; and using the third dimension gives depth to our world with cubes, spheres, cones. The synergy of these ideas still makes me tingle.

    The fourth dimension represents time and it never begins or ends. Such a simple statement with tiny simple words, but this is where my head started to hurt and we hadn’t even got to the exciting dimension yet. If you take a piece of paper and look at the edge you have a line, look at the surface and there is a rectangle, crumple it into a ball and you have a 3 dimensional object. Throw it toward the wastebasket and you will see it travel in time like the hand on the clock, but when did the journey start? When you crumpled it? When you bought the package it was sold in? When the tree fell? When the seedling sprouted? When will it end? When you forget about the ball hiding behind the trash can? When it is incinerated? When the ash and carbon dioxide feed more seedlings? Never means never and always means always, never stopping or starting, always there; E=mc2 with a few practical fudge factors loaded in.

     I didn’t know about the mysteries of geometry and time and associated theories when I took the book off of the shelf, and they were only a part of the reason I hid it in my desk until the end of the school year. There was a new and interesting word on the back of the book that I knew was not going to show up on a spelling test or in my science book. It was my word and it gave me a thrill to hide it from the others and jealously guard its secrets. By hiding the book I was the only person in my world with this word and the ability to learn its meaning. The amazing visitor on that dark and stormy night shocks Mrs. Murry and frightens the children, “…by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

     What is a tesseract? It is a junction between your time and space interposed upon another time and space. This is time travel for kiddies so it was simplified, but not much more than it usually is for adults. In the tree-to paper-to trash example above, if you could use the time tesseract, you could crumple the piece of paper and watch the ball miss the waste can at the same time. The two points in time could exist in the same space without the intervening time or actions. Of course (now here comes my headache) the intervening steps would occur, but a person slipping through the junction formed by the tesseract would not be aware of them. The image used in the book is that of the two sides of a skirt. If you are at point A on one side of the skirt and want to go to point B you can just fold the skirt and be there instead of marching all the way across the lap. Theoretically you can wrinkle space and time coincidentally, so you could plant the tree in the forest and watch the janitor picked up the trash in your office, being in two places at two times converging at a single intersection!

      I could spell it and I knew what it meant; or at least I thought I did, which is good enough at 10. I used it at home (ala Ramona the Pest and her dawnzer) and got that look from my mom who just wanted to sit down and rest after chasing 5 kids and taking care of the house all day. I used the word on the playground- - twice. "I think it will be better if people go on thinking I am not very bright. They won't hate me so much.” says Charles Wallace, boy was he smart.

      I’d like to say that the book sparked a flame of interest for science or math, but I don’t recall it. In fact I had forgotten the book until I was over 40 and found it in a used bookstore. In the past few years I have been buying books from my youth that were lost or ruined, reuniting with old friends. I got sentimental and smiled when I bought the Wrinkle for a dollar to put up on my nostalgia shelf. I took it down to read recently and was amazed at the foundations that spoke out to me. It contained things that I didn’t learn about until college: Einstein’s equation, megaparsecs, the velocity of light squared, third and fourth dimensions, the dangers of conformity and loss of self, the dangers of being too different. I could see the appeal the book had for a bright, lonely, different girl who wanted to have more than what was around her and wanted to be more than she was. I still get the headache when I try to visualize infinity. "Only a fool is not afraid" says Mrs. Whatsit.

       This time when I read the book I really did understand it, and it is not really about time travel at all, even though it took me back to that grade school bookshelf and the secret tingle in my chest when I touched the book and whispered “tesseract”. There is such a thing as a tesseract and our access to it and the interconnected timelines and spaces is at our fingertips. Pick up a book, open the pages and look at it from the top edge. You will see an arrow pointing you into another place and maybe another time. Put the printed pages in front of your eyes and see something different from somebody else’s perspective and you are there. Exercise your brain. “What is the square root of 5?”