Time has been toying with me lately. My son just turned six. I worked for hours on this How to Train Your Dragon cake that glows under black lights. I love making his cakes and tend to go a little… overboard with them.

Baking is such a meditative process and birthdays often trigger reflections on time, but the events that followed this particular milestone pushed me deeper into the mirror…

Twenty years ago, I was living in Paris. I had never lived outside of Colorado before and the leap was a big one for a young adult. I had been determined to make study abroad part of my college experience and since my major (to even my own surprise) was French, Paris seemed like the obvious choice.

I had ulterior motives as well. I really wanted to major in film studies, but I always felt out of place in the film studies department at the University of Colorado. Not only that, it’s an expensive major and it seemed to me that if I was clever enough, I could get the education and experience without the price tag.

So here I was, in Paris, about to embark upon writing an honors thesis about the films of François Truffaut, determined to find a way to get myself into the Cannes Film Festival (which I eventually did), living in a city full of history and wonder, and floating around without an anchor while foreign sounds, sights, and smells overwhelmed me.

In the movie French Kiss, there’s a gag about Meg Ryan’s character never getting to see the Eiffel Tower. It’s there, behind her, but when she turns her head, it disappears behind a building or a moving car or something. I felt a bit like that for the first few days. I knew that somewhere in the city, there was an Eiffel Tower, an Arc de Triomphe, a Louvre, but I wasn’t seeing any of them, just a blur of wet pavement and murmurs of French that sounded unlike anything I’d heard in my classrooms.

One evening, I went out for dinner with a group of students. After dinner, we wound our way through the Parisian streets and visited Shakespeare and Company. As a bibliophile, I’d found heaven. I ran my hands across the stacks of books and the idea “Paris” began solidifying around me, but still seemed somehow out of reach.

We left the bookstore and made our way to a bridge. I had somehow made my way to Shakespeare and Company in blindness, with my nose stuck in my little “l’indespensable” red book, terrified of getting lost and not knowing how to get back to the hostel (this was long before google maps).

I remember turning my head and seeing it: Notre Dame de Paris, a giant piece of history just sitting patiently in the dark. The cathedral was dimly lit, adding to its gothic splendor. It was awesome in every sense of the word. I couldn’t move. None of us could.

Notre Dame was closed for the night, but we walked up to it anyway. I remember putting my hand on the 800-year-old stone and thinking about the history those stones had seen. Suddenly, Paris came to life all around me. I knew where I was.

Then, two weeks ago, I watched it burn.

At first, I dismissed the news. A fire breaking out at Notre Dame seemed like something easy to contain. Stone can’t catch fire, after all. Without reading the details, I had assumed that one of the thousands of little candles lit by visitors for their favorite saints had tipped over (Jeanne D’Arc, perhaps, as an act of revenge). And surely they had people standing by with fire extinguishers or something in such a case? As the alerts kept coming in, however, I resigned to turn on the news.

My heart broke seeing the spire collapse and hearing that some of the stained glass windows had been destroyed. I kept saying to myself that this building had survived revolutions, plagues, world wars, protests. Of course it would survive this. My mind flew back in time to that moment when I placed my hands on the stones and began my transformation from suburban teenager to adult person on the timeline of humanity. How much has changed since that night?

A few days later, I drove my son to school. When we arrived, the parking lot was empty. The gates were locked, the usual sound of children playing outside before the start of the school day eerily absent. I pulled out my phone to find it was still in airplane mode. I switched it on to check the school calendar- had I forgotten about some holiday?

A backlog of text message alerts flooded my screen. All of the schools in Boulder County were closed due to a hunt for some woman who had been obsessed with the Columbine massacre. She was currently running around somewhere in the state with a gun she had purchased after hopping off a plane and passing a quick background check.

Again, my mind flew back 20 years. Again, I was in France on the same trip. My boyfriend had come out to visit over spring break and we rented a car to drive around Northern France (so American). As we were driving through the rain and listening to the radio, a news break interrupted. I still wasn’t completely fluent in French, but I picked up on the words “Littleton, Colorado.”

By design, Littleton is not a place that should be in the news. Ever. Like my hometown of Arvada, it’s a bland Colorado suburb, designed to feel boringly safe, though perhaps a little more on the upper class side of town. How on Earth did it land itself on the news here in France?

I stopped the car so I could really focus on the words and translate them. I felt numb. The windshield wipers tried their best to keep up as the rain poured down in torrents, visually distorting the upended world around me. The remainder of my stay in France consisted of conversations I didn’t want to have in both French and English and involved a good deal of defending the “crazy” United States. So in answer to my above question: how much has changed in twenty years? In this regard, not a whole damn lot. At least not where school shootings are concerned. To this day, shooters still reference Columbine as their “inspiration” for their horrible acts. At least this would-be shooter eventually took her own life before taking any others.

A day or two after hearing that news, I got a phone call from a friend: Phil Solomon had died. And yet again, my mind flew back twenty years to the start of a strange friendship.

After I returned home from France, I had been called in for a sort of emergency favor. I had filled in as projectionist for a class I took with Stan Brakhage the semester before my study abroad. Stan and I became friends (which is partly how I ended up in Cannes on that study abroad trip… a long story for another post) and before I knew it, I was considered a trusted 16mm film projectionist. I also started projecting films for Melinda Barlow, who served as my film studies thesis advisor while I was in France. Remember how I said I didn’t want to go broke receiving an education in film studies? Well, now I was getting paid for it. From my darkened vantage in the projection booth, I listened to the hypnotic whir of the projector while watching the classics and listening to world-class discussions of the topic. All while never having to write a single essay…

Back to the favor: Phil Solomon’s films were playing at the Denver International Film Festival. The festival was apparently required to use union projectionists. Apparently, not a single one of them had clearance to operate the 16mm projector. Could I swing by and do it? I didn’t hesitate to say yes, though I really didn’t know anything about him.

I arrived at the festival and immediately regretted my decision. The 16mm projector was huge. I was used to working with something small enough to carry. This projector was bigger than me. I took a deep breath and a closer look. I could do this. The principles were still the same: film strip follows the channels, light shines through film strip, image appears on screen. Easy peasy.

Five minutes into the screening, the projectionist burst through the door. “Stop the projector!” He screamed. He ran over to me and started gesticulating wildly at the projector. “The film is melting!” My initial panic faded to amusement. I grinned. “It’s an experimental film,” I explained.

Blink. Blink.

“It’s kind of supposed to look like it’s melting.”

He calmed down and pulled up a chair. We watched the remainder of the program in silence.

“Wow,” he said after the lights came up. “That was somethin’!”

Indeed it was.

Unfortunately, Phil was quite ill and I didn’t really get a chance to speak to him immediately after. When I finally told him the story, he laughed. Again, I had made a friend.

Before long, I was projecting films for Phil’s classes as well. Once I had officially graduated from CU, though, I had decided it was time to move on. Paris had planted the big city bug in my head and Boulder, Colorado, just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I had made a list of places I wanted to live. Paris and Los Angeles were at the top. Paris was unrealistic and my fiancé would rather have died than move to “cultureless” L.A., so we packed up and headed to New York City.

In the three years I lived there, I managed to (somehow) make a name for myself as an experimental filmmaker while working as an optical printer at a film lab. A handful of experimental films, dozens of film festivals around the world…

Then 9/11 happened.

Then Stan Brakhage died.

Then a divorce.

Like I said… time is weird.

After I left New York and with Stan gone, I had a hard time feeling like I belonged in the world of experimental film. Many of the people whom I considered “colleagues” considered me “a kid” or “their student,” despite the fact that I never actually took any of their classes. I grew further apart from the herd and started questioning if I wanted to continue down that path. I never felt like I was good enough to fit in with that group. I had no MFA, my films were not particularly intellectual, I had no aspirations to ensconce myself in the world of academia, and on and on. With cinema as visual art now firmly rooted in my mind and narrative in my heart, I turned away from the world I knew and packed my bags for Los Angeles.

In the years that followed, I fell so far out of touch with that world. When I went to Phil’s memorial screening at the University of Colorado, I felt like I didn’t belong. So many familiar faces, so many strange ones. Many of them hadn’t changed a bit in the twenty years that had passed. I felt envious of that sort of certainty and tenacity. As some of the speeches praised those who resist the film industry, I felt like a sellout. Like a betrayer. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run. Fortunately, I had a friend with me who felt the same way. After the screening, the two of us talked for hours as we walked through the campus where so much had started. We walked. We talked. We reflected. There. With my very patient son. My six-year-old.

Two decades. So much time.