The "Just Visiting" Game

     The other day while cruising the aisles of my neighborhood Kroger's I found myself playing the "Just Visiting" game.
      "Just Visiting" is a little imagination game I made up, inspired by and named after a 2001 movie of the same name.

     The story line of "Just Visiting" involves a 12th Century knight and his lowly indentured servant who are put under a spell by an evil sorcerer then accidentally sent far into the future by he machinations of a bumbling wizard.  However the the knight comes to discover his quest in this new world - rescuing a modern-day damsel who doesn't realize the distress she's in - while his manservant discovers a wonderful world of doughnuts and equal rights. The movie's comic scenes mostly involve the two Medieval characters' fearful, befuddled and amazed reactions to life in 21st Century Chicago.
    Now, I know that the leitmotif of a person being transported to a bewildering future is a fairly common one in fantasy fiction and film;

...still,  this film caught my fancy and, after laughing through the travails and wonderment of the knight and his servant,

...I soon after started from time to time playing my little game with myself, imagining what a person from hundreds of years in the past might actually think if they were suddenly dropped into my time, place, and head, and were suddenly experiencing the world through my eyes, "Being John Malkovich" - style. 

     Anyway, the other day in Krogers,  a typical, ordinary, crowded afternoon, while I strolled around the store doing my shopping, people-watching along the way as I always do everywhere I go, observing all the people peacefully doing their shopping,

...or doing their jobs,

...I began playing my "Just Visiting" game.
      And for my visitor from the past I chose to drop behind my eyes a white man of wealth, privilege and property from the American South two hundred years ago.
      "What do you think of the future?" I asked the bewildered visitor in my head.  "It's called holding these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.  True, we don't have it down pat in this country, not nearly, not yet.  But we're working on it.  Because what you see, this is the way we Americans like it. Most of us. 
      "Oh, and by the way, you and your fellow plantation-owning slavers are now among the ugliest villains of history and we still blame you for a number of social and economic problems our country suffers two hundred years later.
       "So if you want to free yourself and your descendants of the stigma and stench you will bear for all time, go home, free your slaves and then darn it, PAY someone to do the work from which you reap your wealth!"
        Then I sent my visitor back home and wondered if he would have heeded my warning.  

​"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
         by Patti Liszkay
is available at
blackrosewriting.com
amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com
Kindle Edition,  Nook, and
Gramercy Books in Bexley, Ohio