The first rule about Book Club? You do not talk about Book Club! So I’ll have to tread carefully here, or risk a beating about the head with a hardback. I’ve been thinking about one of our recent selections, The Time Traveler’s Wife.

I was fairly resistent to this book from the first page, because I’ve come to harbor an intense dislike for otherwise realistic stories that feature fantastic elements as plot devices. I don’t mind good straightforward science fiction, and even recommended Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, which is about time travel, to my bookclub. But for some reason I despise magical realism. Magic, or reality: choose one.

The Time Traveler’s Wife quickly won me over, though, with its Chicago setting. The hero lived on North Dearborn near the Newberry Library, where Husband lived where I first met him. He and the heroine hung out at Get Me High, a tiny little lounge under a bridge in Bucktown near the apartment I lived in when Husband and I got engaged. It was nice to see the old neighborhood again, albeit through a book. And the hero wasn’t traveling back and forth through history as much as back, and occasionally forth, through his own life. I found this interesting on a metaphorical level, although it was hard to track the narrative thread, despite helpful captions like “1982. Henry is 33, and 31.”

I am currently traveling back to my own past. A last-minute substitution for a colleague at a conference has landed me in Philadelphia, one block north of the building where I worked in my first real post-college job. I had moved here after graduation to kill time while waiting to complete the lengthy interview process for a job with the CIA. They rejected me. The government never gave me any feedback on that decision, but it might have been due to my incredible ignorance of world affairs, my astounding immaturity, and the fact that I failed the lie-detector test twice. It’s hard to believe they kept me coming back to Langley for six months. Your tax dollars at work.

When I got the bad news, I began looking for a real job. Since I had been an English major, I thought I had to work in advertising. Advertising or teaching: wasn’t that the law? It literally did not occur to me to seek any other kind of position. In the Inquirer that week, two ad agencies were seeking administrative people. Both interviews were downtown by the Academy of Music, a short walk from my apartment. The first was in a beautiful converted townhouse. The interviewer was very kind and respectful as I summarized my qualifications and goals (mostly, “avoid defaulting on student loans”).

“We do very special work here,” he told me. “We handle all the media and advertising for the Reverend Billy Graham. It’s a wonderful place to work. We start with prayers every morning and hold a Bible study group once a week.”

The second interview was in the Academy House, next to the Academy of Music. The agency’s claim to fame was a series of spots for a jewelry store featuring the proprietors singing ’50’s music. The boss collected Art Deco furniture, including a very cool black lacquer kneehole desk. I sat across from him and tried to sell myself, completely unaware that I was nervously tapping my foot on his exposed shoe. I apologized in horror.

“I thought you were doing that on purpose,” he said.

“I like to hire Catholic girls,” he said. “They’re good workers.”

“I have Tourette’s syndrome,” he said. “Sometimes I say things that are inappropriate.”

Obviously, I took the job, and obviously it was a disaster. Yesterday I visited the deli where I ate miserable lunches for the 8 months I lasted there, and shook my head at my 21-year-old idiot self. I walked past the Academy of Music, where I had an evening job answering the phone for the Pennsylvania Ballet, a job that provided me with free tickets to the ballet, and marveled at my youthful dumb luck. I caught a whiff of the food truck where I used to buy dinner to eat on the train to Villanova, where I had enrolled in grad school because it was cheaper to pay tuition and defer my loans than pay them, and rolled my eyes at my inchoate (yet effective) self-preservation instinct.

Tomorrow, back to the future. It’s a wonder I survived.