The Lake House part 12:  happy birthdays

It has already been noted that once Alex has the dog, he attends Kate's 2004 birthday party.  It was also said that that first time he probably does not know who she is, and he certainly does not try to strike up a conversation.  Her name was included in the one letter he got from her, but since he never heard from her again it has no meaning to him.

The first letter is replaced by the one which mentions the pawprints, and then with each letter from Kate to Alex a new history is written, and in each of those histories he attends that birthday party (in what is for him the first time), a bit more knowledgeable about the birthday girl.  A significant shift occurs the day he realizes that there is a temporal anomaly involved.  Now he knows that this person, whose name is Kate Forster, is writing to him from the future; but he knows very little else about her.

She decides to introduce herself, and gives him the first critical bit of information:  she is a doctor, and two years before was a medical student.  This time when Alex meets Morgan and hears Kate's name, and that she is a medical student interested in a lake house, he makes the connection:  This is that same person who was writing to him from the future.  Now he wants to meet her.  He does so, but it is unlikely that they make the kind of connection we see in the film.  He does not yet know enough about her.

With each repeat of history, he learns a bit more.  The significant shift occurs, though, when he recovers the book.  That night he tells her in his letter that he saw her and that he will get the book back to her somehow, but he never hears from her again and does not know why, as history plays through to the moment when she receives his letter.  Still, he reads part of the book, and it becomes the basis for the conversation that connects them.  Probably they kiss in this history, and in each subsequent one.

It is now certain that Alex can recognize Kate on sight, and so beginning probably with this history we can assume that whatever brought him to Daley Plaza on Valentines Day 2006, he was crossing the street specifically to reach her.  He knows she knows nothing about their correspondence, but he can say that they met at her birthday party two years before, so he has a connection.

We might wonder whether at that moment time is protecting itself.  After all, if Alex connects with Kate in 2006, she will never write the letters he received in 2004, and he will never recognize her.  Thus, reminiscent of The Time Machine, he is fatally prevented from meeting her because were he to do so he never would.  That answer fails, though, as surely here as it does there.  It requires deifying history such that it can know what is supposed to happen and prevent an anomaly, while allowing history to change within the permissible.  We can almost understand time travel within an immutable timeline, but if we allow that changes can be made, we must either incorporate an omnimpotent omniscient temporal protector or abandon hope that disastrous anomalies would be prevented by outside forces.

He receives the letter in which she identifies him as the stranger at the birthday party, but he will never pass through that part of the history again.  He had a chance to make an impression, and he succeeded.  It will take a while before he can take advantage of that.