It’s November and I don’t know how that happened. I mean the way time speeds up and then it’s already passed. Just yesterday I was planting tomato seedlings, and suddenly, I am yanking the overgrown, flopped-over plants out of the ground. At the library we all said we would dress up for Halloween.
The theme was “Decade You Were Born.” I didn’t want to do it. I’m not a dress-up kind of person. But the night before, I threw something together. A gauzy flowery top and tights, a peace sign drawn on my cheek. I was the Summer of Love. No one at work could guess. People don’t remember that summer. I don’t remember that summer.
But then, I was a baby. Flash forward, and I am teetering into Old-Lady. A patron at the library told me I look like her child’s grandmother. The little girl toddled over to me and plunked down in my lap. A whoosh of baby scent and I went rushing through time and space. I was the child. I was the mother of children. I was the old lady stranger, cross-legged on the colored-square carpet at the library. It was fall. It was spring. It was fall again.
A kid came in dressed up in her Halloween costume, and I asked her what she was. Rumi, she said. Her nanny saw my puzzled look. It’s from KPop Demon Hunters, she explained.
Oh, I said. I had no idea what she was talking about.
It's a movie, my manager piped up. What? You haven’t heard of this?
Apparently, it’s all the rage in her house. Her four-year-old is obsessed. Every morning they blast the soundtrack in the car on the way to preschool. Now my manager can’t get the songs out of her head. I laughed, but there was a twinge of achy nostalgia. Those days are gone for me.
But who says so? I watch the KPop movie with my husband. Within two minutes we are delighted, a word I never use, but it truly fits here. Something about the music (which is insanely catchy), the bright colors, the message about accepting who you are and everyone joining together to defeat the darkness. What’s not to love about that?
Halloween is over and we barrel toward winter. It’s spring. It’s summer. It’s fall again. I wake up. I go to bed. I drive to the library. I drive home. In between, I am planting something. I am dressing up. I am holding a stranger’s child.
I am singing.
