Afternoon at the Movies

We went to the movies in the middle of the afternoon. We ate popcorn for lunch and peanut M&M’s. The movie was about aliens and how they’ve always been here and if only we knew, we’d all stop what we are doing and feel awe and wonder. I want to believe this but I don’t. 

Sitting in that movie theater was the longest I’ve sat still in I don’t know how long. When it was over, my whole body was stiff and sore. I felt like a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader during training camp. This is the show we’ve been binge-watching with our daughter this week. Law & Order is old news. Now it’s girls leaping up into the air to ACDC’s Thunderstruck song and landing in splits on the hard football field turf. Just watching them makes my spine hurt. 

After the movie we went crazy and ate ice cream for dinner. We browsed fancy shops and at my daughter’s urging, my husband bought a shirt that was not “him” and I bought pants that are not “me.” The pants are brightly colored pajama material and they pool up around my feet. The minute I put them on, I laughed. These are not me, I said. 

But everyone was saying why not? What is me, anyway? We’re whirling on to the next chapter of the rest of our lives. Why not occasionally eat popcorn for lunch and ice cream for dinner? Why not wear clothes you would never wear? Why not try a high leg kick and land in a split?

Oh my God, Mom, do not do that, my daughter says. 

I used to be able to it, I tell her.

When?

Okay, it was eighth grade. I was a cheerleader at St. Joseph’s School in New Britain, Connecticut. Pretty much anyone who wanted to be on the team could be on the team. Except me, in seventh grade. I got cut. Probably because I froze up in the moment you were supposed to run and jump and do what they called a reindeer. I have literally forgotten this memory until right now, as I’m typing it. I was so humiliated, I practiced the reindeer in my bedroom for a year. I tried out again and did the reindeer like it was nothing. And then I kinda got bored with being a cheerleader.  

The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are so beautiful, they’re unreal. Maybe they’re aliens. It’s possible I have been on vacation a little too long. I don my new pajama pants and head down to the community garden in our daughter’s neighborhood so I can work on her plot. Every day since we’ve been crashing at her apartment in DC, I’ve been weeding and watering, shuffling pots around, picking lettuce and radishes and sweet peas. 

On the walk back I stroll past the other plots. There are at least one hundred here, every small section some other gardener’s wildly different vision. Tomato plants and exotic tropical plants. Herbs and rose bushes. 

The pajama pants swish when I walk. I wander around the garden and pretend every plot is mine. Lavender poking its purple branches through the fence. Seven-foot-high sunflowers. A plant that looks like a trumpet. Or an alien. 

How could you not be filled with wonder and awe?