Passing

Lovely days of autumn pass and I feel them passing. Halloween. A kid's soul. Too old to trick or treat, too jaded, too, but I don't want to be, already nostalgic. I am full of Dick and Jane and Weekly Readers and all the old books I read from the school library set in the forties and the fifties, of high school and football games and rivalries and victories, of the seasons changing and kids wearing letter sweaters and walking through the piles of fallen leaves, the oranges and reds and the smell of baking pies. I want to make drawings of turkeys on crate paper tracing the fingers of my hand the way we did in elementary school. I yearn for autumn colors and stories read aloud by teachers to quiet children after lunch and all the old anticipation and conspiracies. I remember my first Halloween, the costume and the bag my mother bought me for trick or treating with its drawings of witches and jacko'lanterns and hobgoblins that made me cry, my mother hugging me to her and laughing, me still afraid.  In the cooling evenings I watch T.V., seasonal shows and specials and reruns of movies that transport me who longs to be transported. One Saturday I walk through an autumn carnival at a school with rides and booths made by parents, puppet shows and ring toss games and stands with popcorn and hot dogs and sodas, and I yearn for life to be like that. For months, my senses are both heightened and hidden as the an old world passes, a world I think I want to hold onto, not the real world I live in but another, ideal world that I have glimpsed in revelatory moments, simple and quiet and wonderful. I feel it in my bones those afternoons alone or when no one is around in the evening as I watch Christmas specials on TV.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas pass. I am born into winter. My birthday is coming. I will be sixteen. My parents agree that I will get a car.