Adam said hi and he’ll see you Sunday.
I read my husband’s text message with confusion before replying, He’ll see me Sunday? Huh?
Wrap party? he quickly texted back.
Ooooooooh. I kinda forgot about that.
As I wrote recently, my husband works in show business. When one project is complete, it’s traditional to have a wrap party. Since this show had finished shooting for the season, it was wrap party time.
I stared at my phone for a little while after typing my last message. Just like that, I had been catapulted back through time.
I often worked as a TV extra during my law school days. I’d signed up with the casting company hoping only to be on Buffy the Vampire Slayer once, but ended up working on bunches of shows. I enjoyed the experience and, frankly, liked eating food for which someone else was paying. (See: craft services.)
One of the several times I worked on Buffy, I shared a shuttle bus from the studio to the parking lot with one of its actors. I debated saying something to him but bit my tongue until we were getting off the van.
“I’m really looking forward to your show this weekend!” I blurted out.
Visibly startled, he touched my hand and asked, “You know my band?”
I explained I was a fan, and he thanked me. That was that.
Over the course of law school, I saw his band play as often as I could. I’d found Common Rotation through Buffy thanks to a forum-turned-live-friend, Briel, but what kept me coming back was love for their music. How I loved their music!
2002. Photo by Briel K.
I graduated and left Los Angeles, living in Japan for a year and a half before returning to my hometown. Before long, I found myself back in Los Angeles, and back at Common Rotation shows.
The band’s sound wasn’t quite the same, but it didn’t matter much to me. I enjoyed the shows and the nostalgia, and often did so with the man who’d one day help me set aside my mistrust of marriage and become my husband.
We didn’t make it to many shows after our son was born, but we made it to a few. The and was still part of my history, our history, if not much of our present.
As my husband worked his way through various shows late last year, he landed a gig on Adam’s current show. The thought made me smile for a moment (whodathunk?), but I’d long ago come to see that Hollywood is much, much smaller than it seems from a distance.
Adam said hi and he’ll see you Sunday.
Somehow it took that text message for me to real feel the immensity of how much things have changed over the years since I was new to Los Angeles. I floated through law school on wishes and whimsy, hoping I’d magically stumble into a big-picture life that would fit me just right.
The me in that first picture of me and Adam was so different from the one that exists now. That me would be flabbergasted by this me, and by a rundown of all the events transpired to distinguish the two.
I eventually realized that few people just accidentally stumble into good lives. It takes time, effort, and patience. I began building the kind of life that felt right, no matter how different it was from what I’d originally thought I wanted.
I built a life that involves a challenging career, supportive friends, and a small but lovely family. I have a husband! And a son! And a baby on the way! Me, the wandering dreamer, settled into a sweet and stable life.
In this sweet and stable life, a text message had caused my past and present lives to converge in a simultaneously innocuous but enormous way.
I went to that Sunday wrap party. Adam and I chatted for a few minutes, during which I explained that I no longer require pictures as evidence that I Was There, but that I wanted a picture of the two of us for a very different reason. I wanted to write a post about the passage of time, and the goodness of getting a chance to see the present through the window of the past.
The picture wasn’t great, but I love it nevertheless. It’s a reminder of just how much things can change, and just how good that change can be.
I love that awkward old me who wanted to fall into the perfect life.
I love the me who left Los Angeles for Japan. I love the me who moved back to her hometown from Japan and then returned to Los Angeles. I love the me who left her mom’s bedside four days too early to be with her when she died, and the one who signed house sale papers upside down as a way of saying, “I disagree, and I want that documented, but I recognize there are bigger things in this world than my disagreement.” I am grateful for what I have learned from these experiences, and from the forgiveness of my loved ones throughout.
I love the me who negotiates contracts, the very same me who wants to become a child advocate or healer someday. I love the me who has, somehow, stumbled into being a mom and a wife.
I love this life, now, where I can sit at a table with an old acquaintance and, hearing him praise my husband’s work, enjoy the feeling of briefly coexisting in past and present.
My life today is not the one I expected. Indeed, it is better, because what I understand now that I didn’t then is that the beauty is not in the landscape of life. It’s in the sweet details that fill each day with little wonders and little joys.
Those little moments might not make it into daydreams, but they make life.
And, oh! What a life it is.
The show’s wrapped for now, but this party goes on!
