Certain things take me back in time. When I see them, it’s like I’ve gone through a wormhole and come out in my childhood. Around this time of year, it happens a lot. Maybe I’m walking down the cereal aisle at Meijer and I find myself on the floor with a gallon of milk and a box of BooBerry watching Saturday morning cartoons. The General Mills Monster Cereals are back on the shelves and I’m a kid again for a moment. It’s these things that seemed innocuous as a little one that means so much now. It’s the gravity of nostalgia that brings us to our most contented selves.
So when I see those Monsters on the shelves, I get excited. I feel the exuberance of my youth reborn. I feel the possibilities of a future unwritten and the weariness of time recessing. It reminds me that all the things in our lives, no matter how small, have an impact, they have consequence. I see a future in front of me, because of a blue ghost on a white box hovering behind a bowl of sugary cereal. I feel the joys of every fall, every Halloween season, every joy of the fake blueberry flavor, in that image. Fangface and the gang, Spiderman and Friends, Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy, and hours of cartoons, dance in the mind’s eye. No concerns of bills, of legacy, of work, of regrets. Simply the best of a life wrapped in plastic inside a box of nostalgia.
BooBerry, Count Chocula, Frankenberry, sometimes Yummy Mummy, and Frute Brute pay an annual visit to take me back to a simpler time with simple joys. It is the power of creation, it’s the power of art, its the power of time unraveled. BooBerry, my personal time machine, is the harbinger of so many in the fall and coming season. But it is the most significant for its purity and joy.