In Which I Write about Nostalgia Again, Likely Rather Poorly

A whim possessed me today.  There's no other explanation for riding an extra Trax stop in hotter-than-the-fires-of-Mordor heat so that I could walk farther to get back home.  I sensed nostalgia edging in and I just caved.

The extra Trax stop took me nearer to campus, and allowed me to mimic the walk I used to take home several years ago now.  Except that, of course, it's no longer that walk.

Buildings have changed, gas stations have been redesigned with repaved parking lots, entire business have left.  It's a familiar landscape still, but it's also an unfamiliar one.

At first I chose to attribute it to the quiet of college summer, but the longer I walked the more I felt everything to be immeasurably different.  It hasn't been that long, not really, not comparatively--but so many of these places have become landmarks of the someone-once-lived-there or I-used-to-eat-sandwiches-in-that-place-that-doesn't-even-serve-food-anymore variety.

The purse slung over my shoulder felt wrong, felt as though it should be weighed down with more books and slung over the OTHER should cross-strap style.  Houses that used to have beautiful flower beds look straggly and sad.

I never had noticed the kind of spectacular cityscape that I could see as I made my way downward.  My thoughts back then had probably been too full of philosophers and essays and worries about whether or not I was good enough, whether I was smart enough.

Honestly I think this might be the closest that we ever get to time travel: walking paths that we once walked, where inevitably we find ourselves accompanied by our former selves.

Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be

"Next time you look back, I really think you should look again." --from (500) Days of Summer

I've recently come to realize something: very, very few people think clearly when they're reviewing the past. It's Nostalgia Syndrome--everything becomes incredibly good or tremendously bad--and all of a sudden, our past lives seem awfully black and white. We phase out the gray in order to achieve a better narrative. One more seamless and less messy than what actually happened.

It's one of the only ways we have of imposing order onto our lives: in any given moment of the present, we're far too aware of everything. Everything, including the things we wish we weren't. The stuff that, in the present, we want to wish away--the stuff that we hope might disappear if we ignore it for long enough. When we look back, we can ignore to our hearts' content...those things may as well not have been there.

But really, I don't think there are any moments in our lives that are absolutely perfect--not on their own. Not without help. And those moments are never perfect when we are in them, which makes us wonder when we look back why we didn't appreciate what we had at the magical moment we had it.

I suppose I've been thinking about this because recently I can't help but wonder if past versions of myself were happier than my present self can sometimes be. And in all fairness, I'm sure there were times when my past self felt much happier about life than my present self. Of course, I'm sure that there are times where my present self far outshines the happiness of my past self.

Nostalgia romanticizes the past: it acts as its own type of rose-colored filter. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I've always been me. I've always had strengths and weaknesses. Talents. I've always had happy times and sad times and mad times, it's just that I don't want to remember being sad or mad--so I usually choose not to. Don't most of us? We want to be our best selves, so we remember our best selves...and we forget the best selves we remember are a product of editing and some good mental production values.

Oh, the Fickleness of Memories

My grandpa's eightieth birthday is nearly here, and as part of a big celebration, my aunt requested that we write a memory of him. Only I've run across a problem: most of my memories of him are sketchy, at best. Prior to my grandma's death, most of my memories are of the pair of them--and to be quite frank, more of her than of him. Her player piano. Her: teaching me how to play Scrabble while my parents were insisting I was still too young. (The closest to a jolly, happy, little memory I get is thinking of the many times I played Scrabble with him, while insisting I wanted to play with Grandma. Grandpa, you see, has always had a tendency to add -er to any verb and insist that it's a word--the person, you see, who performs the verb. Frowners are people who frown, likewise smilers are people who smile. You get the idea.) Both of them taking us out to lunch on our birthdays, but Grandma insisting we eat everything, including the lackluster tomatoes on our burgers... "Katie, some child in Bosnia would love to eat that tomato." "Can't we just ship it off to Bosnia, then?" (I just dated myself, didn't I?)

Herein lies my problem: I have one absolutely concrete memory of him, but I feel less than comfortable writing it down and including it in his birthday book. Not too long after Grandma died, little teenage me strongly felt that Grandpa needed some company. He seemed so lonely and lost to me, leaving our family house in Centerville to return to what now seemed such an empty place in Kaysville. So I stubbornly insisted that I be allowed to spend some time with him, and he reluctantly brought me with him back to his house. I'm sure we talked, but I don't remember what about. School, books, all those things that were important to me. And when I say "we talked," what I mean is that I remember jabbering at him a lot. (Yes, yes. For all of you who know me well, some things don't much change. I still have a tendency to jabber.)

Anyhow. He opened the refrigerator to a myriad of prepared, packaged meals that my aunts had left behind with labeled instructions, and heated one of them for dinner. But what I remember most is that after I had gone to bed that night, I kept waking up periodically, and I could hear him pacing. Back and forth, back and forth. Every time I woke up. When I mentioned it in the morning, he said he wasn't used to sleeping without Grandma yet. And when he dropped me off in Centerville, he looked every bit as lost and lonely as he had when he left our house. And I felt...utterly useless. Like I'd tried to do something good and nice for him, and I'd absolutely failed.

So hopefully you can see why this doesn't really work as the type of 80th birthday memory one might want to include in a book otherwise full of happy stories. I don't want to say, Happy Birthday, Grandpa!, my strongest memory of you is when you were at your saddest, when you were having one of the hardest times, and when I felt I failed you. It hardly seems festive.

Scrabble's far safer a topic.

Ballerina Bunny Bag

Oh, that I had a camera. Because if I had a camera, I would take a picture of my ballerina bunny bag and post it here. Instead, you'll have to settle with a description. I periodically forget that I still have it, but I can't help smiling every time I come across it.

My ballerina bunny bag is small. It's pink. And it has a lace-fringed heart stitched onto it. A cross-stitched ballerina bunny, more or less en-pointe, occupies the center of the heart. She's wearing a blue tutu, blue toe shoes, and she has a blue bow in her hair.

I have had this bag for almost twenty years. My mom made it for me when I started ballet lessons. (I believe I was five. Maybe six.) I used to carry my own shoes in it. And my, how I loved this ballerina bunny bag. Really, I still love this ballerina bunny bag.

Like my printer, it has served many functions. I didn't last very long in ballet, so the ballerina bunny bag became a book-carrying ballerina bunny bag I used to take down to the Bookmobile. As I recall, my voracious reading habits threatened to split the seams more than once. But my mom always mended the bag, and I kept finding inventive ways of packing ten or more books into it.

I've carried notebooks in it. I've moved it to every new place with me. Much to my dismay, if I couldn't find a different bag, it sometimes came with me to my first job. ("Really," she would say, "Isn't it time to get rid of that?") I've come to agree that it's probably not something to carry around anymore, but I will never get rid of it. And this is why: my mother made it for me.

She's a skilled seamstress and adept with a needle, so I'm sure that neither the cross-stitching nor the sewing took her long. But it was, nevertheless, an hour or two (if even that) that she took to make something for me. An hour or two when she had five little children, each of us with five different sets of activities.

This bag has a tendency to pop up, sometimes seemingly from nowhere, when I feel as though I've been ignored or as though I'm inadequate or as though nobody really knows me personally in quite the way I wish they would or could. It pops up when I feel disliked or un-loved. And every time, it serves as a visible reminder of one earthly person who has always loved me and who knows me and accepts me.

Any time I mention it, Mom begs me to get rid of it. But I can't. It's a visible reminder of a parent's love and I just can't let that go. I rather imagine that once I have a child, they will hear the story of a magically appearing ballerina bunny bag. And then they will see the proof. It's an odd thing to keep as a keepsake, I'm sure.

But how many tangible reminders do we get? And how easily can we let them go?