Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be!

Recently I heard from a woman with whom I’ve had no contact for 25 years. She told me she had been thinking about me almost every day recently and felt that was a sign that she should try to look me up. Her computer-geek niece went on-line and came up with a list of every person with my name in New York City (there were 33) which included, by the way, addresses and phone numbers, and my old friend sat down one evening and started her quest. She hit pay dirt on her second call. The dirt, in this case, being me.

It’s yet another example of how amazing the power of the Internet really is; but also pretty amazing how the power of nostalgia for a better time can come back to haunt you. Nostalgia is an odd beast. The very word connotes a memory that is probably a lot rosier than the reality. The ever-thickening mists of time (zero contact doesn’t help) can create a Roshamon of any past event; even the most picayune, if not a totally false memory. To quote yet another movie, somehow nostalgia can insert a photo of someone into a memory, Selig-like, when that someone was actually elsewhere, vacationing in Morocco at the time.

We chatted for over two hours and I realized early on that the years that I was close with her and her husband (now deceased) must have meant a lot more to her than they did to me and again and again she fondly brought up stuff that, frankly, I don’t think had anything at all to do with me. Admittedly I am a man approaching the gates of Geezerville but I think my memory-lobe is at least (or, at best) as good as hers. I listened kindly (big of me, huh?) as she reveled in her rosy memories and I set her free to insert my photo anywhere she wanted in her collage of nostalgia. If she wants me there it can only do harm to dispute it.

The beast called Nostalgia is a dog to be petted and fed but not necessarily believed. Memories can bend and twist and be crunched into shape to fit in with whatever mood is ruling your brain at any given moment. I have always believed in a philosophy I stumbled onto in a cold, snowy foxhole in Germany, and that is to live for the moment, and forget the bad parts if you can. If, along the way, you forget some of the good parts too, well what the heck, you can always make up stuff. Like that foxhole.