That Old Crippling Nostalgia

I hate growing up.

It’s amazing how as children we take our experience at face value, how as we learn the way of things, we fail to perceive that it’s only a single moment we’ve mastered, and that it passes in just about as long as it takes to make sense of the damn thing. New moments come, fast and furious, but most of us are stuck looking through the lenses that we grew in those formative times. We change and adapt, refocus, but not as quickly as the world around us shifts. Meanwhile, the demons of our own making are so exhausting to fight, and they take altogether too long to let us free, that our ability erodes to challenge new presents as they come.

I visit my hometown with some regularity, and while it’s always great to see my family, the rest of the business is increasingly awkward. It’s cliché to point out how the grand things we experience as children grow small and shabby with age, but that’s only a part of it. Every corner of that place is infested with some memory or other, and as places change—things get discarded, homes get bought and sold, people die, organizations restaff themselves, whatever—each instance is like a personal affront to my memory. It’s a bittersweet experience—the recollection is made with fondness, but it comes with the knowledge that it can’t be relived.

The hometown visits are merely discomfiting, though. There is something about regular maintenance of existence that allows perceptions to remain comfortable even while time changes what we perceive. Poignancy still fades, but it doesn’t dissolve as quickly when we keep living in those places.

The past has a soundtrack, even to a guy that got struck only rarely by popular music when he was a kid. Driving around my alma mater recently, I recalled the themes associated with certain routes—music I played, say, on the way to pickup hockey games, or echoing in my head as I stumbled home from the late night bars, or tunes that just happened to be captured in a passing moment, a tiny vignette preserved uniquely in my skull. Listening to those songs can give me a little poke in the brain, reminding me that I’m not there anymore, and, more to the point, that I’m not then anymore either. No more late night games, no more 4AM drunken weekends, no more patience for crappy music. There are new things to do, but there’s an element in doing them that’s running from the moments that I’ve left behind. The more memories you have, the harder it becomes to make new ones.

The past surrounds us like a prison, bars growing like bamboo: sprouting, strengthening, and eventually dying. It grows from the seeds we shed as we pass through the moments and places of our life. We cast about heedless throughout our days, unknowing that the green carpet on which we walk will become a jungle the moment we leave it untended. We hole up in our tiny clearings, fighting the weeds on our few well-beaten routes as the forest closes in about us, or we wander the unknown prairies, leaving stands of fetid verdure behind us like spoor, a lacework of choked-off possibility which can only be recrossed with great difficulty.

Most people, I imagine, reside, like me, between the extremes of holing up and racing forward. I still have quite a lot of living I want to do, after all. Eventually though, we either paint ourselves in, cornered by no good new reality, or else the undergrowth gets the best of us as we run out the will needed to tamp it down and establish new realities. And let’s face it, when we can’t occupy the present anymore is when it all ends for us, no matter how long we may continue to breathe. If we lived long enough to forget things entirely, then I imagine it would be possible to stake out a perpetual route through the maze we generate. Otherwise, however, you’re stuck: if you’re of the right mindset, you can enjoy watching the grass grow, or maybe you’d prefer to blur time’s passage in a bottled haze, or maybe you labor to stay one step ahead of the clock.

But the fucker gets us all in the end.