Posted: Sep 26, 07 7:24am
Nostalgia ... I believe that every time I tell my life story it gets better. Perhaps my real memories have dimmed and have been replaced with romanticized versions of reality.
Were "things" really better then? I don't know. Was it better to sleep in a bedroom that was stiflingly hot or, by the flick of a switch, live in the cool comfort of conditioned and hypercooled air? Was life better when we lived in a coldwater, three room flat on the second floor of someone else's home on a street befouled by the coal dust from a train refilling station or is it better in my country condo with its zombie residents and suburban ultra-monochronicity?
Who knows anything for certain anymore. I look back at my childhood with pleasure. I look at friends and activities that were more real than the masturbatory exercises of playing with an X-box. I remember puppet shows and quiet nights on the porch roof with my best friend, planning a future that we were certain we could make happen.
I remember the pictures we took with the Kodak Brownie that still reside in the album I made over a half a century ago. I remember that chubby kid in the knickers, Marvin was his name ... I just saw his obit in the papers last month - dead at sixty-eight of a massive heart attack. I guess he didn't plan for that exit. Maybe it was for the best; nobody is named Marvin anymore. Clear out and make room for the Heathers and the Jeremys.
When did I figure out that I was different? Was it when I was two ... or was I younger than that? When did I learn that different was a good thing if it made the world a slightly better place than the way I found it? Was that yesterday or maybe this morning?
Life doesn't flash by. It remains fixed and constant but the layers get deeper each passing day. Now it gets difficult to see the earliest layers, buried beneath 365 days times 68 plus years. The book of my life is heavy now and flipping the pages gets increasingly difficult. Perhaps that little girl I see wasn't as bright or as pretty as she now appears through the mists of time and the layers of thousands of days passed since we sat on the porch swing and pledged our eternal love. The 5 inch screen of her family television flashed Arch Obler's "Lights Out," in shades of gray; stories so chilling that a nightmare was welcome after exposure to his keen eye for the darkest side of fantasy.
Her name was Reesha. She had curly, raven hair and black eyes that looked far older than her nine years on earth. She had come from Europe after the war and she had an ugly, blue, tattooed number on her inner arm which she held against her body as if it carried the plague. I was ten and felt like a child next to her. She never spoke of what she had seen there and heard there but spent her time with me pressed close to my side. I wonder if she feels safe even now. The neighborhood was full of families like Reesha's. My grandmother who came to this country early in the Twentieth Century spoke in whispers about her brothers and sisters who remained behind in Vienna. They chided her when, as a teenage bride she journeyed to America. The last she heard from them was in 1938.
There's so much more. Maybe I have reached the age at which I need to tell my story. Maybe I'll be the next Marvin. I certainly hope not. I don't live in the past so much as live with it as a constant companion that is as much a part of me as my 21st Century PT Cruiser which I drive merrily despite the latest gas crisis. Hell, if you had asked my blessed grandmother about the gas crisis, she would have told you that polite people don't bring up such subjects at the dinner table!
No, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
