In Defense of Nostalgia

Crooked scans of Blake, my brother, on our old street corner in 1982!

I am SO EXCITED and INSPIRED by the lists people have posted and the general response to the last post. Here I was thinking that it was a dumb & boring post & who is going to care about how I chased toads when I was five? Let this be a small example of how we don't have a clue how to measure what is "good" or "bad" about what we create. Also, never underestimate how everyone's experience is not only universal, but so funny and human and inspiring. Your lists make me want to make more lists. Like listing 5 years of Halloween costumes (which would include Princess Leah and Laura Ingalls Wilder!); or listing my favorite foods as a kid(which would include mini-pizzas made on English Muffins)! SO GREAT!

People often speak very negatively about nostalgia. I think it's because there is this idea that you are "living in the past" and that IS SO BAD. While I think it is absolutely important (and sometimes much harder) to honor what we love in the lives we live now, there is something so wonderful about also noting what touched us in the past. It's not only about honoring our experience, but about connecting to the things that delight us, and ultimately STILL DO delight us.

One of the things that is really hard about living in New York is to see how kids are treated on the subways. Some of this is poverty and some of it is cultural. I can't tell you how many times I've sat across an indifferent (at best) mother and her children, who are small and filled with energy and laughter and buzzing, natural effervescence. When the mother regards them at all, it is with such out and out hate or rage, it is sickening--yet, the children continue to withstand this. I can't help but look at the mother and know she was like her daughter son at one point--small and naturally full of life. How long did it take for her to shut down, to become embittered, to become angry and completely closed off to empathy or tenderness? How long before her children will also be chipped away at and succumb to shutting off the natural beating of their hearts?

As kids we know nothing but our nature and the environment we are given. As we age, no matter how successful or unsuccessful we are, our natures have become shaped by those environments. Yet underneath these folds of adulthood and experience, WE ARE STILL THOSE KIDS. There are a million things that I know ANY ONE OF US could complain about AND RIGHTLY SO about our childhoods. Some of us, had very painful childhoods, but among that there were still things we loved. So no matter how discouraged or depressed I get, when I hear the word, SHRINKY DINKS, my heart warms up like the electric oven in the kitchen which made paper drawings into plastic pictures. It reaches out to the purist parts of myself that didn't need to be taught how to love something. It also shows me how that can never be lost--as long as I choose to remember.