You’ve come across a new song or album and immediately like it, and you become addicted to it, needing to play it and hear it repeatedly until you’ve memorized the lyrics and the music precisely. You’re enjoying it stuck in your head and humming the melody when it’s not playing. You may also annoy your friends when they ride in the car with you as it plays ad nauseam. It’s all you want to hear and sing and dance to. In hearing it so much, you burn it out; it gets burnt out. You can ruin it for yourself. Eventually, it moves further down the list of albums downloaded. Through time and new music, it gets forgotten about. At a much later date, the song appears again by way of a shuffled playlist or a random memory that compels you to seek it out for nostalgia. It was once your favorite. You loved it. Goodness, you may still love it. It’s been great to hear again. The song or album was so much at one time; then not so much over time. And taste does change.
We also treat people this way.
But you can fall in love with it again -like a great symphony piece.
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The smells of the daycare center are a mix of bleachy disinfectants covering up poo-y diapers, the Lysol spray used on every surface, and the more pleasant smells of food coming from the back kitchen. These meals are kid-friendly items like beanie-weenies and chicken nuggets with mac-n-cheese. The midday treat of packaged vanilla sandwich cookies and fruit juice out of gallon jugs doesn’t permeate the air like the cooked meals, but the sickly-sweet cookie filling and thin, fake taste and corn syrup from the juice are easy to conjure. It’s summer, so the kids smell like outside air, the mix of dry dirt and sweat from the sun. A few of the girls have staked out a little corner at the back of the playground where they’ve happened upon a little family of frogs. They’re in the throes of running around and swinging on the swing set, but a pet frog is intriguing. One girl tucks her daycare-branded t-shirt into her cotton shorts and puts one of the frogs down the front of her shirt to hang out till she can focus. The frogs were jumping around everywhere, and she feared they wouldn’t still be there when she got done playing. The kids are eventually called in to clean up and cool off and lie down for a nap on their individual cushioned mats. When the girl goes into the bathroom to pee and wash her hands, she realizes she’s completely forgotten about the frog. She looks down the front of her shirt to see the frog had suffocated in the heat of her playground adventures. Its mouth is open with its swollen tongue sticking out and stuck to her belly. A large scream comes from her as she pulls her t-shirt from her shorts, so the frog drops to the bathroom floor. It’s disgusting and traumatizing. She washes her hands and uses the soap on her stomach too.
Nostalgia is a neologism coined by a Swiss medical student to describe the melancholy (a medical term back then) felt by Swiss mercenaries who fought far from home. It’s a mashup of sorrow or despair and “homecoming.” It’s come to mean homesickness for the past.
Feeling happy and also slightly sad when you think about things from your past is a conflicting dichotomy. To long for that holiday experience or family meal or teenage adventure means you have to take everything else that came with it; and when it comes to childhood, that’s not always a fair bargain. So we pick out the memories like puzzle pieces.
Things are not well in this world, but to say any past decade was better strips it of most context; getting to selectively remove the bad. It was just different. As the cliché goes, the grass is not greener over there; it’s greener where you water it. We cannot long for the past but make the most of our current situation. People do this by carrying on traditions -like during the holidays. The holidays are a prime example of recreating nostalgia. Some people invest in vintage cars or visit ancient ruins. We do this with our daily rituals, too. I still have affection for when I drank Folgers coffee through a traditional drip maker because I anticipated opening the canister every morning to fill the coffee filter. There’s something about smells that conjure most of our memories. As much as I loved those Folger’s days, my palette is more sophisticated now. It’s not mentally healthy to dwell or linger in the past. We water the grass we’re on.
*Painting by Richard Diebenkorn, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad
Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant distinctly remembers mealtime with her father, the eminent American post-war artist Richard Diebenkorn. ‘Oftentimes after dinner, he would look at art books if he wasn’t drawing himself,’ she recalls. He had an extensive collection. ‘He would just sit there looking at them and relooking at them and marking them so that he could find something again later.’
**This is the longest period I’ve gone without any medicine or steroids to tame things, so ‘the health’ is holding on till my insurance approves the fourth medicine we are trying. I’m dealing with severe chronic fatigue, which is the antithesis of motivation and productivity. I sleep a lot on the weekends.