Tuesday, July 20, 2010

How Nostalgic the Days

When I was very young (second grade? First grade?), my parents brought home an album by Roger Whittaker. While skimming YouTube yesterday, I came across some of the songs from that album and received an object lesson in having grown older.

One of the songs in particular swirled a bitter bit of nostalgia through those days—I hated it at the time because I couldn’t incorporate the emotion and it was depressing. Today, the song plays without effect. The melodrama is just another restatement of a cliché that I feel that I’ve heard a thousand times and I’ve done that kind of putting off until an impossible tomorrow.

This doesn’t mean that I’m no longer nostalgic, just that I learned it early and have to look further afield for it these days. As everything seems to be sliding into the novel these days (the casserole of the imagination) this may find its way in as well. What did I have to look back on at six or seven? Did it change how I watched the days going by to know that they were shorter than they felt?

Today the music and the shades need to be brighter and more menacing, but I’m still in a sleepy haze of yesterday.

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