Posts Tagged ‘nostalgia’
Exercising Memory
My memories are fading, but as I revisit many of them, the details I review slowly grow more memorable and probably less accurate with each iteration.
I remember what my life was like before my eyesight declined to the point of needing glasses to see with functional clarity. Those memories often arise in response to needing to clean my glasses in the present day.
I remember how free life was before the coronavirus pandemic.
I remember when there were no personal computers.
I remember getting my first mobile phone when my workplace at the time made them available to all employees for personal use.
I remember how awkward it always felt to walk alone in front of the entire length of the high school bleachers on the way to get a bag of popcorn from the concession counter.
I remember how much I liked the popcorn purchased at those basketball games in the high school.
I remember using our basement for a kitchen in our Eden Prairie house while we were having the upstairs remodeled.
I remember putting a vinyl Crosby, Stills, & Nash record on the old hi-fi phonograph with the sliding glass woodgrain top panels when it was in the closet of my boyhood bedroom and then laying on my bed to listen until I fell asleep.
I remember when the impacts of the greenhouse effect on our planet were hardly noticeable and mainly the subject of scientific predictions.
I remember when we first set foot on the property we eventually purchased in Beldenville, Wisconsin. I will always remember walking one of the trails near the house and coming upon the gnarly oak tree that remains the most prominent.
I remember when the sky turned a deeper blue during the two times when air traffic was greatly reduced: After the September 11 attacks and when the pandemic lockdowns stopped almost all travel around the globe.
I remember the morning I called our health clinic to ask to be seen in my first step of treating my depression.
I remember how moved I felt after learning about the extent of hidden added sugars in processed foods that occurred with increasing frequency throughout my lifetime.
I remember tying one of my deceased mother’s handkerchiefs to a branch as a prayer flag in the Himalayan mountains around the highest elevation I achieved during the trek I did in 2009.
I remember my son inspiring me to start a blog to chronicle the trek I would be doing.
I remember learning I was an asthma sufferer during my physical that was required by the adventure travel company before the trip began.
I remember waking up stressed from breathing the smoke that had leaked from the woodstove all night when we slept in the lodge of the Sherpa sirdar guiding our trek.
What I can’t remember is any reason I started this exercise and whether or not I had a point in mind. Having a point would have come in handy when it came to reaching a conclusion.
This reminds me of how often I find myself laboring to come up with a closing line for daily blog posts.
Sometimes, I just want to “Say goodnight, Gracie.”
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Reunion Planning
A few posts back I was waxing nostalgic about the 70s and I think I failed to point out another aspect of my renewed interest in the good ol’ days. This coming summer will mark 40 years since my class graduated from high school in Eden Prairie, MN, and I have again volunteered to participate in planning our every-decade-whether-we-like-it-or-not event.
Some people loathe the idea of a high school reunion. I get that. I love class reunions, except for the part where I don’t get to visit with unique people I was fond of who don’t come because they loathe reunions.
There is also one other problem I have with reunions: The nights always wiz by in a blur that leaves me short of having talked in any depth with all of those who do show up.
I guess I could frame the missing classmates who skip out on the event as a positive, since that gives me fewer people to feel bad about not having had enough time to chat up by the end of the evening.
In my experience with reunions, like so many other things, the main event can tend to be anti-climatic. The preparation and anticipation are often where I get the most reward for time invested. A few of my life-long friends gathered last night for a planning meeting, and once again, I heard some hilarious stories from our youth. After all these years, I’m amazed there are still tales I’m hearing for the first time.
Plenty of them have me wondering how we ever survived the shenanigans.
Our planning committee has the significant details established. We settled on a date, location, and rough outline of a plan for the evening. The next biggest step is getting the word out. A decade ago, I pushed an attempt to reach every name on our list, which made for good adventure in sleuthing. Who doesn’t like a little game of following clues every once in a while?
Ten years later, I’m finding myself much less interested in playing. Maybe it is a result of seeing the futility of trying to reach people who loathe reunions. Why bother? It makes more sense to me now that we should direct our energy to those who want to come. All we need to do is make it easy for people to learn of our event.
We advertise.
I’m thinking we should try something like the zoo did with April the giraffe’s pregnancy. If you don’t know about April at this point, you are in the uninformed minority. (Google: April giraffe. I dare ya.)
We need to start with some outrageous objection to our reunion event that would cause it to be banned. Something salacious enough that news organizations would pick up on it and cause a stir. Then we resolve that, get the ban lifted, springboard off the attention with a GoFundMe campaign, and get some corporate sponsorship.
See why the planning part is so much fun?
Still, part of me really hopes some of my old classmates who have skipped every other reunion will discover an urge to come this time. We intend to make it easy to learn about our event for those people who choose to inquire.
Do your classmates a favor. Do the math yourself and every 10 years, check to see if your class is holding a reunion. Then tell the planners whether you will come or not. It’s a simple courtesy that I know will be greatly appreciated.
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Nostalgia Happens
Nostalgia. I can’t help it. Against my own wishes to deny the inevitable chronological orientation of my being, which fits precisely in the place where nostalgia begins to dominate ones attention, I am powerless. For years and years I enjoyed living in defiance of marketers who flooded the airwaves with attempts to bait and hook the primary buying demographic.
My tastes and interests were usually out of sync with the times or just far enough from center to be of little consequence to the purveyors of must-have products and services. My hobbies and interests leaned toward the years of my older siblings more than they matched what was aimed at me and my peers while we were coming into our prime.
Or so I like to think. In reality, there is every likelihood that the cunning advertisers of the products that I did fall for were deftly plying their trade to make me think I was forging my own bold path on the journey of maturation. I blindly wandered directly into the cross-hairs of their financial machine which worked its grips for brand loyalty deep into my unconscious.
With each passing year I have to work harder to deny that my value as a consumer is fading fast from the ever-changing entertainment industry and flying headlong for the entry gates of the AARP and pharmaceutical marketers.
During this wonderful NCAA basketball tournament month, my primary radio station for music has decided to run their own playoff bracket pitting match-ups of record albums from the 1990s. Yawn. How come I don’t care about any of these artists? I get the hint. I’m getting old, thank you very much.
In the same week that I was going through that realization, Cyndie turned on the television in our bedroom to see what was on and landed on a mesmerizing review of my home state, Minnesota in the ’70s. Produced with the Minnesota Historical Society Press and inspired by authors Dave Kenney and Thomas Saylor, the incredibly familiar scenes dredged up completely neglected memories of the world I experienced as a teenager.
I couldn’t look away for fear of missing something. I wanted to soak in every last morsel of what was appearing on the screen.
Did these images trigger my latest re-fascination with long-lost music memories or is the timing incidental? Again, just last week, I was pulling out old vinyl albums that weren’t to be found anywhere in digital form, hoping to feed the hunger to listen to songs from my collection that I haven’t heard in decades.
There was an old Loggins & Messina album in the bunch that I realized was totally available for download, and after giving it a spin on the turntable, I went right to the iTunes store and bought it. That should definitely be in rotation on my iPod.
The advertising genius of showing other similar albums at the bottom of my screen found me powerless to its allure. I hadn’t thought about Seals & Crofts for so long that I’d forgotten they existed! I bought that, too. Jim Seals and Dash Crofts’ voices together are a spectacular combination.
Since I hadn’t listened to that harmony for what feels like forever, it sounded good as new to me again.
It also makes me feel like I might be getting a little old.
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Relative Something 