“My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old pro copywriter. Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of... calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate... but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means, ‘the pain from an old wound’. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.” -- Don Draper (Jon Hamm), “Mad Men”
Hi, all…
I’ve been meaning to write this ever since my 40th High School reunion in 2022. Given that I recently began my 61st personal solar orbit, I’ve been running ideas through my head, and I think I finally will be able to put something coherent together…
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Have you ever been bored and in an attempt to entertain yourself, you type in an old address, the name of your old school, or an old place you used to go, into Google? You click on the map and zoom in to a place you knew like the back of your hand—unless it has met the fate many places like that do and been razed and replaced…
Take the house you lived in as a kid. Go to Google Maps, find the house, and zoom in. Look at the neighboring houses. Try to look at them as they are, not as you remember them. Is that possible?
Many times, you might think, “I wonder what that house is like now?” In one of those strange moments, you might even think something like, “If it went on the market, it would be fun to walk through it.” And, in a crazy minute, “What if I was to buy it?”
Snap out of it.
These thoughts are a sure sign that nostalgia has bitten you. Hard.
Here’s the truth: Nothing is as it was. It never will be. It never can be.
Why? That thief we call Father Time dictates that things will never be the same, except in your memories. Places change. You have changed.
Ever since I moved to the Greater Upper Midlands Co-Prosperity Sphere in 2001, friends from South Florida would ask me if I miss the old stomping grounds. Based on a visit made a mere three months after I left, my answer shocks them.
I told them that I miss people (some who have departed this world) and I miss places that were no longer the places I knew—if they still exist at all. For instance, for several years our Friday Night eating establishment of choice was 3 Guys from Italy on University Drive just north of the I-595 interchange. In my return at the end of 2001 (again, three months after I left), it was gone, closed and reopened as (IIRC) some sort of taqueria.
Our other Friday night spot after closing the hobby shop used to be the Applebee’s at University Drive and Peters Road next to the Albertson’s. Don’t go looking for it. It is now a Charles Schwab office. And the Albertson’s is now a Publix. And the old hobby shop is gone—destroyed when the building exploded four or five years ago.
The yardstick I use tends to be hobby shops. I know, you’re shocked. But I take a look at what was then and what was now. None—and I mean zero—of the hobby shops I frequented in my South Florida days remains today. They’ve all been closed for a least a decade, some even longer. The same goes for restaurants, craft stores, grocery stores, movie theaters, golf courses...
Even during my brief travels out and about in town when running to and fro for reunion duties during my visit in 2022 proved to me that the Ft. Lauderdale I knew lived only in my memories. Even if a building or an establishment was still there, it wasn’t the same as it was when I left 23 years ago.
Well, except Lester’s Diner—that place is a time capsule.
Lest you think this is a phenomenon of big cities, ask my wife about her small home town, and how it has changed over the years.
No, these places we knew in our youth are, in the here and now, vastly different.
Our nostalgia makes us want to believe that they are the same—that, if you could go back to that house of your youth, you could stand in the same place in the family room and watch the sunset stream through the windows the same way they did when you were a kid. That is an illusion, created by the effect of mist of time on your memories. It is what we want to see, because humans tend to remember the very good things we’ve experienced in vivid detail while allowing the really bad experiences to fade.
And yes, sitting here at my desk, I can close my eyes and imagine a cool fall day in Ft. Lauderdale, standing in the family room of that house, and noting how much softer the light is compared to the summer time. I can sense the difference in how the shadows fall at various times of the year. The air is cool and dry—not the humid hot air of summer.
I miss those days, I miss that experience...
But in the 30+ years since I moved out of that house, changes have taken place that make those visions I have impossible to duplicate.
It is best to leave them as memories and move on.
“This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel. It's called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we are loved.” -- Don Draper (Jon Hamm)
Even though the subject of the “Mad Men” episode quoted was a Kodak Carousel slide projector, each of us has our own mental Carousel. Replay the memories, because you cannot truly re-live them in the present.
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As I type this, I have “My Mix” on YouTube playing. In the time it took me to type this, I’ve heard songs from my formative years, ranging from mid-1970’s Blue-Eyed Soul (Robin Trower’s “Too Rolling Stoned”) to early 1980’s Genesis (“Home By The Sea” and “Keep it Dark”) to 1990’s Girl Group rock (The Donnas’ “Take it Off”). Right now, Al Stewart is singing about strolling through a crowd like Peter Lorre, as a girl comes out of the sun, silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain (how I adore the imagery in the lyrics for “The Year of the Cat”)...
This music evokes the same memories—remembering where I was and what I was doing when I heard them for the first time...or the hundredth time…
As we get older, the experiences of youth seem to come rushing back, in sharper detail than they ever had before.
My advice? Enjoy the ride. Soak up the vision of days past. What if one of those experiences that makes you cringe hits you? Enjoy that, too. Because all of those experiences are part of the person you’ve become over the years.
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Thanks for reading. Be good to one another, and, as always, I bid you Peace.
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