For The Love Of Words
I love words. All words. But some are especially beautiful to me for various reasons. You will notice I use them more often than others. Ephemera is one. Nuances is another. My very favorite is nostalgia, and I love the story about how it came to be.
It was sometime in the 17th century that a medical student noticed that Swiss mercenaries displayed strange symptoms when they were away from home in battle. In those days it was considered a medical condition and they called it nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a longing for the past, so much so that you almost ache - the pleasurable memories of the good times long ago combined with the pain of knowing it will never be like that again.
It is a wistful desire to return to another time and place, to one’s home or homeland, to one’s friends and families.
Nostalgia is remembering our first days of school each year, the friends we made, so many of which are now gone, but even for those still living, the years have a way of chipping away at our memories and we grow nostalgic as we realize those relationships have changed forever.
Nostalgia is remembering the music you grew up with. For me it was the Fifties. For you, it might be the music of another decade. Nostalgia is very personal because that music is the soundtrack of our lives.
Petr Janata, a psychologist at the University of California-Davis, explains that our favorite music “gets consolidated into the especially emotional memories from our formative years.” He coined the phrase “reminiscence bump” which means that we remember the times of our younger adult lives more vividly than other years, and these memories last well into our senior years as we go through the aging process.
It comes as no surprise to most of us that we discover music on our own for the first time when we are young, often through our friends, and we all listen to the music as a badge, a way of belonging to a certain social group. It’s one of the ways we develop our sense of identity.
Nostalgia is the smells and sounds of things from long ago. I had an after school job in junior high, working for Mary Jo Martin at the old health clinic which used to be near the courthouse on Adams Street. In the winter, darkness would start to set in as I walked to my grandmother’s home on the far end of Wood Street in Old Town. It was quite a distance and I would be tired and cold but I believe I could still find the precise point in the sidewalk in front of her house, a house no longer there, where I could smell potatoes and onions frying in the iron skillet, combined with the fragrance of corn bread my grandmother had just pulled from the oven. I never prepare those foods in my own home without that memory of coming home to Wood Street.
For others, it is the fragrance of the perfume our mother or a favorite aunt always wore.
Nostalgia is the crunch of leaves beneath my feet.
It is the sadness I feel when I see one leaf still hanging on a tree limb by itself, showing tenacity and courage while the others have given up. Do you ever feel like that one little leaf in the face of the oncoming winter?
Most of all, nostalgia is like taking a walk down memory lane in our mind.
The intersections of our memories lead off in so many directions to paths now obscured by the fog of dates and places and people, as our thoughts jog around the curves and meander through the fields and over the hills of our mind. We see fences and posts marking the boundaries of the places we’re trying to find but we still can almost get lost in the days of our journeys, days we wish we could bring back if only for a moment.
Looking through the mist we can see shadows of houses where we once lived, broken tree swings where children once played. So many precious memories made decades ago yet it seems like only yesterday.
The longer I live the more I think that memory lane just makes a circle to bring us back to a time we once knew. My daughter is now grown and my oldest granddaughter just began college last month and I can see that my memories became the pavement they walk on as they journey through life.
They are travelling in the footsteps I’ve laid out before them. They are following the paths I marked out for them to use. They are picking the fruit I planted by the roadside which will provide sustenance for their journey.
The song lyricist wrote, “May those who come behind us find us faithful.”
Nostalgia is the video of our lives as it rewinds, sometimes pausing at the painful places, and speeding up at the sight of a familiar face or place where we would prefer to stay a while.
But lingering too long in the memories of the past will cause us to miss making new memories today, so we move on through this journey, not knowing what’s around the bend, but with the certainty that because we have made it this far, we can make it the rest of the way because we know the One who walks beside us in all our days.
©Joan Rowden Hart 2000
Comments