When I was 20 I didn’t really look back at the previous two decades of my life. I didn’t really look forward. Thirty seemed very old, in its own way. I didn’t even need to watch Logan’s Run to sense that. I just lived in the moment and stumbled along with youthful exuberance.
I remember being mildly traumatized when I turned 26, struck at how most of my 20s were behind me, that I was inescapably an adult and I would probably need to start acting like one. Three years later I grew a beard.
I never looked much into the future or thought about getting older much since the mini-crisis of turning 26. Turning 30 didn’t phase me and neither did 40. I started running at age 44 and by 50 I’d logged over 3,100 km jogging. At the same time I never really got into long term planning, never managing to successfully move beyond the stumbling approach of my youth. The difference now is if I stumble I have an increased chance of breaking a hip [old person joke].
What I have found in the last few years is an increasing tendency to look back to my youth and the things I enjoyed back then. This is nothing unusual, most of us do it as it brings a sense of comfort and familiarity as we grapple with the dawning realization that we are, in fact, mortal, and our time is limited, barring reincarnation as someone famous, spiffy or perhaps just a beetle that gets eaten by a curious cat. Or maybe post-death is some truly fabulous thing and no one ever comes back to offer concrete proof of this because our mortal minds could not handle that level of fabulousness.
All of this is to say that tonight I ended up on one of those nostalgia treks that led me to listening to the song “Something About You”, the 1985 hit from Level 42. It was a catchy song. I put the album its from, World Machine, on my wishlist in iTunes (not Groove, which, if it has a wishlist, probably adds random albums and songs that it determines are what you really want, not the ones you’ve selected, then deletes the list at some random point in the future, anyway). I continued my trek, listening to a smidgen of Cyndi Lauper, Roxy Music, Hole and yes, Nazareth. I found myself hovering over the Play button on Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” but had to draw the line somewhere. If you could wear out YouTube videos, I’d be close on that one.
I may have wishlisted the self-titled Boston album, though.
Most of my nostalgia is music-related because music is so of its time and is great at invoking memories in ways that TV shows, movies and books simply don’t. I’m re-reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for instance, but I couldn’t tell you when or where exactly I had read the book before, except that it was when I was young. I’m actually kind of shocked at how little I remember of the book (it’s quite good). But there are things I do sometimes look back on wistfully. I will reminisce about them soon in another post that pushes me that much closer to “old man yells at cloud” territory.
