In the grip of nostalgia
youngest brothers, the monotony of change, the books that keep me here
Yesterday after school, my youngest son stood in the kitchen with me while I finished cutting vegetables for dinner. He had put on an album that we listened to on repeat during our sabbatical road trip in Europe, and we were both “vibing” as the kids say. We started talking about all the specific memories the songs conjured up. Good memories, some of them borne out of near catastrophes or funny mishaps, some of them just pure idyll.
At one point, he said, “Do you ever think about a really good memory, and then feel sad? I hate that.”
“There’s a word for that,” I said. “It’s called nostalgia.”
I have some serious nostalgia genes in my family, so this kid comes by his feelings honestly. Maybe there are other words for it too. Sentimentality, or melancholy. It’s that weird enjoyment mixed with longing or a sense of grief. Maybe grief at what is no more, or what has been lost. But joy at the goodness, a gratefulness that there even was this sweet thing you had for awhile, or at all.
This boy of mine has been feeling all the nostalgia and sentimentality lately. He often asks where “the boys” are, meaning the older boys— the big bros, and wants to know when they’ll be home. He’ll tell me how he wishes they didn’t go out with friends as much, and loves when we are all home together. How he doesn’t like to think about them graduating and moving away. A few weeks ago, he told me how he thinks about moving back to America as something that really makes him feel close as a family. “It’s something we have to go through you know? But we’re doing it, together.”
I tend to feel embarrassed about all my sentimental feelings. We joke about big feelings and overblown sentiments, and I suppose I don’t want to be someone who seems overdramatic or with an inflated sense of what is important. Like, we get it okay? Your oldest son is graduating, you’re so proud of him, yada yada yada.
My youngest son, who is eleven this month, doesn’t feel that embarrassment just yet. All he knows is this strange and confusing mixture of sweetness and sadness, of love and grief. I understand it, I said to him. I’m so grateful for the good we have, the memories we’ve made, and it is hard to think about how it will change.
But it will change. And there is something both exciting about doing it together, and daunting about the days ahead.
In the past few weeks, we have spent more time than ever before in the history of our twenty year marriage talking about vehicles, appliances, furniture, and budgets. These are things that in general, we have not had to worry too much about, either because we did not have them or they were provided by our company or we acquired them when others moved away.
There is also an entire subset of plans that have to be researched and thought about regarding our son’s graduation and subsequent drop off at the Naval Academy in June. I am quickly learning a common phrase held in high regard among USNA families and students— “Semper Gumby” or “Always Flexible.” I feel the need for this as we think through the various needs of the summer and schedules that are still up in the air. I peruse Airbnb for a place in Annapolis in June, and again in August. We throw around possible scenarios for when our house in Massachusetts will be ready, where we’ll stay and how we’ll furnish it. Should we get a membership to Costco? How much is car insurance?
Then there is the leaving part on this end. We’ve sold or given away most of our furniture. But I still need to go through things like the kitchen, and the million odds and ends that pile up in the end. At some point, you begin to live in chaos. Cooking is simplified. The house looks bare, or just messy.
And then there is all the inner stuff that gets submerged under the packing. The fact that you’re saying goodbye, the existential questions of what matters, what difference has it made, how is it that you can learn to love a place and a life for so long, and then just up and leave it? The worries about starting again, in the middle of our lives. Will we ever feel at home? Will we fit in? And what will happen to everything and everyone here? How can we help our kids to say goodbye, to name the loss, to look forward to the good?
I suppose I am feeling apologetic in some way for the monotony that is about to settle into these letters for the next several months. Change, transition, all the feelings. These are my catchwords for the foreseeable future. It is not a circumstance unique to me or my family, but it is my life for awhile in this little corner of the world.
Do you know what helps? The stories of others. I find that as I walk through the unknown, it is the narratives that I’ve lived in that come to mind, providing a telos, a map, a way of thinking about the murky present that feels like a great cloud of witnesses lining the way before me. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters to his family while in prison, how their memories sustained and comforted them. Elisabeth Elliot’s biography, her tortured and then clear decision to leave the jungle.
It is also stories like my current read, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. The treatment of memory, of the way we learn to do what is difficult, of the need to become wise and to embrace virtue, of what it means to be a strong woman who is not ruled by her emotions or her vices. Or, The Diary of a Country Priest, and what it looks like to live a good life. What it means when you feel yourself a failure, or inconsequential, and how it is we can lay down our lives for one another.
It is, finally (but not only), Moses’ account of the Exodus, and the intensely human and divine experience of a people being led by their God. It is the gospels, the prophets, the epistles, all accounts of a faith that required obedience, and obedience that required faith (that last part I took from The Cost of Discipleship, my current morning read, and one that never grows old).
What would our lives be without our books, our meta-narratives, our ancient stories that we still tell to light our way? They sit in the background, or hang before our eyes like a transparent film that colors our whole world. I’m grateful for these anchors that somehow keep me still and tethered, even while nostalgia and shifting times and turbulent change blow every which way.
And thank you for joining me here, as I tell my small stories. Little boys and big feelings and all.
If you enjoy being here, and think someone else might too, please share.
Thank you for sharing your story, and by default, putting words to my pictured thoughts and inarticulate feelings.