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Thursday July 5, 2001
"Nostalgia is the longing to go back to the good old days when you were neither good nor old." unattributed in 20,000 Quips & Quotes, edited by Evan Esar
summer dreams
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a gulf of feeling I couldn't shake the feeling of being on the cusp of a change, a dislocation. A new beginning, an ending. I came up with the concept of 'comtemporary nostalgia' today. This is the process by which we discover, in the moment at hand, the things we will remember favorably later. The 'remember when...it was so great' stuff. Except we appreciate it now. Imagine taking a toy out of a flimsy box in the 50's, playing with it, and then carefully returning it and putting it in a safe place. Or taking a deep breath during a game of tennis after a particularly nice shot and thinking "I'll remember being this fit and having hit that backhand volley forever." Sometimes we capture that. But mostly we look backward and forward, fervently trying to recapture what's lost or find the right future. I had trouble shaking out of bed. I had trouble getting myself to work. I had trouble getting seriously into what I needed to do. Although I did work my brain and typing fingers some. I had a meeting at lunch time. Some of the participants were having their lunches. But I didn't eat anything. Around two, I took my lunch break and I went home and never came back. But first I stopped at Eckerd's and bought a picture hanging kit that had some of that wire stuff in it to put on the backs of pictures. For my mom. I also bought a bit of candy that I immediately ate. I don't shop much. Sometimes, on the rare errand like this, I just wander around and see what they have for sale. The Eckerd's sells black lights. And plastic cars that dispense Pez. (Pronounced 'pets' in German. In Berlin I saw machines in the S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations selling the candy but never saw a dispenser.) That's what they sell today anyway. I stopped by the parents' house. Dad was reading a novel and Mom was napping. The problem on her computer was, I think, that she 'xed' out of a window in Microsoft Outlook and thereafter got confused and did a bunch of stuff. I showed her how to fix it if it happens again, but I don't know if she will remember. "I wrote a lot of e-mails but I haven't gotten too many back." I check and she has indeed sent a bunch. I go home. I think about work. I read a little bit of the paper. I watch Venus Williams win a match at Wimbledon. Good tennis. SuRu comes by after work. Gayle is here doing bookkeeping. We all go to Fonda. Our friends Gayle and Jeff are there. (We had dinner with them Tuesday night.) We have a nice meal. I have duck with almond molé sauce. Us girls drink a bottle of Texas Sangiovese that is pretty good. I still feel vaguely dislocated. But dinner with FFP and friends grounds me a little. I have to be there for others, don't I? I have to get it together.
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