Nostalgia
I unexpectedly ran into an old family friend today. This woman has been a friend to my family since before I was born. She was my primary teacher when I was 5. Every memory I have of her breathes warmth and love. She was the first person of Tongan decent I ever knew and I’ve had positive inclinations for all Tongan people ever since. She was that wonderful. Seeing her today was like going home. Even more like going home than actually visiting my hometown, because when I’m in my hometown I’m confronted with all the changes time has wrought. I had a wonderful, but short, visit with her and her husband (whom I didn’t know well as a child) and I’ve discovered that they’ve moved to a town only about 20 minutes from here. I may play adopt-a-grandparent because my kids are short of local grandparents and I’d love for them to know her.
I’ve spent a good portion of this afternoon sorting through random memories that were dredged up by this encounter. I’m suddenly thinking of wading and catching polywogs in The Arroyo. I’m remembering a chestnut tree that used to grow in the courtyard of our church building. (It had the most fascinating spiky balls that fell from it yearly. Do chestnuts do that? Maybe it was something else.) I’m remembering tagging along on my brother’s Cub Scout outings because my mom and this friend were the den mothers. I’m remembering playing with a dozen friends whose paths went different ways in junior high and high school, people I haven’t thought of for years.
All of these memories seem imbued with a sort of idylic glow. They were happier, less worrisome times. But not because the world was a safer place, I don’t believe it was all that much safer, the glow is because I was a child and it wasn’t my job to make the world better. I was free to just enjoy it. The times that my kids will remember as idylic are taking place right now. Years hence my kids will look back on today as some sort of golden age when life was simpler. I will too. When I am a grandmother, watching my children raising children of their own, I too will look back on today as a golden age.
This is why I need to keep this journal, so that years from now when I want to tour The Golden Age, I’ll have a guidebook.