Nostalgia

We were at brunch with Emily and Jesse last week, and we started talking about early childhood memories. I related one about how I used to nap in the back of my mom’s 1968 Volkswagen Bug, which was my favorite car in the world at the time.  It was Navy Blue.  I was five years old.  

For those unacquainted with the Volkswagen Bug, it was the last car ever built that had both rear-wheel drive and the engine in the back. 

As you can see, it's a little cramped back there.  But between the back seat and the rear window was a tiny slice of space.  Right in front of that blue arrow is where I used to go to sleep.  

My parents tried not to let me do this while the car was in motion.  But my dad was twenty-eight, and it was the seventies, so stop being all uptight and square, man.  Suffice it to say that I took many a nap in that tiny space, quality German engineering thrumming me off to sleep. 

When I was seven, we moved from San Francisco to Boston.  There was a period of several months when we didn’t have the Bug, because it was being transported cross-country.  I got used to living without it, and to napping without an engine beneath my head.  

Then the Bug arrived in Boston, and I climbed inside for my customary nap.  But time and separation had done their job:  it was obvious that I was way too big for that space, and had been for a while.  I knelt on the seat and peered down into that slice of nap-space, and felt that I had forever lost something I loved. 

When I told this story, at brunch, I said it was “the first time I ever experienced nostalgia.”  Ah! cries the seven year-old.  The joyous innocence of my five year-old years is lost!   Gone forever!  We all smirked.  

At first blush, it does seem ridiculous for a seven year-old to feel nostalgia.  But then I thought about what an incredibly full human being my son is already, at age 0.08.  He has memories, and dreams, and intellectual curiosity.  All of those are going to get progressively more advanced and complex, even in just the next year.    

And actually, the opportunities for nostalgia are far more numerous in the first few years than later in life: being weaned off breast milk, forgoing diapers for the adult toilet, leaving your mommy and daddy for hours at a time for pre-school, and then kindergarten.  These are massive, seismic shifts in lifestyle.  They require huge emotional and intellectual resources.  Going off to college is a fairly mundane affair by comparison. 

So to me the anecdote now seems smirk-worthy in the opposite way: seven is a ridiculously OLD age to think that a child would first experience nostalgia.  It’s the first time I remember feeling it, but no doubt I had already been nostalgic many times over by then.  

Such is the emotional life of a child: intense, turbulent, formative --- and then almost completely forgotten.