It never fails that having my friends from Cincinnati visit for even a short evening engenders all manner of grave nostalgia. Nostalgia can be quite destructive if even for the most brief moment it is fully indulged. Because it is a faux joy. A memory of joy. It isn't present and it isn't lasting. It is pleasant but it can certainly, at best, distract and at worst obliterate the fullness of living that is attained when attention is paid to the present and the hope of the future.
All this calls to mind the first time I saw the movie "The Wrong Guys" starring Louie Anderson and Richard Lewis. Several years ago I walked in on my mom watching it some Sunday afternoon on one of the local stations. She usually watched the worst of movies on any given Sunday afternoon. The beginning credits had just begun and there was a voice over by Louie Anderson. I recognized his nasal passage of a voice from my religious watching of "Life with Louie," Anderson's Saturday morning cartoon that lasted eleven episodes in the mid-nineties. As I watched the movie the camera eventually zeroed in on a very nostalgic and also very unhappy Louie Anderson sitting on the front porch of what turned out to be his mother's house looking at old pictures of his boy scouts troop. I asked my mother what this movie was about.
"It is about what happens to people when they don't know how to just let go."
That is mostly correct. Louis's character gets so nostalgic that he gets his old troop buddies back together for a camping trip to the mountain they couldn't "conquer" as young scouts. They run across an escaped conflict and the initial plot gradually disappears but it is an amusing movie nonetheless. Something about my mother's cynacism tainted the way I watched the entire movie. In every scene I looked for traces of regret, self-loathing, and slovenly - all the things I associated with poorly lived lives. And these guys were miserable.
"People shouldn't live in the past" my mom said. It certainly is alienating to live in the very self-obsessed fantasy of your precieved "good times," the halcyon days of yore. Thank God it is a mighty pleasurable thing to reminiesce for most of us but that grace has not reminded me of how grand life truly is as much as it has caused discontent and selfish restlessness.
If I am unsatisfied may it be for future ends not tied as opposed to what has be sealed for years and cannot be exhumed.
Mmm, memory - "she's a crazy animal when she screams"
1 comment:
My mother always said a friendship built on the past and always saying "Remember when" never speaking of the present or future was a friendship on its way out.
I started a blogger. Because I wanted to talk about writing with other writers, agents, and publishers. The world is full of them, it turns out.
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