Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Nostalgia . . . Sort of

It has been a long time since I've done a reflective, sentimental post, but I'm sufficiently tired and loopy, so here it goes:

I may be the only person I know who gets nostalgic in the future. That phrase is so absurd I think I need to explain. As a teenager I would sometimes picture myself grown up with kids and reflecting back on my childhood. So, for example, driving around the area of my parents' house I would get flashes to bringing the kids to visit my parents and explaining to them the significance of different personal landmarks. And sometimes I'd wonder if physical things would still be around in that picture.

One of those things was the blue chairs my parents had. I don't know when exactly they bought them, but they were around for most of my childhood. And sometimes I would wonder as I rocked in them whether they'd still be around for me to rock my kids to sleep in.

It has been awhile since I've really had time to be so introspective as to think about things like this, but it struck me the other day that some of these things were happening. For example, Nicholas can't really be rocked to sleep anywhere, but we read his bedtime stories in one of the blue chairs each night and the picture in the sidebar shows him sitting in one.

But, as is likely in real life, the connections to my childhood aren't the ones I imagined. The 12-year-old me didn't have an inkling when she saved up to buy a keyboard that 15 years later it would provide her 4-month-old with endless amusement. But as he was playing the other day I put on the demo and had flashbacks to a preschooler Andrew "playing" that demo song. It's an odd thing to be sentimental about, but I think that is why it struck me so much.

The weird thing is that I feel much more like I'm still the teenager than the adult I envisioned.

No comments:

Post a Comment