Thoughts on Nostalgia

I've reached the age where nostalgia no longer seems like a stupid waste of time. Come to think of it, I've always been that age, but with each passing year more so.

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Not least with regard to music. Some old songs I now love simply because they remind me of the old days.

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Robert Frost said a poem begins with "a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness." Nostalgia is essentially homesickness for a time, or a sense of dislocation that is temporal as well as spatial; a longing for a time and a place. Sometimes only a few notes of an old tune, or the smell of cookies baking in the oven, or a faded photograph can bring it all back.

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Or perhaps it's not a longing so much as a reference point connecting you to the long ago, a reference point, a signal from the past that help to locate and even define you, connect you to that which is larger--longer, deeper, fuller, richer--than the present moment: even as it fades progressively over the horizon at your back.

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Funny how an old song can be that reference point. Sometimes the voice of Paul Cotton or Richie Furay of Poco, or even Rusty Young's steel guitar, can do that for me.