Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a drink best sipped in tiny quantities. Toast significant anniversaries with it in those little glasses used for rare and expensive spirits. Too much imbibing of it makes you realize what seemed piquant was pungent. Nostalgia is one of the reasons I no longer drink; to damn easy to get nostalgic at two in the morning for places and people that were truly toxic, but when viewed through the glaze of a few snifters of brandy, take on a friendly glow. Pungent indeed.

I use my past excesses as kindling for my writing. I’ll rummage around the mess left over from the odd trip out to some obscure place in the late ’60s and weave a narrative using a bit of truth and a tad of fiction. Sometimes, I do too good a job and get online looking up names. Thankfully, I am rarely lucky in this. And I stay away from the phone.

Memory is very inexact and a liar, too. When I drank years ago, I could run up telephone bills calling odd locations and half-remembered girlfriends. With luck, no one answered the phone at 2 AM. And if they did, the response was often, “Who did you say you were? Wes? Wes, who?”

Just last night, I woke up from a dream about someone I’d known many years ago. My best buddy and I had not been kind to him when he was our roommate. I had tried to make amends for him about twenty years ago. He’d become a bit of a fire and brimstone sort of preacher, and instead of accepting my sincere apologies, told me that I was bound for perdition. I asked him if a sinner truly repented, was he still damned? “In cases like yours, Yes!” He then hung up on me. Well, we had stolen his girlfriend away.
Why had he shown up in a nostalgic dream about my days on the road? After a bit, I concluded that I’d written several posts in which the road days figure prominently, so I guess Reverend Ed returned to remind me that nostalgia, like the road, is dangerous.

What’s new is safer; its history is not written yet. But it’s New Year’s Eve 20224 as I write this, and the words to Auld Lang Suynes came to mind:

Should old acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot
and old lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear
for auld lang syne
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet
for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup
and surely I’ll buy mine
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet
for auld lang syne.

We two have run about the slopes
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot
since auld lang syne.

We two have paddled in the stream
from morning sun till dine
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand my trusty friend
And give me a hand o’ thine
And we’ll take a right goodwill draught
for auld lang syne

So it’s a drught that’s both piquant and pungent. Drink it with care.