Nostalgia
Sunday, 26 February 2006 | 15:43
8:44, the sun is peeking out behind the clouds. Rejoice – this means for once I slept for over 6 hours! Maybe that feeling of rest that keeps eluding me will finally stop by and stay for awhile. It’s cold again, -29C, which means no skating on the river today. I used to skate on the river, when I was younger, but I’ve become terribly sensitive to the cold and the last time I was out on the river I actually cried, I was so cold. But this I do live in a very wintry place, after all, and not everyone has the opportunity to skate outdoors nearly every day for several months of the year… I should seize this opportunity. But so often, I’d just rather stay in my pyjamas…
I’ve been wanting to post a photograph of my old dog, Whiskers. He died 12 years ago Friday. There is one specific photo I want to post; it’s my favourite picture of him, taken the day before I left for Quebec on a school trip, about 3 weeks before he was killed. I believe it was the last photo of him – but it’s nowhere to be found. I spent several hours in my closet last night, searching in vain. I did find some nice surprises: a 45″ I had been looking for, and a few pictures that I thought I had lost – but no photo of Whiskers.
And what always happens when I do these grand closet-searches, happened: the time spent looking was stretched out immesureably because as I opened each cardboard box, a flood of memories would wash over me, and I would just have to spend 40 minutes looking thoroughly at each item contained inside: reading each note, flipping through each book, gazing at each photograph. My closet is full of boxes, you see. I am and always have been a pack rat. I periodically do a big clean-up, tossing out years of faded memories, but generally I keep things – I have a few boxes of magazines; a few boxes of school work (dating back to my elementary school days!); a few boxes of letters and postcards, interesting newspaper clippings, and old journals and diaries; many boxes of books (I’ve run out of space on my few bookshelves); boxes of art, boxes of crafts supplies, boxes of boxes… Sounds daunting, but my closet is navigable, surprisingly. I have the boxes arranged in such a way that I can access them all, with the… shall we say more relevant ones near the top.
And so I peeked and I poked and I rifled and I shuffled and I searched for that photo, but to no avail. No matter; my soul fed itself on all the memories available to me, and I was soon laughing and crying alternately. My evening was filled with nostalgia, always bittersweet. While progress is good, and my current life is fairly wonderful, there’s always that lingering question in the back of the mind:why? And although I’ve seen the pictures, read the journal entries, played the records hundreds of times, and I’m generally acutely aware of the passage of time, I’m always struck by just how much things change, and how quickly. People often say change is good; trouble is, they’re not usually the ones to whom change is happening!
So here I am the next morning, feeling slightly hungover from my nostalgia binge, still without that picture. But one day my old dog will be here on these pages, and I will write a few words about him, and I will once again be carried off by a wave of nostalgia. In the meantime, maybe I’ll think about going skating.
So, I discover that I’m a “pack rat”! how nicely put. The only way I’ve yet devised to avoid the nostalgia binge is to simply discard the box without looking inside.Must admit I only do this with boxes of really outdated magazines when crying out loud for space. My son said the best way is to hold a big trash bag next to the box and discard in it whatever is no longer relevant but I found I need him to tell me what is really obsolete. Giggles guaranteed! I finally managed to get read of all the documentation I had brought back from the South pacific area, only because I can retrieve the up to date one on the web. Well that does help noawadays,but you sdhould see what I store on my ibook!
So you too can skate outdoors many months a year, after all.That much cold can be discouraging though.
Nice picture today. Have a warmer week. Le printemps nous amène les amandiers en fleurs et les bourgeons sur les saules dès à présent, plus les jolies minuscules fleurs rouges des noisettiers.
My main problem with my collection of stuff is that, while I can fairly easily determine which things should be thrown out/given away/sold, I tend to find a great many more things that I intend to keep, hidden amongst the “garbage” – and I get caught up looking through the “keeper” pile for an hour or so, and by the time I’m finished with that, I’m too exhausted to do the actual sorting and culling!
Il faisait plus chaud ici pour un moment, mais ces derniers jours le froid a retourné. Nous ne verrons pas la beauté des fleurs ici pour quelques temps; pourtant, nous avons toujours la beauté de la neige et le gel.