STALKED BY OUR PASTS

As we move toward middle age, a strange notion of sentimentality overcomes us. Although we may not have fully appreciated the culture and grandiosity of high school, somehow we cherish memories of our time spent there.

A new centrifuge of whirling memories and the saleable commodity of our lost youth is now being sold to us.

Each week we get reminders from Classmates or other dusty but beckoning web based “switchboards”. Since my best friend put me on Classmates, at least five people who I barely liked have connected with me. My thoughts on this? Are the people I liked too busy to contact me or do they have better things to do than sift through the fossils of their adolescent life.

The natural process of growing older brings us to a place of sentimentality which used to amaze me when my older relatives exhibited it. Why are you looking at that antediluvian year book? Who cares if your teenage boyfriend from forty years ago married someone who wasn’t as good looking as you were?

The cynical marketing approach now taken by most corporate entities is to appeal to the baby boomer’s desire to harken back to simpler times, and the carefree early days of their lives.

The really unfortunate part of this nostalgia game, is the efforts of every charlatan in the marketing business to resuscitate life back into things we really hated. Terrible television series, whole networks devoted to re-runs of programs we didn’t like in the first place, and radio station formats that play the same mediocre oldies that gave us a rash when they were originally top forty fodder.

My worst nightmares are being realized with the return of flares and the low rider hipster pants. Fortunately the six inch Mott the Hoople platform shoe has not made a comeback.

As far as yearning for my past, I am sure there are moments of serendipity when I run into things bygone and long for the familiar, but for the most part I remember the past, not with longing, but relief.

I do not want to relive Afros, I never liked the Archies, I despised bell bottoms and the deeper meaning of much of the psychedelic era was completely overshadowed by my discovery of Indian food, my love of Dave Brubeck and a sense of great things to come.

Currently, we are being stalked by our pasts. There is a misguided assumption that not only do we want to relive the past, we want to plant it right on our daily lives, real time, to live all over again.

I, for one, have had enough of my own stupid behaviour as a young person. The risks we took, the folly that led to our solid commitments and later responsibility is now morphed into a little wistful recollection of our daring-do. I remember a high school graduation rife with big hair, guys in really weird suits, and girls with dresses that looked like those decorative toilet paper roll covers. I remember a large group of us dancing in the rain after graduation and the mystifyingly boring dance that proceeded that experience.

Those were the days, but now these are the days. I would not trade the future for the past. The humour and humanity of my friends, young men and women about to accelerate through the clouds into adulthood, make me smile when I think of them. I smile too, thinking of our many years knowing one another and the richness and immortality of friendship. You can’t buy that on a website, or relive it with a wheatgrass facial.