'Our Self-Important Postures'

My middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, is visiting for a few days. The conversation turned to nostalgia. He’s young and contemptuous, as I used to be. He used the verb I would have used: “wallow.” The young believe in the future. Nostalgia represents a used-up yesterday, a distraction from today’s important business. The word arrived in English in the eighteenth century, though our modern sense evolved late in the nineteenth. The OED defines that usage as “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” In other words, an unearned longing for something that likely never existed, a comforting pipedream. But memories are precious as we get older. I don’t cherish some mythical Golden Age in my life or the world’s. Memories can be a goad to gratitude – the teachers who encouraged us, friends and lovers, family now gone. In the closet are boxes…