Not Nostalgia
On my most recent round of travel, I found myself getting a pat-down from a TSA agent at the Burbank airport. This happens with some frequency, since I wear a medical device and can't go through the new-fangled body scanners. For some reason, this instance was extra annoying because the agent kept giving confusing instructions, and I was following her around in circles in this crowded, tiny space for a ridiculous amount of time before we even got down to business.
When we did, I stood there with my arms out and felt a familiar surge in my chest that meant I was about to cry. I bit my lip and took deep breaths, but a few tears managed to slip out anyway.
"Are you okay?" the agent asked.
I nodded. "Mm-hmm,"
And I was okay but things didn't feel okay and it was one of those moments when you somehow see clearly the gaping chasm between how things are and how you wish they were, how it feels like they should be, and you see the past and wonder how you, we, got to this moment.
I remembered a time before 9/11 when airports were a normal pain in the ass but not a constant potential trauma. I remembered a time before type 1 diabetes when I didn't have to travel with needles and insulin and didn't have pumps and monitors adhered to my body 24/7. I remembered a time before I lost my faith as I'd always understood it. I remembered a time I loved myself more.
Alongside the intense moments like that one, I've been generally experiencing a constant low-grade fever of what I've been thinking of as nostalgia, specifically for the decade of my childhood: the 1970s.
I've been thinking about church potlucks and falling asleep on a shag rug to the sound of the jeans-clad adults praying, singing. I've been thinking about corduroys and macrame, and I've been reading the old vegetarian cookbooks like Moosewood and Laurel's Kitchen and the Tassajara Bread Book, filled with drawings and visions for communal living around rough wooden bowls full of bean salads and fresh bread. (And for a moment there in the seventies, we had that.)
I've been thinking about The Electric Company, roller skating on the block, playing outside in the city for hours after school without adults hovering around, without mobile phones or computers, without easy credit and the accompanying pressure to have All the Cool Things. I remember a time when if you couldn't afford something, you just didn't have it, and you went to school in your Toughskins and Zips and it was fine.
There's a reason I watched all four hours of the Eagles documentary on Netflix and it wasn't because I like the Eagles. It was because I found immense comfort in the footage of people wearing the clothes and hair styles (or "styles") that surrounded me in my childhood.
As I read this back, it occurs to me that my nostalgia for those touchstones is directly related to the aforementioned loss of faith, or at least loss of a certain expression and community of a faith. Those shag rugs, those potluck dishes, the long hair and the clogs and the corduroys, the guitars and macrame, those were all part of growing up in San Francisco around a bunch of Jesus movement hippies, pre-Reagan, pre-Falwell and the Moral Majority, pre- urban flight.
I was eight and my father was a disaster and we were poor but Jesus loved me, and for a long time I felt safe in the cocoon of church community.
The pitfalls of misplaced nostalgia are many, but sometimes things are worth crying about. It's not that you want to go back in time, or be stuck in the past. Just that there are these moments when the losses land, and you see them, and you say, "Oh, that was a loss."
You see there are things and times and versions of yourself you will never get back, events in your personal life and in history that will not unhappen, elections that can't be undone, bombs that can't be undropped, chronic diseases that will not magically go away, aging that will not stop, complicated revelations that will not simplify.
And you realize that what you are feeling is not nostalgia, but grief.
And May I Recommend:
New Liturgists episode on spiritual trauma, especially if you are someone who has experienced loss of faith in a spiritual community, or abuse in such a setting.
Now available on Netflix: Disney's Queen of Katwe. It completely transcends the Disney "triumph of the underdog" formula while at the same time remaining completely faithful to it. Based on a true story and beautifully acted by all the leads.
Also now on Netflix! Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a the Revolution This is a deep and wide look at the Panthers with tons of great footage, with bonus appearance by Rita Williams-Garcia who wrote -
- one of my all-time favorite middle grade novels, One Crazy Summer, about a trio of sisters who visit their estranged mom in Oakland during the summer of 1968. It's about the Panthers, and the Black Power movement, sisterhood, mothers and daughters, abandonment, and how personal and world history connect.