On nostalgia

It was at Alex Steckler's family cabin at Lake Roesiger, although calling it a cabin is like calling a car a bicycle. It was the kind of place that would attract people who would call anything a cabin if it were on a lake. Her place was a small built-in-the-70s house overlooking dirty sands and gaudy colored kayaks and joyriders tearing through the water on muscular motorboats. The day was overcast. 

Inside, wood paneled everything and a Big Mouth Billy Bass on the wall. Its outdoorsy inconveniences were a very old small fridge and a poor radio signal, the latter of which we were trying to fix, fiddling with the long antenna on a boxy radio-cassette player. Through the fuzz we heard the beginnings of Blondie's "Heart of Glass." This was the first time I heard it. At once, Pam, Alex's mom, a platinum blonde, tight jeans-wearing, beige lipstick-kissing woman with a huge smile and a melting heart, turned up the volume and started dancing, a kinda glossy look coming over in her eye. In a faraway voice I didn't recognize, she told us that this was the song of her high school days. It played at her prom.

I watched her and tried to imagine what she had looked like then. I basically saw the same woman as the one in front of me, but in a puffy dress and in a school gymnasium, that was the best my seven year old imagination could do. But to be honest she probably did look the same. She was a beautician at Nordstrom so she knew all the age-defying tricks, and probably got them on discount, too. Seven was too young to experience nostalgia, but Pam's sudden transformation introduced me to this mysterious orientation towards the world, and to the idea that maybe there was a secret experience that was only granted to a person with the passage of time... maybe there'd come a point where life wasn't a successive chain of tomorrow-driven playdates?! 

Now I think I know nostalgia too well. I am crippled with it, just thinking about Big Mouth Billy Bass and Pam's Heart of Glass.