Early Onset Nostalgia

I was about to go home for the day when I stop and reminisced about a few things from long ago. That led me to the notion that I am pretty nostalgic. I've known for a while that I'm something of a sentimentalist. So much so that I thought I might as well stop and spend a minute or two to write about it in my blog while it was on my mind.

So, yes, I'm not yet 30 years old and I have these odd bouts of nostalgia or sentimentality. Sometimes I wonder if this condition might be linked to my various difficulties with depression I've mentioned in this goofball blog. They aren't too terribly different, when it comes right down to it. It's as if the two conditions kind of overlap.

Unlike depression, I actually like being nostalgic. I sometimes think back to when I was about six or eight years old. I can recall riding up and down the street on my bicycle with hardly a care in the world. I recently visited my parents and I happened to half jokingly mention to my mother the birthday party I had when I turned six years old. My mom immediately disappeared only to return ten minutes later with a handful of photos from that afternoon. I still remember the names of every one of those eight kids seen in the pictures.

My mother is painfully nostalgic. She still occasionally meets with friends she first knew almost fifty years ago. She always goes to class reunions. She would not miss one. I have asked her why exactly she enjoys such things. Without missing a beat, she stated that she likes to think about the days when she was younger. If class reunions consisted of nothing but former classmates discussing their ailments, or passing around photos of their grandchildren, I'm sure that my mother would never attend. For my mom, it's about revisiting the past. I kind of know what she means.

My father likes to stay as youthful as possible, but he doesn't really harken back to his bygone days. Now and then he will mention someone from his past, but that's about as far as it goes. I guess in at least one respect, I take after my mom.

I think it is true that a person views their memories through rose-colored glasses. I distinctly remember having a wonderful time at age seven speeding down the sidewalk on my bicycle. Oddly, I do not remember crashing once. Given that I am something of a klutz, I know there had to have been some disastrous wrecks complete with tears. I don't remember one of them.