Nostalgia Is Now

A week riding the waves with my grandchildren . . . and time collapses.

On Sunday I was reading a beguiling piece on nostalgia, written beautifully by my friend Susie Middleton. With her father’s 95^th birthday approaching, she finds herself waking up thinking of her mother, gone since 2018. What follows is a rolling reverie of childhood days running through the sprinkler, sitting on a raft with her sister or sailing a Sunfish. “It’s funny,” Middleton writes, “I don’t want to simply relive these moments; I want to feel the way I felt—free and light and a little silly.”

I want to feel the way I felt. What we often miss from those long-lost years are the feelings, the way we so naturally inhabited our bodies before we learned to worry about our looks, the way we chased pleasure and adventure without fear, the way we lived so naturally in the present moment. We didn’t need classes and books of technique to bring us to now. What else was there? Later in life we become like Wendell Berry in that lovely poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” He’s afraid about his own life, worried about his children’s future, and he goes to lie down by a pond, just to be with serene, wild creatures who "do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” The two sisters sitting on that raft, dangling their feet in the water, are like that—they are free, light and a little silly.

I was especially drawn to Middleton’s deep retrospective on Sunday morning, because only a few hours earlier I had been on a beach in Cape May, New Jersey. It was a family vacation. Our daughters were there and our grandchildren. Every morning after breakfast we loaded up our trolley with towels and sunscreen, beach chairs and umbrellas, and headed for the waves. That first day I think I had about twelve minutes to read my book, and then the kids were calling incessantly from the water, “Papa, come in! Papa, come in!”

They are ten and almost six, and all they want to do is ride the waves. Maybe they get lucky and a wave lifts them up for a short flight and a landing on the beach. But mostly we feel the swell lifting us like a bobbing buoy as it sweeps by. The cold salt water is thrilling. The ten year-old boy wants me to Watch! Watch me! Watch! as he dives like a kamikaze into a huge, cresting wave. He wants to be pummeled. His body is red with sand abrasions. The almost six year-old wants to take on those bracing walls of water too, but she needs me to hold her, lift her at just the moment of whelming.

For hours we stand in the surf, looking for the next “big one,” our feet sensing the undertow, moving in or out to meet the wave just as it rises up like a briny dragon. Watching and waiting for waves turns out to be a lot like watching one’s breath. In, out. In, out. We’re mesmerized. While you’re moving with the rhythm of the ocean you’re not aware of what’s happening inside. Only later, when you return to that “forethought of grief,” do you realize how free you were then, how like a child.

“I want to feel the way I felt.”

We can’t go back, it’s true. But that feeling of freedom and lightness is not locked away in our past. It can be ours any day, any time. The wonder—and I felt it so intensely on the Cape May beach—is that when we are pulled into the present, we are in heaven. Or heaven is in us. To be here, now, is to slip into a corner of eternity where time doesn’t matter. It only lasts an instant, but it feels like forever and ever, because it is.