I was recently asked by someone (on a website dedicated to nostalgia that encourages discussions of childhood memories as they relate to my old neighborhood) about a schoolmate who I hadn't thought about in nearly forty years. There was nothing spectacularly wonderful and certainly nothing tragic or obviously poignant about this person or of my memories of him. And yet, I now think about him often and of the brevity and the pleasure of our simple but very genuine friendship. I believe this relationship, in microcosm, may be the essence of what nostalgia is, or at least what it means to me. As one may very well remember an unpleasant person or experience, decades after the psychic poison has long stopped intruding on one's sunnier worldview, so also a memory of kindnesses and congenialities, especially somehow, small and short lived ones, can also linger or be rekindled (in this case) in one's musings of tender bygone times precisely because of their beauty, fragility, and in essence, an awareness of their finiteness. Exchanging good deeds, fun and simple fellowship (what befriending this person meant): expressed through the unabashed desire to like and to be liked, these remain safely in the archives of some of the secret treasures of my heart.
This guy was not a senior like myself, when we met. In those high school days of intense studies mixed with carefree and youthful fun, the inevitable human inclination to rank, categorize and to not fraternize with "other" persons not within one's tribe, grade, clique, etc., much like the military or any class- conscious society (which society is not?), was a habit that I became aware of the need to break as an increased relaxation and a sense of freedom in my senior year began to take hold. The open mindedness of that period perhaps enabled me to strike up a conversation with a lower classman and for me to allow that I could learn from, not only my peers, elders (parents and teachers), but from a younger student. My then new buddy Herman, a junior, was smart, funny, sensitive and endured all the same travails of most adolescents searching and striving to get their adult "sea legs" in that special time of ugly (or in many cases, imagined ugly) duckling status, balancing on a tightrope and praying for acceptance and a loving place in the sun. Hermie, as we called him, was short statured, like myself, and suffered perhaps a tad more than most others with his appearance, in that acne was a particularly implacable foe that his infectious smirk and jocular manner nonetheless, erased from the consciousness of anyone who bothered to get to know him. His impression of a comedic character (especially funny and ironic being portrayed by this Jewish adolescent friend of mine): the Wehrmacht soldier created by Arte Johnson of the then smash television show "Laugh-In", revealed a certain innocence of both him, our youthful world, and also even of our time, despite the mushrooming calamities of international strife like Vietnam's conflict, the other aspects of the ongoing Cold War, assassinations and the then nascent cultural wars, growing substance abuses and general social unrest.
Our mutual interests, the simple but powerful comfort of an understanding pal and the relief from societal pressures that pure amiability provided, cause me to remember Hermie anew and fondly, with the years melting away while the irrepressible waves of his goodness crash up against the ramparts of forgetfulness and death. Can these walls be breached so that the forlorn and lonely might be bathed in such cleansing waters? The battle rages and the less sentimental part of me soberly reminds the dreamer in me that no exceptions for the irretrievability of the past are possible: whether they be for the decency of a Hermie (or even the most heroic deed of a general or the martyrdom of a saint): at least not in the sense that we may relive perfectly the cheery smile of a boy-man not yet in his prime or enjoy his humor and sweetness in a precisely experienced kind of video replay or Lazarushian miracle of rebirth. But why does memory persist and what is it teaching about the ghost of Hermie and the ghost that was me? I do not know what this very special longing for what was, may bring. That is, is there a future for the past? I believe that remembrance, as I have stated before, has some unbreakable connection to holiness, but am not sure what exactly that may be…only that the longing is indescribably and profoundly aching and beyond beauty in its potency to sadden and to stir feelings akin to rapture almost simultaneously.
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