NOT ALL NOSTALGIA WAS

Coming Home to Stranger Things

It’s only a place inside

It’s a familiar feeling, driving around for two errands and then doing four. The traffic is thick, the noise constant, and the strip malls offer fast food, nail salons, and new, hip restaurants that roll by the car window in a blur.

The car feels too big for the parking spaces, or maybe I can’t drive in the big city.

I lived here for over 22 years. It feels like opening a giant refrigerator in my parents’ kitchen: I stand and peer inside, hoping to satisfy a craving I realize is restlessness.

I am not part of this house, but I want the streets and buildings and mountains to be mine.

I want the lull of home but I am displaced like a match plucked from a matchbook, ready to strike yet set aside in a moment of distraction.

I’m not a tourist, and I don’t live here, so who the hell am I?

Maybe that’s the feeling that disturbs me so — knowing life goes on whether I am here or not, and my identity is always up for grabs.

Perhaps the sound of rushing traffic reminds me of my insignificance as I crisscross the old open spaces that feel neither fresh nor familiar.

Then again, I’ve never been big on nostalgia.

The Same River Twice

Siddhartha learned you cannot step in the same river twice, and Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.

When we visit, we know somewhere in our wisdom we’ll never find emotional satiation. The past is safe; we lived through it, therefore it must be benign.

But time, for all our measurements, is neither linear nor tame.

The spaces of childhood don’t serve us as adults.

The experience of being in a big city makes me acutely aware that I prefer a small town, but that’s not why I feel so out of place.

The houses where I lived haven’t moved, though they’ve altered with new owners. I am not the same person, so if this town hadn’t changed a speck, it could still never be a fixed mark.

Everywhere I see food: new diners replacing old diners, funky homegrown faves that always draw crowds. Ramen and poke bowls rise up like daisies in a field. The mom-and-pop burrito joints seem immortal. The trendy and the traditional sit across the street from one another, as if they are dueling for primacy.

The rest of the businesses are mostly chains: Skechers, Walgreens, Starbucks, and Goodwill.

There seem to be more and more check-cashing shacks.

I drove by the effervescent “Noblesse Oblige” trailer park. The timeless irony shall never die.

The carniciera where I could always find fresh corn tortillas went under.

I’m not disappointed, but I lack the desire to drive all over creation to shop and eat. In fact, I don’t have much of a desire to shop at all.

The desert is beautiful, but I miss the serenity and coziness of the forest.

I take refuge, most days, in the library, which may not be the same river but it’s a river of sorts. Libraries carry their own nostalgia. That’s where I felt safest in childhood and high school, too.

I suspect my affection for the campus isn’t sentiment but nearby basketball courts, knowing my way around, and free work-from-home space well out of my spouse’s line of sight.

Nostalgia Is a Cheap Emotion

After more than two decades building a life here, you’d think I’d well up with warm feelings when glimpsing the old haunts.

I’m happy to see my friends, but beyond that, I’m stumped as to this feeling of weightless detachment. They are here; I am not coming back.

I guess what I’ve always believed is true — I’m neither nostalgic nor sentimental. Despite this, it seems like a rip-off.

I wonder if three years isn’t long enough and my inner compass is still trying to establish its new territory. I can’t be in two places at once.

I’m staying a stone’s throw from where I worked for ten years and earned two grad degrees. Nope — not one ounce of special feeling. I love riding my bike to my library “office” deep in the stacks, and appreciate the convenience of a Starbucks downstairs, but as for reliving the good times, I’m not.

Maybe there weren’t any good times? Perhaps I can’t get past the trauma of having to do an assignment in 2003 involving microfiche.

The best feature of big city life is being able to walk to many places, but that doesn’t remove the obligation to drive.

A few restaurants, a grocery store, and the campus are within a half-mile. Otherwise, it’s a mishmash of activity and opportunities on every corner, seen from the car window. The streets could be any place — but this is where I happened to make friends.

Seeing friends is pleasant, but my life has moved on.

So we walk. A Wildcats basketball game, the grocery store, a Vietnamese restaurant, and the 24/7 laundromat.

And I drive, to more restaurants, a specialty grocery store, a better class of laundromat.

The city is an illusion of satisfaction in the glitz and anonymity and mobility of American life.

This city keeps expanding and I guess I learned to tolerate it as it grew. Like the lobster in the pot, I didn’t notice I was sweating more each year.

The city’s growth is double-edged. Housing prices rise, traffic gets worse, and homelessness is harder to ignore where it spills into the streets from the dry riverbeds, where camps sprout up under the shade and privacy of giant trees.

A new Tesla dealership sprouted up next to my old neighborhood. The 60-mile bike path around the city was finally completed. The county Supervisor who built the bike path retired after 40 years, shortly after he got hit riding his bike in city traffic.

Aging, Drinking, and the Death of Novelty

I’m not officially old. At 57, I am still middle-aged, but I’ve always been a bit ahead of myself. So I feel 63, or something.

I don’t yet feel 65. I’ll know that feeling because it’ll bring the relief of no longer having to fork over $800 for monthly %$#@ health insurance.

I don’t go out at night to party and I’m not a drinker. I’m not a foodie anymore, either. You can cajole me out of the house after dark, but I have to be persuaded it’ll pay off.

What impressed me in my 20s and 30s, and even a little in my 40s, isn’t much of a thrill anymore. I don’t miss free cocktails or my feelings of self-importance.

Is all this been there-done that because I’ve become tight with money, on account of reading the writing on the wall? The writing says:

“You’re gonna have a fixed income, and everything around you is gonna get more expensive.”

My health insurance has gone from $635 a month to $755 a month in the last year, and I expect it will be over $1,000 by the time I’m Medicare eligible. Food prices seemed to have doubled. You know the drill — post-Covid reality has hit everyone in the shorts.

Here in Tucson, real estate made quantum leaps. We sold our place three years ago for $195K, and now the same places are topping $285K.

We can’t afford to move back even if we wanted to, so I guess I’m grateful I don’t yearn for my misspent semi-youth.

The Endless Desert Skies

The sunsets are still spectacular, my friends are still cool, and the sights of giant cacti and exotic flora are still captivating — but it’s only a place.

It’s a place with too much traffic, too many choices I’ll never choose, and too many grooves I climbed out of.

The desert isn’t what I remember. It’s both more barren and more open.

The open skies and mild weather resemble a vacation, but I still flounder like a fish out of water.

What should be fresh tastes a bit overcooked.

There must be some German word for this: when you return to a place and you feel weightless and fragmented by the unreliability of time and space. You wake up and go to bed untethered by a center, which only existed because you were, once, present in this place.

My sense of who I am has nothing to do with where I lived. How can that be?

Is that self dead, silent, a ghost, or nothing more than a transitory thought? More likely, permanence is an illusion and the self is the last holdout. I can admit a place is fleeting, and other people die — but recognizing my essential incandescence is too much.

The Past Flows By

My youth isn’t coming back and going to the places I enjoyed isn’t paying off.

Maybe I was too old to form the kind of overwhelming memories of childhood. What if I took a trip back to Denver, where I spent my 20s — would nostalgia emerge?

I’m waiting for a specific feeling, but it eludes me.

The landscape welcomes, even beckons, but I made another choice.

Thankfully, the weather is perfect and I’m beginning to get used to this sensation of expecting something I won’t get.

Perhaps nostalgia, like grief, comes and goes on its own schedule.

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Jean Campbell recently started her first Substack newsletter to laser focus on getting her book, City of Lies: A Street Hustler’s Omaha Journey published.