Old Tunes and Nostalgia

Daily writing prompt

What makes you feel nostalgic?

The music of my childhood makes me feel nostalgic. I was born in 1963, and my childhood was the 60s and 70s, with high school graduation in 1981.

To be specific, though, it’s not just any music of my childhood. The Beatles, surprisingly, don’t make me feel nostalgic, nor does hard rock or disco. The Top 40 radio format doesn’t make me sentimental, nor does easy listening. 80s and later music doesn’t make me nostalgic. Specifically, it’s singer-songwriter music from the 60s and 70s, as defined by Apple Music, that makes me nostalgic.

Singer-songwriter music comprises folk music and rock well-known for its lyrics. Its instrumentation often involves acoustic instruments, sometimes augmented by instruments like harmonica. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Janis Ian, and Judy Collins are examples of the genre. Not all singer-songwriters give me nostalgic vibes — I was not exposed to John Prine or Leonard Cohen as a child, for example.

If I had to pick one song that makes me nostalgic, it would be Helpless by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The song is about nostalgia, so that makes sense. Neil Young’s voice keens over the fiddle and piano singing about his childhood and how “the chains are locked and tied across the door”, because we can’t go back.

In a way, I literally can’t go back. I have aphantasia, or an inability to visualize in my mind. Visually, my memory is a series of snapshots which I only get to look at for a split-second, and they’re blurry. I remember from a narrative, where I tell myself the story, and by the feelings in my body. Nostalgia is a clutching of my heart, a longing.

Odd Things that Make Me Feel Nostalgic

As a writer, it’s good to examine what my personal symbolism is — first, because it may provide universal symbolism for my stories. Second, because sometimes my personal symbolism is so personal that it just confuses my readers.

I feel nostalgic seeing cars driving by in the early morning. It comes from being up very early in the morning as a child when my mom had to drive my dad to a pickup point so he could get to work. Mom would wake my sister and I up early and we would eat cereal in front of the tv watching the hog futures with Orion Samuelson (this is a 1970’s Chicago area TV reference) as it was the only thing on TV. Then Mom would bundle us up for a 20-mile car ride in a blue Buick station wagon, during which we would often fall asleep. The occasional car driving by in the dark reminds me of a moment when I felt the rest of the world was sleeping around me. I don’t know that this image would speak to anyone else.

Another thing that makes me feel nostalgic is antique auctions. I spent several weekends a year in my childhood at junk auctions as my parents searched for treasures. From rain-damp backyards to big, dusty antique barns, drinking small styrofoam cups of hot chocolate and eating hot dogs for lunch. I remember feeling special as very few children got to sit through auctions with their family. I once bought a box of junk for 50 cents and later sold the cookie jar from it (a primitive with blue cobalt glaze) for $9. Is there anyone else out there who would pull up a feeling of boredom and curiosity from the images of a junk auction?

Then there’s my experience with certain rock songs that use harmonica or sax. Think “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” by John Lennon or “Helpless” by Neil Young. I remember the first time I heard the former on the car radio (AM radio) half asleep in the car on the south side of Ottawa IL as an adolescent. The first time I heard “Helpless” was on an AM radio in my bedroom, and I was a few years younger. Very prosaic memories, yet these songs call up a portentous feeling of the past.

The caution here is that I could build these into my stories and believe I am communicating such things as nostalgia, such feelings as isolation or boredom, such universal moments that the reader will experience, but the truth is that these would speak only to me and maybe a rare reader. This is why I have to be careful as a writer to not depend on instant nostalgia to speak for me.

Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re up to cooking a decently big meal here tonight.

When I was growing up, the big meal was at Christmas Eve, because it was a potluck at Grandma’s house. I got to see all my cousins and open up packages from relatives and Santa. It was a near-perfect late 60’s/early 70’s Christmas. I felt pretty spoiled, and we would leave late in the evening so that the stars were bright in the crystalline cold.

Christmas day was my celebration with my immediate family, and we ate more relaxed food — in fact I remember cheese, crackers, and summer sausage for brunch.

Things changed as I got older, as all of us children in our own particular baby boom got too old for Santa, and Grandma got too old to host Christmas at her house.

This year, in isolation, we’re reverting to my family’s schedule. The big meal is tonight: Rib roast with horseradish and my orange/golden raisin/cranberry relish; rice and broccoli casserole, homemade bread, oil and vinegar slaw, and mini mincemeat pies for dessert.

Tomorrow we have a veggie/relish tray, crackers, cheeses, herring nibble over Christmas presents. I already know everything I’m getting except for what Richard managed to smuggle in my stocking.

We don’t have children, and sometimes I think that’s because we both had traumatic childhoods. But we still have a childlike wonder for the holiday season.

The Night Train

When I was a child, I lived a block from the Rock Island tracks, back at the end of the Golden Age of trains. I would wake up in the middle of the night to hear freight trains passing by on the tracks, or the 11 PM night Rocket, a passenger train, to Chicago. For a child who didn’t sleep well, the trains were a comfort, offering familiarity in the uncertainty of the night.

The Rock Island Line, like many railroads in the US, struggled to survive when the interstate system made it possible to travel at speeds previously unknown. The network of roads — interstates, US highways, and local roads — made the great elegant passenger trains obsolete. However, the Rock Island didn’t go without a fight when the government went to take it over, and they wooed people to their side by offering family excursion trains to Chicago.

My family took one of those excursion trips to Chicago, ninety miles away, in 1970, when I was seven. I remember everything about that trip — the shiny exteriors of the Rock Island passenger cars and the worn interiors, the feeling of watching the industrial jungles and the brick stations pass by, bridges over sleepy water, and the noise, the glorious noise of the engine’s horn close up.

The thing I remember most was eating breakfast in the dining car. With its heavy silverware, its china with the Rock Island logo, and its white tablecloths, I felt like a princess. I don’t know if any dining experience will equal that one in my mind, because the waiter found me lemon and honey for my tea with a graciousness it’s hard to find nowadays. That waiter would be in his eighties if he were still alive, but if I could find him, I would thank him for making my day memorable.

The Rock Island line is no longer, having been subsumed into Amtrak. Unlike the Rocket, the aging elegant Rock Island passenger train, Amtrak presents a train ride with little to be nostalgic about. The chairs in coach are not as comfortable, the meals on the Lake Shore Limited are now pre-made, many of the old railway stations are closed and the big stations made smaller due to security needs. Sometimes the toilets malfunction and things get — odorous.

But trains are still worth traveling on. The variety of people you encounter, from the Amish who see the train as a necessary evil, to itinerant musicians with backpack and guitar, and businessmen with their suit bags hanging in the luggage area. You can still sleep in a sleeper car, which is a miracle of getting two beds and a couch in a tiny space. The chugging of the engine and ringing of the bell as the train edges into the station, and the hiss of luggage wheels as the passengers hustle toward the station, waking up in the middle of the night in a sleeper car as the train travels through the Sandusky preserve on a narrow bridge of land surrounded by lake and marsh.

I dream of the trains coming back someday, when we have given up some of our control issues over travel, when we have given up our love affair with cars. Maybe it’s a futile dream, but it’s mine.