It's a Reliving

It was such a lovely, Spring-like day, Sunday, that it put me into an odd mood. It started with meeting for coffee with an old friend, and ended up as a journey into the past.

As we were talking, I mentioned that I was looking for a book that (thanks to the Internet) I knew was only available in a store that was about an hour’s drive from where we were sitting. Of course, I casually admitted, actually going and picking it up would represent a huge waste of time, gas, and money. But still.

Neither one of us really felt like going back to our respective homes, or finishing up the mundane chores that awaited us there. Nor did we particularly want to acknowledge the resumption of humdrum responsibility that tomorrow would bring, and the baleful shadow that sort of thing inevitably casts on the last day of any period spent away from work. Fuck tomorrow. It was that kind of day. So we got in the car and started to drive.

That was nostalgia trip number one. It has been so long since I spent that much effort, or traveled that far, in an attempt to satisfy a nagging acquisitive urge. I couldn’t tell you the last time that sort of thing happened. I could tell you about the first time, though, when I used to ride my bike across town to buy issues of Dragon magazine. But–some other time, perhaps.

As it happens, this particular book store was in an area I haven’t visited since I lived practically next-door to it. And I didn’t only live there; I worked a mere stone’s throw away, too. It was the old stomping grounds of my early twenties, when I could think of the future as something that wasn’t horrifying.

Nostalgia trip number two: The old stomping grounds.

The old home turf changes, like everything else. Outside, many of the businesses I knew had changed, of course–but so had I. The old neighborhood looks different when you’re no longer invested in it. It felt crowded and tatty. Jumped-up and sad.

I’m impossible to be around, when I start talking about things like that. But, inside my own head it was an interesting to find myself so off-kilter, even if such wobbling was brought about by just another apartment building, just another commercial center, just another office park. Especially moving was the knowledge that the younger version of me, whose ghost I was seeing out of the corner of my eye in all these places, would happily stab this sort of sentimentality in the neck. All that’s left of him, however, is the fact that I’m not at all proud about these feelings.

Nostalgia trip number three: The book.

Of course, I didn’t go back to get all maudlin and reflective. I was after a book–a normal, average, every day sort of book that I could have bought online for less money than I was willing to spend on it. Now, as it happened, it was the latest book in an ongoing series that I had fallen in love with back in junior high school. Unlike a lot of the things I was into back then, I’ve managed to keep my interest in this one.

It’s almost too much: To go back to an old neighborhood, in a long abandoned method of pursuit, to buy a book that is a sequel to a beloved artifact of my childhood–I tell you, if it hadn’t been such a nice day, and if the company hadn’t been so amenable, it never would have happened.

Some days are just like that.

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