Nostalgia

I have always had a strong nostalgic streak, and of course I am now very much affected by it. I have a tendency to idealize the past and wish that it could be preserved. When I was a little boy -- but no longer a baby -- and I had four little brothers -- I once asked my mother to hold me in my lap and rock me. I wanted to recapture my babyhood. Angela would say that I don't like change (especially when she wanted to change something, rearrange the furniture, say), and there is truth to that -- when I do accept change I like it to be gradual and slow. But of course my life right now is imposing changes on me at a pace I am not accustomed to, with the loss of Angela and two girls off to college. I hope I can adapt to them. I have done things to solidify my memories in the face of these changes, like putting up some family pictures and writing things like this blog.

All of this was brought home to me when I took Teresa up to Loyola last week. The night before I had been thinking about how we used to read to the girls at bedtime when we were little, and I thought of reading The Little House in the Big Woods, which has a moment in it that expresses perfectly the desire to hold onto the past. Of course the whole book is an expression of that desire, being the record of the memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder when she was a little girl, making those memories permanent. Angela has distinct memories of her very early years -- many more than I do of mine -- and it would have been nice to have recorded them in her own words. I can record them as I remember her telling them, but that is not the same thing.

The moment I thought about in The Little House in the Big Woods comes at the end, but can only be fully appreciated if you keep in mind the beginning. I remember being struck by this when I read the book to my little girls, 15 years ago or so (Angela had the set from her childhood).

The book opens like this:

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Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
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The book chronicles a year in the life of this little girl. At the end, Laura is lying in bed, listening to her father play his fiddle and sing.

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Pa's strong, sweet voice was softly singing:

"Shall auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And the days of auld lang syne?
And the days of auld lang syne, my friend,
And the days of auld lang syne,
Shall auld acquaintance be forgot,
And the days of auld lang syne?"

When the fiddle has stopped singing, Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
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I confess it gives me chills and brings a lump to my throat just to type this out. The desire to hold on to what we remember, in an eternal now, is very strong in me. And so I want to remember when my girls fell asleep with their Daddy playing his guitar and their Mommy singing for them. And yet every now passes us by and is replaced by another, and so we remember, and hope for a fulfillment in which all the nows of our passing time are embraced in one eternal now of the new creation, which Angela so wanted to understand before she died, and which I pray she can now (what "now" is this?) experience. I understand so little of this myself.

Driving up to Loyola last Thursday to move Teresa in, I told her and Rosie about this passage in The Little House in the Big Woods and found myself moved to tears. Whether tears purely of sadness I cannot say. I really was happy to see Teresa excited to move into her dorm room. Yet I have found it hard to adjust to the two older girls being gone as well as Angela. The apartment seems strangely empty at times. On Sunday, Gloria, Rosie and I went back up to Loyola for the opening of the year Mass, and Teresa was singing in the choir, and I was proud of her and happy for her -- she looked beautiful and confident and happy -- yet again there were tears -- because Angela was not there, and would have so loved to see this -- and maybe too, just because my daughter was moving out of our apartment into a world of her own.

Driving back from Loyola, talking about this further with Rosie, I realized that she has no real memory of my reading from the Little House books to her and her sisters -- she was just too young. And so I have started reading The Little House in the Big Woods to her, again. I hope this time will give me an opportunity to get closer to my youngest daughter, who has in some ways gotten the least of her parents' attention of the three -- especially since she was so young when our lives became suddenly more complex, burdened by the cancer. There is some nostalgia in this too, but also a real opportunity which I do not want to pass up.