A Meaningful Nostalgia

I had a powerful day yesterday.  I visited the Galveston Naval Museum in Galveston, TX.  Frankly, as such places go it is unimpressive, but for me it was as full of meaning as when I stood on the Missouri or the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Nostalgia – “a sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists : a wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real or romanticized past period or some irrecoverable past condition or setting.”  What I experienced was nostalgic, but rather than “wistful” or “sentimental” it was visceral.

I had been to that place before, but it was very, very long ago.  I am 69 years old and the last time I was there I was 4 years old.  That is a long time between visits and the age gap makes memory retention near impossible.  As we approached, I knew I had been there before, but only recalled it because my parents had told me about the visit as I continued to grow.  But when I arrived that knowledge turned into memory and flesh.  Unusually in my experience, the two vessels there are not afloat, they are buried in sufficient dirt to make sure they remain steadfastly upright.  I presume they were floated into the area which was then filled with dirt, but who knows?  What I do know is that as soon as I saw that submarine buried that way, I desperately wanted to reach up and take my father’s hand and ask him how they did that.

My father is, of course, long dead.  That I would have to reach upward to take his hand was a phenomenon that passed many decades before his death.  But the impulse was as real as if it were once again the early 1960’s.  It was a sort of muscle memory.  My brain still qualifies as fully functional, medically, but the reaction times are not what they used to be and the malaprops seems far more frequent than when I was a younger man.  But all of me, physical and mental, called up this 65 year old memory as if it were yesterday.

I spent the rest of the day pondering the experience  – and I wondered.  Younger generations experience life these days primarily through a screen and a keypad of some sort.  Will they have such muscle memory?  Too often these days I have been with young people that when confronted with a new experience, “google it” and take a picture rather than actually experience it.  What will happen to them when they return to some mostly forgotten place 65 years later?  Will they respond by reaching for a device long since replaced by biomechanical implants of some sort?  Or will the memory simply stay submerged?

What are we robbing kids of these days?  Today I as able, in a fashion, to touch my long dead father.  For a few brief moments he was alive again and I was with him.  I would wish such an experience on anyone, but I fear we are eliminating the possibility.

I think we have learned that screens make for lousy education.  Now we need to learn the that, when overused, they make for a lousy life.