Nostalgia's Greatest Hits

When we were kids, my sister had an inexplicably awesome stereo in her room, which she cobbled together from my Dad’s old bachelor hi-fi set. It consisted of felt covered Zenith speakers, a Marantz tape player, a Fisher turntable, and a Pioneer receiver. And while I was blowing through my allowance weekly on slurpees and action figures, she was using hers to hoard 45’s and K-Tel compilations of one-hit-wonders, storing them up in an old milk-crate. I would come across different mysterious treasures of hers when she was out with friends and I was sitting home bored of comics and Star Wars and looking to give her Barbies haircuts for kicks. I wasn’t trying to be cruel; I figured that if Growing Up Skipper could grow a pair of boobies, her hair would grow back, too, right? Not so much, actually.

It was on one of those little scavenger hunts that I came across the milk-crate, and in it the album “Escape” by Journey. Most of her other musical collections were K-Tel greatest hits albums, with the likes of Blondie, Soft Cell, Michael Jackson, The Clash, Hall & Oats, Diana Ross, The Stray Cats, and The Pointer Sisters. Or else individual singles on 45 by Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Glass Tiger, and Gloria Estefan. But the first album I ever sat down and listened to, start-to-finish, was Journey’s “Escape,” because that was the only stand-alone album she had in the crate.

I would sit and listen to it on the Magnavox headphones she’d scavenged from the heap of random boxes in the garage, only getting up when it was time to perform the sacrament of turning the record over to side two. That was kind of an intermission when I’d go get another oatmeal cream pie and Hawaiian Punch, flip the album over, and settle in for another session. “Escape” contains the single most popular song of the 20th century, “Don’t Stop Believing,” but the entire album is great. Certain songs from it have played at key moments in my life, ever since. “Still They Ride” was the first song I ever slow-danced with a girl to; “Don’t Stop Believing” kept me from getting into a fight I was sure to lose with Andy Viglucci in sixth grade; and “Open Arms” was the track that was playing when I discovered that a-million-to-one odds mean nothing when fate decides to intervene.

But before any of those things could happen, when it was just music coming through scavenged headphones, the music still conjured something. I couldn’t name even one of the notes, the chord progressions followed theory I knew nothing about, and the import of the words were beyond my ten year-old’s experience. But still there was something... An abstraction that I had no name for, but whose edges were implied like an emotional algebra I was almost ready to comprehend. If I could just solve for X, I'd unlock some secret waiting for me. Perhaps then I'd understand why we invent words like “wistful” or “bittersweet.”

I mean, at 10, there was really no reason that lyrics like “midnight train to anywhere” should have made me feel the way they did. I'd never had my heart broken, unless the unattainable Ms. Brimmie—my first grade teacher—was taken into account. My very first kiss with Ylani Ballares was still almost a year away, and even that was a millisecond-long peck. It was like being nostalgic for places I’d never been and things that had never happened. Like I was just yearning to have my heart broken, so all the songs could finally be true.

So when Jesse rode through the night under the Main Street lights, the traffic lights keeping time and leading the wild and restless through the night, I’d yet to experience the exquisite romance of a highway scrolled out like a ribbon of black, no one ahead, no one behind. Or why a vast horizon ahead, or the vanishing point in the rearview should hold such powerful sway over me. I only knew that they did. And then I grew up, slowly populating all those archetypes with my own experiences, steadily imputing my own meaning to all those lyrics. Until, eventually, every song was somehow about me; the tragic, misunderstood hero of my own story.

But where did the initial instinct to do that come from? How could a ten year-old kid project from a world of tetherball and four-square into a melancholy world of solitude, nameless longing, and broken hearts? And, really, why would he want to? It seemed an oddly superfluous mechanism to be designed into a kid, not unlike a dog’s ability to dream. I wondered about it for a long time, then came across an unlikely answer in an unlikely place.

In the book “Count Zero,” by William Gibson, an art student is tasked by an enigmatic billionaire to find the creator of a series of anonymous curios, released by an unknown artist simply referred to as the Poet. The curios were single-serving tableaux of random objects—a tarnished silver comb, snippets of strung pearls, the wing of a bird, a doggerel of disintegrating lace—arranged in an antique box in such proportion as to evoke powerful reactions of yearning and loss in its audience. People were becoming obsessed with them, yet no one knew who the creator might be.

Eventually the student discovers that the Poet is a machine, a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence. This intelligence spent its days directing a robotic servo-arm to sift through the heaped remains of an affluent family’s lost heirlooms, constructing the curios from the crumbling bits of treasure left from a centuries-long dynasty that had finally imploded under the crushing weight of its own decadence. A lone machine mind, telling stories to itself by sifting through the moldering detritus of forgotten luxe. After discussing its haunting work with the Poet, and learning why it was making them, the student finally asks, “Are you sad?” The Poet replies that it is not. Yet when she presses it about the sadness reflected in its creations the machine replies, “They are merely songs of time and distance. The sadness is in you.”

And just like that, I understood.

The wail of the train passing at midnight, the vanishment of the rearview and every far horizon…all of it. The dog-eared copies of haunting novels, a box of love letters and fading pictures, a backward glance at the airport gate, long desert highways, a scroll of streetlights keeping time, that first bashful ask of a slow dance with a pretty girl. And how the four right chords can make you cry. I finally understood it all.

The list is endless, because the ache of heartbreaks past and the yearning for an unknowable future is equally endless. When tomorrow's horizons become yesterday's regrets and cherished memories; when all of the mundane trials and small victories take on the sepia tint of nostalgia; when the ordinary moments become the good old days, it's then that we invent words like "bittersweet.” Because in so doing, we can be happy and sad at once, in a way that's better than either one alone. That need isn’t in the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall or the major lift. It’s in us. In how we’re all connected, our lives woven together of chaos, heartbreak, love, and distance.

If, as Homer said, men are haunted by the vastness of eternity, perhaps it would explain why yesterday becomes so sweet and so much hope for happiness is placed in tomorrow's promise. The tension created by that wistful harmony is the only way we know to come to terms with the mystery of X, and balance the vastness of eternity against the vanishing mist of our days here. In our defense against an unsearchable eternity, we give rise to every song ever sung, and reason to every story ever told. 

A ten-year-old boy may not have been able to articulate that thought, but he damn sure knew it to be true. Knew it in his bones.