Category Archives: Nostalgia

Nostalgia

My career as a promtrotter

My niece went to her high school prom this weekend. She goes every year. Apparently the whole school does. It all seems very democratic, but don’t you kind of miss that feral atmosphere where only the really popular were sure they would be going to the prom? For the rest of us, it was just survival of the fittest all the way.

I have to smile when I look at photos from my own prom-going history. My brother is going to kill me for this, but here we are with our respective dates, just before the Roy C. Ketcham High School senior prom in June 1977. I was only a junior, but my boyfriend was a senior. Check it out. I’m in peach and my date is in a lovely beige tux with a peach-ruffled shirt. We definitely worked together on the color scheme.

I don’t remember the name of my brother’s date, but it looks like we might have coordinated colors ahead of time, too. We didn’t. We both have typically 70s hairstyles. I’ve got the super-straight Marcia Brady look, while what’s-her-name is obviously going for the Farrah Fawcett feathered ‘do. The dress I’m wearing is actually the same dress I made for my junior prom, but I cleverly removed the long sleeves. I wonder if anyone noticed. This photo does not do justice to the print on my brother’s tux, by the way. And don’t even get me started on those bow ties!

Family, Nostalgia, Philosophy, Sadness, Travels

Homesick

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I’ve been so uninspired lately that I have to think it is some kind of depression. It’s a combination of things: the recurring snowstorms, the sinking economy that is making things bad for business, the ongoing estrangement from my stepdaughters, which has become a hopeless status quo.

If I think about just these three things, I want to crawl under a handmade quilt and go to sleep. And the third one is so painful, I wonder that I don’t walk around every day with red-rimmed eyes. Somehow we keep going — each day the sun comes up, one of us makes coffee, and there is music.

We are busy. Dave has some kind of extracurricular activity almost every day. I hold myself back more. I always needed a lot of quiet time and feel hungry for it now.

During my first couple of years in Switzerland, I would occasionally go a whole weekend without exchanging more than a word or two with anyone. I read a lot, visited museums, walked for miles and spent time sitting in cafes. I don’t remember feeling lonely or homesick. Reading “The Stories of John Cheever” during that time, this quote seemed very true to me –

“Homesickness is nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.”

So it’s funny now to realize by this definition, I am a little homesick. I’m longing for something in myself that I just can’t find right now.

Family, Nostalgia, Summer, Switzerland

The First of August

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Today is the Swiss National Holiday. I grew up celebrating this holiday at a family picnic hosted by the Swiss Home in Mount Kisco, NY.

The Swiss Home was a retirement home for elderly Swiss Nationals. As kids, my brothers, sister and I couldn’t have cared less about the inhabitants of the home. The attraction for us was to spend the day running amok with the offspring of other Swiss immigrants.

There was bratwurst to eat, a roulette game that was so exotic to us, a large bell on the hillside just daring us to ring it and a band playing the Swiss Landler music that our parents loved to dance to. Best of all, at dusk we walked in a “lampion” parade from the bottom of the property to the site at the top of the hill where a bonfire was lit. It was magical.

Tonight it is too hot for a bonfire, but I miss it all the same.