Nostalgia

In Temporary Kings, the penultimate novel in Anthony Powell’s great duodecology Dance to the Music of Time, the fictional composer Hugh Moreland imagines his own demise: “Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia? Will that be my end? I should not be surprised. I can see the headline: MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA.”

For me August has been a month of nostalgia, but I can assure everyone it has not been lethal. In fact it has been a source of joy. On the 14th, 46 members of the Brunswick, Maine, High School Class of 1962, gathered at Estes Lobster House in Harpswell. This was, of course, a perfect event to create nostalgia: all those teenagers hiding like ghosts in the three-quarter century bodies we now inhabit.  Brian, Claire, Tom, Linda (who shares my exact birthday!), Carl, Denise (who organizes monthly class lunches, bless her soul, of which this was a Big One), and many others. My wife Jane and I were among the throng.

But for me the real source of nostalgia for this event was its location.  In 1973 I spent the summer as a short-order cook at Estes Lobster House, a restaurant owned by another BHS classmate, Larry Crooker. Right on the water, it overlooks Harpswell Sound across to Orrs and Bailey Islands.  There Larry and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly as we worked the fryolators, coffee-makers, and steamers. I learned a bunch about hot grease, burgers, steamed clams, and lobsters.

The lobsters were kept in a large tank where they poked mindlessly into each other. When one night one poor fellow shed his shell (which lobsters do every year in order to grow), all his mates clustered around him in his very new, very soft shell and cannibalized him right down to the tip of his carapace.

The steamers were large metal washtubs suspended over gas jets. Lobsters do not have much in the way of brains; there are three nerve clusters above and behind their eyes. To cook the animals we brought a few inches of water to a rolling boil and laid them in on their backs, close to those nerve clusters. When the boiling water hit them, they died instantly, presumably sparing them any pain should their legs go in first and cook while they’re still alive. In eighteen minutes they turned fiery red; we scooped them out and laid each into a paper tray.

At the luncheon classmate Bill Brown read the names of the five of us who had died since our last gathering. I was sad to hear the names of a couple real pals, Ted Peacock and Stevie Hazelton. Our food orders were brought out; Jane received her flame-red lobster, which she ate efficiently and completely. I chatted with lots of old friends and remembered sweating behind the grill. Larry looked at my left ring finger, the nail of which he recalled I had crushed while taking barrels of lobster shells to the dump. It still looks a little funky. Ah, nostalgia. It’s not always glamorous.

Earlier in the month I received out of the pure blue a couple of emails that sent the nostalgiometer deep into the red. First Martyn Brown wrote to me from England. In 1990 – so almost thirty years ago – we spent two months in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Martyn and Jane Brown lived across the street, a couple about our own ages with two children, a daughter Harriet and a son Peter. Pete was five, as was our older son Gardner. Sam, Gardy’s brother was 18 months.

Our time in England was difficult.  I’ve written about it in The Withering Child, the story of Gardy’s anorexia, a result of being in a strange land away from friends. I won’t repeat it here. However, the Browns proved to be good friends when we were dealing with hard times, and I feel that I owe Martyn a great debt.

He was inspired to write, he said, because blackberries are now ripening, and we used to pick them on the railway embankment near our houses – thus he thought of me. He is now living in south Devon.

His email tells me that Harriet has provided him with a granddaughter, a new apple for his eyes. Pete lives near her in Bristol, where he coaches tennis. I thought, Harriet a mother! Pete a tennis coach! And suddenly I’m back in Woodstock, up on the embankment, filling a pan with sweet, juicy blackberries, and back at the house Gardy is growing thin, and my heart constricts. Nostalgia is sometimes painful.

The other email – also out of the blue – came from an old girlfriend. I knew Nan Butterfield back when in 1970 I had left my teaching job in Indiana and was back in Maine, in a cabin in Harpswell, Maine, working on a cookbook. I’d had the idea in graduate school when I invited a fellow student named Jill Miller to come out to my country apartment to see lovely Brown County, Indiana. The afternoon was growing late and I asked her if she wanted to stay for dinner.

“What are you having?” she asked.

I was tentative, for I didn’t have much to offer. “Um. Hotdogs.”

“Yuck!”

“Sit down, kiddo,” I said, stung, “and I’ll give you a hotdog like you’ve never seen before.”  Fortunately, she laughed, and even more fortunately I invented Bowser Buns on the spot: patties of grated boiled potatoes, diced onions, and grated hotdogs, broiled with cheese over the top. Genius, we agreed.

So two years later in Harpswell in my cabin I worked out recipes, tried many of them out on Nan, and after the summer had 75 of them in a manuscript called A Dog’s Life in a Man’s World. (Eventually, Doubleday published this opus under the less-sexist title The Great Little Hot Dog Cookbook.) The dedication was obvious to me: “To Jill, who started this book, and to Nan, who finished it.” It became my first published book. The photo below, was taken by Nan, who still has the manuscript, which I gave her all those years ago.  Looking carefully, one can make out that dedication, which over time has bled through the corrasable bond typing paper of the title page, paper so necessary for those pre-computer days.

I can’t describe fairly the delight that these encounters with the past have brought me this summer, but it was pretty darn exquisite.  In 1980 Dan Fogelberg sang a wonderful song of nostalgia, “Same Old Lang Syne,” about meeting an old girlfriend on Christmas Eve, talking with her, and finally saying goodbye: “Just for a moment I was back in school, and felt that old familiar pain, and as I turned to make my way back home, the snow turned into rain.”  It’s all there: the old girlfriend, the school, the pain – and the joy. We can’t ever forget about nostalgia’s joy.