Nostalgia

At the beginning of High Fidelity Rob asks, "What came first, the music or the misery?"
My own cycle seems to have been kicked off by Levon Helm's latest album "Dirt Farmer." The album was a birthday present that I still hadn't listened to until today. I jokingly told Witty at one point that I was saving it up until I was really homesick so an Arkansan could soothe me over.
This afternoon when I popped it in the player I eventually got lost down inside my memories. The music came first but was my heart sending messages to my mind? Did I subconsciously desire it?

Strangely enough the memories and thoughts I was having weren't of going home but of times forever lost. It's a realization we all have at some point in early adulthood and its sentiments have been given voice in various forms throughout history--from Thomas Wolfe to Garden State. Inside each of us lives the desire to return-to find our place of comfort and happiness. And so we spend our years out on our own--separated from what we once were and not yet what we'll become. We are a shapeless lot waiting to find "our" place.

Today I got lost in the web of nostalgia remembering times past, remembering youth, remembering life on South Jackson--eating KFC with my Great-Grandparents, sitting at the bar in the kitchen, the garage code. These nostalgic thoughts are often a pleasant thing to get lost in especially since I long ago realized that I could never return to them. Robbie Robertson summed it up in the Last Waltz when he lamented that "it ain't like it used to be."

My memories where of happy times past and not memories tugging at my sleeve to "come home." I've long felt "homeless." I've had houses. I've lived places but the "home" for which I search, I fear, is still far off in the distance.