Nostalgia

We were recently with friends of my husbands at a restaurant in New York when the woman of the other couple said to me in amazement: "You're really quite nostalgic.  I wouldn't have thought you went in for nostalgia, thought you would always be looking to the future."  How strange, I thought.  First of all, when you are in your mid-eighties the future does not seem like so large and inviting a subject to explore. Ever since I have been examining my attitudes.  Yes, I am very much a person who lives with nostalgia.  I guess growing up in a house  with a mother who looked back with nostalgia to the days of her Edwardian girlhood, to the courtship of her husband who died in the First World War, of the fun and games she had with her second husband, my father, who died when he was just fifty in a car crash, a woman who looked back to the world of servants and money and genial ease.  Well, none of that inspired me to look to the future.  Here I am at eighty five, and as I sit in my chair reading all the literary periodicals, I am always fascinated with news about Gerald and Sarah Murphy on Cap d'Antibe, about Marcel Proust and the boulevards of Paris where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas entertained the artists of the day, about everything that made the twenties and thirties so fascinating and repellent.  I look back with horror and fascination at the events unfolding throughout Europe in the thirties, that peculiar ardor, that lassitude.  And then I can not stop thinking back to peculiar enthusiasm and hope that the Second World War inspired, of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again," of all the GI's in my classes at university, rough, hardy, enthusiastic, optimistic, sprung loose by the GI Bill, embarked on an entirely new road.  Oh, the wonderful simple minded optimism of those years!  I think back to the parties, the dance hops, when I was a teenager, and then I remember the years of my late teens in Manhattan, whoring around, remember so well the marvelous sensation of getting sloshed, not fall down drunk, but not sober either, the movies, the art exhibitions, the strange people I ran into, the refugees, the weird veterans, it was all so much fun, and whether that was true or not, that's the memory of it.  Yes, I want to go back to Bette Davis asking "Why do we need the moon when we have the stars?"  I want things to be corny again, and I want the exquisite thrill of discovery when first I read ancient epic in the original Greek.  I'm tired of canned laughter and recorded applause. Jon Stewart bores me to tears; can't stand that face he puts on.  How awful it is that I must confess I am indeed nostalgic.  I don't seem to notice the here and now of the twenty first century.  My gaze is elsewhere.