But I’m Too Young To Be Old!

Shawn T. Meade II
Aug 24, 2017 · 7 min read

I took a little extra time getting myself together this morning because I opened up Apple Music and started clicking around and finding old music that brought on a flood of memories. I laughed to myself as I contemplated writing about this because I only two days ago talked about not being able to commit shit to memory on the reg, but these are long-term memories. Ones that made a significant enough impact on me to stay. The minutiae of what daily household chores I have to do is about as significant as my generation’s purchasing power and about as impacting as a wet blanket… Needless to say, I’m not going to look back in twenty years and say, “Man, doing that laundry? Mm, what a rush!”.

Whenever I get on these stints of going back through my music library and rifling through classic 70s and 80s rock, or what passed for “metal” music in those days (total screamo death metal makes me want to puke!), I get extremely nostalgic about my childhood or the memories the particular songs I’m listening to bring up. Floating along on each old melody that entertained my parents’ generation and sounds “cute” to mine, I started thinking about nostalgia in the broader sense. Collective nostalgia. Because that can be a swirling shit show of flying thoughts, I did something I’ve yet to do on this writing journey, I outlined what I wanted to say to the Internet today. Hopefully, you’ll take a nice pearl of wisdom *mimes cupping hands together in anticipation* away from this and think on your own nostalgia!

The first thing I wrote down in outlining was “Nostalgia -> What is it? Why do we enjoy it?”. Trying to avoid making this sound like an essay or commentary on some social struggle like every other would-be scholar posting on a free online platform, I decided to keep this light and fun. But, it did get me thinking a little bit about the seriousness behind those questions. I’ve spent a lot of time with close friends and people my own age (wise, old 27) talking about life in the 90s and early 2000s. Nickelodeon cartoons, AOL and the Internet explosion, rapid tech changes, Y2K, George Bush, 9/11, and the over-sugared snacks we used to get. There’s always an excited murmur about these things and someone inevitably says, “That was the best!”, and I’ve heard people more my senior doing the same thing. Nostalgia isn’t the exclusive realm of young adults just realizing that they lost their childhood and were handed responsibility and anxiety. Where I hear a little different tone in my contemporaries (millennials) and those now in their forties and early fifties (Gen X) is in how much longing there is. We can all say, “life was simpler then”, but for millennials, we’re inheriting a few more screwy events than our parents. (Not blaming anyone, just observing). Y’all in the 80s had one enemy to fear (Russia), today, any angry dude with a Twitter can be our undoing! So I feel like it’s only natural for us to want to retreat, full speed, back to 1998 and feed our Tamagachi under our desk before the teacher catches us, or trade over the Link Cable for that Vulpix you always wanted because Pokemon Red didn’t have them…

When you Google “Millennials Vs Gen X”, this is the first thing that comes up. Appropriate, I think.

Maybe millennials are the Lost Generation of the twenty-first century. We are 100 years exactly removed from the previous one, and there’s so much war and strife, and millennials want to work to live (and drink and eat and travel); so maybe we’ll all pick up stakes and congregate in trendy liberal cities full of music, art, and creation and drink craft cocktails and…oh, wait. See where I’m going here? Naturally, I spend a lot of time thinking fondly on times past, like when I’m listening to old music. Yesterday for example, I put on Elton John’s Greatest Hits, and listened to songs I instinctively knew every word to because that was the kind of music my father would play when I was with him. I then eventually began swiping his CDs (before iPods, kids) whenever I could to listen on my own. I tweeted while listening as I was changing the laundry and “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” came on that this song always reminds me of playing Kingdom Hearts and eating Devil Dogs. Oddly enough, a particularly warm memory I have. (Wtf?!). At the same time, music by Meatloaf, Queen, Aerosmith, Journey, Styx, all remind me of helping my dad around the house with odd jobs, or car rides around town with him like when I tried to secretly pick my nose during “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth” and started viciously bleeding everywhere.

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For me, food, like music, immediately transports me back to my childhood. I grew up in a (half) Italian household near all my aging Italian relatives who always made food the reason why we got together. Oh Gina got married, that’s great, here’s some ziti! Oh no, Carmine died? I’ll pull some meatballs out. There was always food…and Italians aren’t the only culture group who make food the raison d’etre, but you get the picture. So when, this past Christmas, I got a particular itch for Pasta e Fagioli from my childhood, you can understand why. Because I’m trying to be a good writer, trying to scribble out “pasta fazoul” in it’s guttural, fake Italian glory chips at my credibility, but for those of my relatives who don’t actually know the true name of the dish, there you go. Living in Austin, TX, I can find a million kinds of hot peppers and enough tortillas to sink an oil tanker, but trying to find Tubetini pasta, Cannellini beans, and panchetta is near impossible. After settling on what Texans call “baby elbows” (they’re shells…), white kidney beans, and raw salt pork, I went home and gave old “fazoul” a try. The house smelled like Grandma’s and when I served dinner to Aasim and I, I was on a time machine back to Seaside Park, NJ to that old two-story on Beach Drive. I told Aasim that this was what my childhood tasted like, at least in part. The same thing happens whenever I eat freshly steamed lobster. Only this time, I’m on a trip back to summer vacations up to my father’s family in Maine with a plastic bib around my neck, the smell of salt water and New England pine in the air. I’m sitting in a rundown ramshackle of a side road restaurant with a giant crustacean in front of me. I learned to shell lobster before I had a bike without training wheels! (Not sure if that’s 100% true, but it sounded great…).

My try at Pasta e Fagioli Christmas 2016, Grandma would wonder wtf it was, but it tasted as it should!!

Movies, too, throw me into a tailspin of remembering. Gone With The Wind for some reason reminds of Thanksgiving at my Grandma’s house. The Godfather and Grease remind me of summer afternoons on the Jersey shore (before it got guido-fied and shitty), rinsing sand off with the garden hose. More recently, watching 24 hours of A Christmas Story on TBS reminds me of teenage Christmases with my mother. (We just cancelled our cable so I hope my husband knows he’s sitting to watch that with me at least twice this Christmas!). At the same time, I get into laughing fits over obscure memories like when my little brother, the girl from across the street, and I built a snow fort in our front yard, hurled snowballs at a passing UPS truck and the driver stopped, got out, and practically molested us with ice and snow in retaliation! Or the time when my brother and I were messing around in the hotel fitness center on one of our family vacations and he turned the speed up on the treadmill until he tripped over himself and went flying off of it and into the back wall. (I’m literally spitting with laughter right now). Does all of this nostalgia stay with me because it made a great impression, or did it pack in it a concise lesson? I mean, more than just don’t fuck around on a treadmill…

Or, is it more like I’m missing another time. Sometime when I was carefree (hardly with my worrying ass). Maybe I’m trying to change something in my present and want it to feel like the past I remember, even though my past is less than rose-colored. I think that nostalgia is central to deepening connections with people who share those memories, but also teaching people younger than you how fun life can be. When I’m looking behind me with a sense of longing, I feel like I’m begging for the past to happen again; when I have a warm, happy buzz about it, I’m missing it fondly but not necessarily pining for it. Ugh, is that what getting older is like? More recently, my college years are starting to feel less relevant to my present and more formative in relation to my current adulthood. Soon, I’m sure 2008–2012 will feel as long ago as 1995 or 2001. I had so many people tell me as I turned 18 and then 21 and 25, to “remember these years” they go by so fast…bro, they really do. What I wish they said was, “remember these years, but accept that they’ll come to an end; stay excited for the future”. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so nostalgic all the time. To my now teenage cousins, listen to the dude in his late 20s who really wishes he accepted the eventuality of things ending. Enjoy them, for sure, but know, you’ll have to march on into your twenties (and then your thirties…please, God, no!) with whatever lessons you were able to pick. Either way, though, you’ll always have Elton John, or Pokemon, to look back to and smile for a few minutes while the laundry’s drying.

Claps, just like praise, are music to this twenty-something Leo, so if you made it this far through today’s piece, give yourself (and me) a round of applause :) ❤

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