Rememberwhen

The chairs where I live are booby-trapped. Anyone who has lived in Clydesdale Rise will not remember the wooden contraptions students are supposed to recline in with any fondness. Plus, the seat is constructed of flimsy strings which have a quicksand-like effect, causing your posterior to collapse.

This is why I was happy to see that my chair was free at Starbucks this morning. My chair is a little green beauty, a comfy armchair with no wooden parts in sight. So I grabbed my grande vanilla latte and settled in with Philip Roth. But I couldn’t quite concentrate on Mr. Roth’s sunny expositions. The soundtrack Starbucks had chosen to play was seasonal: “Boys of Summer” and “The Summer of ‘69″ were two prominent joints. Nathan Zuckerman gradually faded into temporary oblivion, and I found myself feeling oddly nostalgic for the summer of 1969, which was ten years before my birth.

You know how nostalgia feels: you perceive the faint scent of some delectable confection that remains perpetually out of reach. There is a light sadness to the sensation, mixed with giddy recognition. Marcel Proust got me thinking about it a while ago, and, I must confess, I only read about a hundred pages of “Swann’s Way”, but that did the trick. The guy had me pining like crazy for 19th-century Combray as if I had experienced something there way back when. And this is what confuses me. I can understand nostalgia when it’s related to something that actually happened to me; I remember getting excited about Transformers when I first heard about it last summer because I used to watch the old cartoon as a kid. But 1969?

And then I realized that this happens in sports too. Images of Zico, Socrates, Cerezo and Falcao gliding through 1982, before crashing spectacularly, take me back to that sweltering Spain. The vision of Spud Webb, triumphant in improbable flight, reminds me of something I only saw much later. The Drive. I was crushed when that beautiful Total-football Dutch squad succumbed to Gerd Muller’s ruthless Germany, and recalling that sad day in 1974 makes me smile.

Perhaps that’s why I feel old at 28. I actually remember when Tim Thomas was a promising young buck. It wasn’t too long ago that Slam magazine mocked Eddie Jones for pretending to reminisce at some All-Star game some years ago, because Eddie himself was young then. And Penny was young once. And someday I won’t be. No, not someday…some day. And that day is fast approaching.