Remembrances

Updated on December 15, 2019

By Jerry Robbins

I am so upset with myself!  After 50 plus years of marriage I have fallen in love…again.

Again.

I have fallen in love with…wait for it…my Remembrances.

The seduction has been so subtle.  I no longer feel at home in the world with its slick devices and many disappointments.

I sit in public and am surrounded by I-phones, fit bits, and electronic music, all of which makes me feel out of sorts. 

Why Is it that the present seems so empty? Why is the now nonsense? Why do its excitements no longer excite? Why do I want to escape to an earlier time? 

Inside, my soul is pre-pan pizza,  pre-shoulder bookbags, pre-Microsoft Word.  I am after the Ed Sullivan Show. But I am outside the news on CNN.

I have been lured away to the Land of Sweet Remembrances.  When I walk In the neighborhood and hear a distant barking dog. I remember that very sound from my  childhood. My mind travels to a happier time.   

When I hear Elvis sing, “Love Me Tender,” I feel a shiver of nostalgia, and melt into the sentimental moment.

Finding a story I wrote 40 years ago I am overcome with flashbacks and prideful satisfaction.
I can still remember the joy of eating an ice cream cone, going to a Saturday matinee, visiting a zoo, listening to “The Shadow” on the radio, looking at travel slides from a projector!
The smell of plain rice cooking on the stove, as in my childhood, has an insistent tug on my appetite.   

I am a left-over of a time gone by, an ancient being who has time-travelled into a bleak future.

So I have become a lover of wistful melancholy. And like a lover I have lost my mind to the passion of something both beautiful and wonderful.

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