So Much Older Then
I don’t recall the exact age when my children had their first pangs of nostalgia—when they started saying things like, “Remember that time when…?” But it did come sooner than I’d thought, I would guess as early as 4 or 5 years old, and it’s not something I was really prepared for. (It was a kind of faint but distinct mirror image of another unexpected but mostly welcome result of having kids: revisiting forgotten feelings, even sense memories, from my own childhood.) It got me thinking about my own old-soul tendencies when I was younger: the way I often seemed to relate to older people more than my own age cohort; my love for old movies and music; my attempts to imitate my grandfather’s sartorial style (i.e., cardigans, guayaberas, thrift-store slacks). It was not so much a precociously mature “I can’t wait to grow up” feeling as it was a quasi-morbid fascination with aging, with feelings of regret and roads not taken—an awakening not only to the fact that time is passing but that this...
