Nostalgia Trips #Thoughts
Nostalgia Trips
I’m sitting here in my office, scanning the room. No, not scanning. It’s more of a looking around with a loss for words and no idea where I want to go with the few that are coming to mind. See, I’ve had a few moments that struck my noggin recently and really brought in some deeper thoughts.
Not deep thoughts in the fate of the world or anything like that. It’s a bit more along the lines of deeper thoughts of where I have been and where I want to be. Yeah, that’s sorta the stuff I am going to be going into today.
I’ve been reminded recently of the game room I have wanted for a house for a long time. I dare say it might be something that I have wanted since before the kids were even born. So, we are talking about a decent number of years (over 20 anyway). It’s never really been something I’ve pursued though. We get caught up in life, right? The world around us has this habit of setting an order to us whether we are prepared for it or not.
For the longest time, our homes have been sans Knicks or knacks or general extraneous stuff. Part of it is the kids growing up. You want to keep the things they might swallow away from them. I keep being reminded of this with the grandkids lately. You have to make sure anything you don’t want slobbered on or played with is well out of sight and out of reach. You live like that long enough and you begin to think you have no place in your life for those little things.
You know what I mean, right? The useless paraphernalia that you pick up as trinkets from vacations or mementoes you collect through so many different places you might take something to remember the moment by. If you aren’t careful the stuff could overwhelm you and take over the world you live in. And what’s worse, eventually you forget why you even wanted whatever it was in the first place. So, you are always better off not buying the junk when you are in whatever tourist trap you saw it in. But you buy it anyway. Or you don’t, and you reach a point like I have where you wonder where all that junk you might have collected ended up in the world. Because it didn’t end up with you or in your home.
Or maybe I am just wandering around in my thoughts and not really going anywhere right now. Let’s step back in the office. My office is finding it’s order, slowly but surely. On the surface, there are places that seem to be in a state of flux still. But that is a reflection of life around me still. Many parts of life around me are in a state of flux that won’t allow certain aspects to come into focus and settle into a steady rhythm. I like to think that this fits pretty much all of us.
But then you ask, what does any of this have to do with where we started today? I’m coming around to that. It’s a part of the things I am seeing as I look around the office. It’s a part of claiming spaces of our own in our home. As the kids have grown and now are moving into their own lives, our world is shifting. And it’s a bit weird. You spend so long in a specific state of mind that when things change it can be a bit crampy as space opens around you.
We have slowly been working knick knacks into our spaces in the house. It’s a progression that I hadn’t consciously thought about till now. There are things floating around that I might never have had out in the open. Small pieces are easy for children to choke on. Aside from the idea that children will eat just about anything if given the chance (remote buttons and even plastic from the Xbox controller. This doesn’t even touch the things my kids ate growing up).
And now as a bit of something to do, my wife and I spend time surfing through discount shops and such. We don’t always have a specific quest item in mind. Most of the time it is a search for something that might spark ideas, or the chance find of the perfect something for an area of the house we didn’t know we needed. It’s weird. We don’t do the antique thing, but I think this might be something similar. I dare say we might be becoming closer to normal people. That actually frightens me.
Anyway, where was I going with all of this? I’ll tell you that now. I ended up in a comic shop today. This is one I have been wanting to check out for a long time. I’ve never been in there before and thought I should see what they have.
My thoughts on a comic shop are not what they used to be. When I was going up, a comic shop was a place where they might have a newsstand that sells the comics that you won’t find at a bookstore or the supermarket. Generally, they would have the comics in the bins to sift through, all organized by publisher and line. Of course, in some you might find a new and used bookstore (to differentiate this between the other, these were independent bookstores long before the bigger chains had taken over the world). These stores were an experience similar to digging through ancient catacombs looking for lost bits of knowledge. Sometimes you could find the Holy Grail (and pay out the nose for it).
Things have changed since then. The current way you might see that kind of thing now is as part of a gaming store. There will be all manner of geeky games as well as geek fan merchandise and then the comics. This isn’t to begrudge this type of store. When I can, I spend time in stores like this because I am a gamer and I dig the geeky stuff.
Where was I? The comic store… Yeah, I was expecting the gaming/ comic store. It wasn’t that at all. I don’t think there was a single game of any kind in this one I was in today. Instead, the center of the room was nothing but tables of comics boxes. And the sides of the room were filled with geeky stuff. You could think of it as a hybrid store without gaming. But it was so much more. I must have wandered the perimeter exploring. The mix of toys and knick knacks was a geeks dream. I’m talking action figures ranging in prices from a couple bucks to hundreds of dollars. Yes, they can be quite expensive if you find the right ones.
This was a trip through misted nostalgia as I am seeing my life over the past 40+ years. We’re talking my history through various toys. Some lining the walls were ones I have had in my possession at one point in time, while others were ones I knew the kids who had them. The owner apologized to me as I stepped around a riding tractor (easily from the ’70s) that his kids had been playing with. One of those old riding toys that you moved through foot power.
And now as I look up at the words that preceded these right here, I realize I have gone through quite a list of thoughts to come to this point. To make a long story short, sometimes as you are searching for you don’t know what, you find reminders of the things that have filled your life. I still want to set up a gaming room in the house. Maybe by the time we become empty nesters I’ll be able to claim another room for my second childhood. I mean, aren’t we all just big kids living in a world with responsibilities we don’t really want to claim most of the time…
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