17.03.2023

Of all things, it's an image of the roughly woven, off white, textile curtains that hang in what was my father's office, (which used to be the family room) in the Miami house that haunts my thoughts right now; this specific, and unimportant element of nostalgia, that witnessed the daily, evening ritual in the early 80s when we'd gather after dinner on the roughly upholstered couch to watch that day's episode of Guiding Light on the VCR, that- once turned from family recreation space into my father's workspace,  hung silently behind my mother's back on those sleepless nights she'd play Freecell at my father's computer whilst softly listening to Schubert's "Trout" on CD, that witnessed my father's endless frustrations, cursing over computer, after computer, after computer down the years that he could never quite wrangle to his will.. 

Those curtains, like the corners of the produce section in the neighbourhood Winn Dixe I used to visualise on hot, lonely nights when I couldn't sleep in Kfar Habad.. 

When everything is threateningly unfamiliar, it's trivial things– specific and trivial, even mundane things that offer a feeling of safe familiarity.  This is the true lure of nostalgia; because we have already survived the past, and the only thing the future promises, is that we won't.