Nostalgia

A comforting fiction, even as it tricks us into only remembering the 'good bits'

I used to be a little boy
So old in my shoes

Ooh, the years burn

The Smashing Pumpkins from the song Disarm (1993)

A few weeks ago my wife Cate and I were interviewed by SBS Insight in prep to appear live in the SBS studio in Sydney to talk about nostalgia.

This is not a normal turn of events for us.

Cate, you see, is a writer for Mamamia (amongst other things), and had penned an article about how her and I began ‘dating each other’ again. Of course we didn’t invent the couples ‘date night’, but it’s a light-hearted look at how we attempt to still spend time together just the two of us in spite of the time demands of work and raising two kids.

The article is also about how quickly time goes by. To quote Cate:

I used to roll my eyes when older people told me that age creeps up on you, but now I know that’s completely true, suddenly you wake up and the years have rolled past at speed. 

So, the SBS Insight crew thought it would be good to have us both on to talk nostalgia - looking back at our early love, and how it feels to reminisce on times pre-kids.

In the end we couldn’t make it down to Sydney midweek on such short notice, the irony that we were too busy with work and kids to travel in order to talk about the struggles of ‘finding time’ as busy parents was not lost on either of us. So instead, SBS asked us to write an article about nostalgia, which I’ve posted below. (They have a version on their website, but to be honest, they re-edited and changed it for some reason, and it reads terribly. So, enjoy the original below! 😎)

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When you’re young the way older people talk about the passing of time seems truly odd. Phrases like “I can’t believe that was over 20 years ago” are repeated regularly, or “I still think of you as a baby” are uttered when faced with a 6-foot teenager. Young brains can’t understand this, how can something that happened 20 years ago feel recent, how can time slip past you like that?

But it does.

As you age you experience this phenomenon, life speeds up even as it stretches out. You blink, and you’re in the middle, married, with a house in the suburbs and a couple of kids.

That’s our life.

We’ve been together for nearly 20 years, married for 14. We have two young boys, and we live in a slightly ramshackle home in the Brisbane suburbs which we’ll be paying off for the next forty years.

It’s an ‘ordinary’, but special life really. We both have work we enjoy, healthy kids, amazing friends, and family, and despite the immense demands of parenthood - the inevitable exhaustion, and the lack of spontaneity - it’s a life we adore because it’s filled with love and family.

Recently we realised we weren’t getting much time together as a couple (which parents do?), so we made a commitment to start going on ‘dates’ again. Not very exciting dates truth be told - going for a walk dates, sitting on the step drinking coffee dates, watching a movie at home on a Saturday night dates.  

On one (‘mocktails and records’) date night recently, we were listening to a Fat Freddy’s Drop album and found ourselves longing for the way we were. Nostalgia took us over and we both expressed a deep desire to pop back in time for a bit, to visit ourselves and our relationship as we were.  It's often music that causes these ethereal nostalgic feelings to show up, because our early love was forged through music, specifically the early 2000s live music scene in Brisbane.

We got to know each other at gigs – Salmonella Dub at the Arena, Groove Armada at Riverstage. Our first real ‘date’, at which feelings were declared, was in 2003 seeing Missy Higgins at (a long gone) Fortitude Valley venue, The Rev, for which tickets cost a cool $7.

From there we were ‘all in’ to each other and to enjoying a music-filled adventurous life together - Mia Dyson at the Troubadour, Loren at The Alley (the little venue on the side of the now demolished Milton bowling alley), The Cat Empire at The Arena, You Am I at the Zoo, even Six Foot Hick at Rick’s if we found ourselves wandering the valley on a weekend night and felt particularly energetic.

We also frequented many festivals in those early days – without a mortgage, our part-time jobs left us plenty of disposable income for tickets to Woodford, BluesFest and Splendour to see our fave folky rock musos of that era like The Waifs, John Butler, Xavier Rudd and Ben Harper.

But nostalgia tricks you into remembering only the good, lingering on the ‘fun’ parts - that new young fresh love we had found in each other, the freedom to travel and have new experiences. These waves of wistfulness hide a bigger truth - a period of our lives when we were facing some complex mental and physical health challenges, parents splitting up, losing friends and family far too soon, and fear and confusion about our future.

Yet, it was these challenges (as well as the joys) that forged who we are today. The trajectory of our relationship has been one of initial co-dependency, a large separation caused by the immense change that parenting brings, followed by a ‘returning’ to ourselves as individuals as we painstakingly faced our own personal challenges whilst attempting to consciously raise little people. This ‘facing ourselves individually’ allowed us to return to each other and the relationship as more whole people.

In late November this year we’re going on a ‘real date’ to see The Cruel Sea for the 30^th anniversary of their seminal album The Honeymoon Is Over. This album was a part of the soundtrack to our yearlong campervan road trip around Australia in 2011, a journey we undertook in part to avoid the inevitable ‘growing up’ that we sensed was just down the road. (Video highlights here!). We called ourselves the ‘Wrinkle Free Rovers’ to clearly distinguish ourselves from the many Grey Nomads out there ruling the roads.

We know we’ll be struck by nostalgic waves as Tex and the boys take us back to road tripping days in Tamworth and Jindabyne and Strahan through the magic of music, and we find ourselves longing for those days when we were ‘freer’, and definitely more wrinkle free!

It’s never going to be that way again

(as Tex huskily intones on the title track), but the joy (and sometimes sorrow) of nostalgia is transporting your new self, the person that has altered, through hard-fought and often painful self-growth, back in time to simpler and more naïve moments. It’s beautiful to remember the way we were then, and then float back into the imperfect present, because even though there is much to fondly recall, there is also plenty we’re happy to leave behind.   

Written by Cate and Nick Gilpin