Kicking Nostalgia

My father tells me he's found a bunch of old copies of The Lion Roars, and asked me if I wanted them.

The Lion Roars was the newspaper put out at my elementary school. Run by Mrs. Rubin (who now does Yiddish children's theatre, if Google can be trusted), Mrs. Meyers (fourth grade), and a bunch of the kids, mostly the gifted kids. Me. Alick Dearie. Lionel, whose surname I want to give as 'Richie', but then I get all caught up in doubt because of the musician. Phillip Jarrell, the kid who never ate lunch or stood for the Pledge, who I did the lead editorial with one issue in the back corner of the library with Alick's enthusiastic assistance. I don't remember for sure any of the other girls who worked on it, but Emily Morrison must have done. Stacy Theoharis. Mieke Simons, whose surname I probably spelt wrong.

I wanted them. At some point I'll have them in my hands, the long paper, the articles and literary contributions from all the grades in the school, the drawings put in around the margins.

I can't find my photographs from then, and it's really bothering me. I know they're here somewhere, at least some of them. I could probably remember more names with them.

A discussion on dot_cattiness, of all places, has got me thinking about then and there.

( Memories. Paper-journal material, but I don't keep one, so this is where this sort of self-absorbed blithering goes. )

Meta: So many songs we forgot to play

Why does it feel actively transgressive to speak of my childhood as something important, formative, something with people in it whose presence I miss as an adult, something that promised things that circumstances meant never happened?

Why do my traumas from that age feel like things that it's okay to have still mattering to me, resonating with me, but loves and friendships and triumphs of that age are things that I can only speak of with a sense that I ought to feel shame that I have not outgrown them?

Why do I feel the urge to reclaim my childhood, hold it close to me and tell the nay-sayers that it matters, when I can think of few cases of me being directly told that I cherished its jewels too much or that it is not worthy of consideration?

Why do I feel that the things called the "formative years" in some rhetorical treatments of childhood are only things I can be formed by if they were pain? Why is the joyfulness (and the sadness of loss of potential joys) something that I feel self-conscious about remembering?

Is it just me? Or am I responding to something geniunely fucked up in the world around me?

Do I transgress? Fine. Then I transgress.

Mine.