i·ro·ny [ahy-ruh-nee, ahy-er-]
–noun, plural -nies.
1. the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend.
2. Literature.
a. a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly stated.
b. (esp. in contemporary writing) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., esp. as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion.
3. Socratic irony.
4. dramatic irony.
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
6. the incongruity of this.
As we get older the mind spends more time hovering on tiny happy memories, things that we sure as hell didn't appreciate enough when we were in the moment, and can now never recreate or recover. Standing in the shower this morning somehow reminded me of the brief era that I lived in my grandma's beach house and bathed in the ocean pretty much every day. I only showered when I couldn't get away with not showering, or when I had massive amounts of sand in my crevices. Letting my mind linger on this memory of living there was pleasant, though the more I thought about it, the less pleasant it probably should have seemed. My roommate and I never had the heat on because we couldn't afford it. We ate ramen and peanut butter sandwiches like all the other starving students you've ever heard of. I remember being lonely, though I did have friends in town, and I had a couple of girlfriends over the course of that year, and so did my roommate. I worked on the loading dock of the local Orchard Supply Hardware. 'Nuff said about that. My car was a rusted-out '77 Toyota Corolla wagon, though according to my carless roommate, I was lucky to have a car at all. On the plus side, we lived in a house that always had the sound of breaking waves in the background. My roommate was my best friend, at the time. We were creative and irreverent and the shit we collected and plastered all over our house reflected our humor and energy. At one point I tried to carefully and conscientiously paint my car some other color than 70's mustard yellow, but got a wild hair up my butt after I had only finished one quarter panel and ended up using it as a stencil-art/graffitti/guerrilla poetry backdrop instead. In hindsight, I loved that car, no matter that all the empirical evidence available would lead anyone to conclude that it was a piece of utter shit.
I guess it's all relative, which makes me consider that old saw; that you never appreciate how good you have it until you're older. "Youth is wasted on the young," and all that.
I guess the feeling intensifies when the current situation starts to seem like THE outcome of events and not just another segment of the great adventure. Sometimes the reverie over past glories, real or imagined, keeps our current happy moments just slightly out of focus... or out of sight entirely. This is not revelatory. Everybody knows (or is) someone who can't let go of the feeling those memories provide, who can't create something new and good for themselves because they can't get over how great things used to be. The folks at eye magazine (www.eyemagazine.com, issue #68) are running a special edition about their proposed additions to the established "design canon", mainly based on the premise that "history is vital - nostalgia is death."
I am also at an age where I can appreciate the fact that thirty years from now I will probably still be thinking that I didn't know how good I had it. Maybe I'll forget the things that I'm reminiscing about now and long for things that haven't even happened yet. I have sure forgotten a lot of other things up to now that I wish I had back.
Holy crap, I'm wistful about things I can't even remember! That's what we mean when we say we take (or took) things for granted and that our kids don't know how good they have it. They have what we used to have, and we wish we had it back.
