Nostalgic BBQ

   August was my favorite month when I was a kid. And I’ve become so nostalgic now since I’ve been a parent. I look at my son and daughter and wonder what it’s like behind their eyes.

  For example, we had a barbecue here tonight. It was relaxing - a chance to de-compress a little. A great man who I work with turned 59 today, so it was kind of a birthday celebration also. It was just a bunch of us sitting around on folding chairs, eating hot dogs and hamburgers, drinking soda and near-beer, talking shop and joking with each other. There was a lot of dust in the air, so the light had a strange quality that made the evening sun look like the morning moon – you could stare right at it. But there we sat for an hour or two, as if we weren’t in the middle of an ancient land working and planning and praying to have a positive impact on the fight and bring everyone home safe.

  As the sun set and it became dark, I had that pang of nostalgia again. I found myself smiling at the fact that it was August, my favorite month, and across the miles my children were right in the middle of their day. Imagine  a movie, one of those tricks of cinematography in which you’re looking at one scene (say a mother and her son and daughter driving to the mall or having lunch) – then suddenly the camera lifts up and away until these three are but specks in the landscape, then the mountains and other geography become visible, then smaller, then you zoom across the globe, across the ocean, to another, more exotic place, and you’re looking at a scene where someone close to those other people is involved in something else (say the dad who is deployed in Iraq), and the camera pans, slower, and then stops.       

   Sound rushes in, and you’ve traveled time. I sat at the barbecue tonight, and for the most part it was simply another barbecue. But for a moment, a half-noticed silence when the light was just right and almost gone, and the wind teased the trees, I let my mind drift across the miles and tried to picture what my family was doing right then. I thought about those around me and all their families and friends, then I took the thought to the next level and had a sense of America in general, with its freeways and small towns and big cities and rolling plains and Rocky Mountains and fast food, and it made me feel pretty good. I felt like I could go on another year here if I had to (though I hope I don’t have to) knowing that loved ones over there can rest easier because we’re over here.

    At least I hope this is true. I hope I’m not still being naïve in my ripe old age of 33. I hope I don’t kick myself someday many years from now, thinking, “Ah, what a fool I was. What a nostalgic fool.”

We need a renaissance of wonder.
 We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls,
 the deathless dream, the eternal poetry,
 the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.

                                               - E. Merrill Root

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