I keep my grandfather’s books on my shelves mostly as mementos. Yet, on a whim last year I opened one. The trapped air in the long-unused book smelled exactly like—no, the air was actually from- my deceased papaw’s study. The aroma gave me an instant nostalgic high. Forgive me, but I leaned into the book, and I admit it: I inhaled deeply.
O, the transport! I remembered myself in papaw’s study around 1975. Like Mark Twain told his friend, Will Bowen, “Old voices greeted me wailing down the centuries.” Before me appeared such a vivid and joyous set of possibilities that my childhood dread of bedtime returned.
The experience didn’t last long, of course. I came crashing back to intensified grief over something that I now sense is missing. This grief is painful enough that most people try to suppress these nostalgic stirrings of the soul as if they were just foolish.
But the producers of those infomercials about musical collections of the oldies know that our nostalgia is more than just wanting to turn back time. The music, itself, bears witness. Bruce Springsteen sings of “glory days.” For Brian Adams it is not just about the “Summer of 69;” it’s that somehow that summer seemed to “last forever.” John Mellencamp in his “little ditty 'bout Jack and Diane” feels our loss: “O yea life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.”
That lyric is no different than my six-year old’s observation about Christmas a few years ago. “Daddy, the Christmas tree isn’t giving me any warmth anymore.”
“Yes,” I said, “for it was never really the tree that gave the warmth.”
With Abraham we are homesick for a city built on better foundations—for a warm place, where the days are glorious, the voices cross the centuries, the summers last forever, and the thrill of living is restored. Occasionally we do something like open our grandfather’s book and are reminded that our earliest childhood tastes of that true and eternal home were no lie.
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