Nostalgia

Artwork by Brian Haley

It was a warm summer’s day. The sunlight shone dappled through the leaves, but the park was quiet. It was still fairly early in the morning, and the children who had once run these paths were long gone. Some of their descendants would still come running, but for now they almost certainly occupied themselves with the bright new screens of cartoons and games.

In these hours the air carried the whispers of the trees, although their conversations were drowned out by the splashing and quacking of a symphony of ducks. The old man brushed the last of the crumbs from his knobbly fingers as the ducks fought for the soggy remnants of bread still in the pond. With the crusts disposed of, he set his hands to the wheels of his chair and rolled himself back from the water’s edge. His hands gripped his wheelchair with the strength of someone younger, who wasn’t used to going slowly. All around him hints of that boy lingered. His white curls were still wild, and there was a kiss that sat at the corner of his lips when he smiled that had once consumed him entirely. It was just his knees that had taken too many rough landings. He said he’d never grow up, but that couldn’t stop him from growing old.

At the sound of voices he turned his head. An impish smile called out the endless child on his wrinkled pixie face. Along the path came an older gentleman and lady. The gentleman tottered along with his cane while the lady locked her hand gently in his elbow. She was older than they were by quite some margin, but she wore her years well, and most people who looked their way couldn’t tell. She always told them years were like frostbite: it might hurt to start with, but eventually you’d stop feeling them. Her hand on her companion’s arm was as much to support him as anything else, and she helped him to the bench by the pond that their friend was perched by.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she commented teasingly. “Why, of all the strange things my eyes have seen, you must be the strangest.”

The man in the wheelchair poked his tongue out at her childishly. She laughed and her companion smiled an old and tired smile. He was the youngest, but he didn’t feel it. He was used to being the oldest. He had always been the oldest before, and his new company wasn’t enough to supplant that feeling. He was still young enough for growing old to hurt. There was a trembling in his hands that wouldn’t go away. He tightened his grip on his cane to try and hide it, and closed his eyes. His knuckles whitened, and the sensation reminded him of the way he had once held his sword. He wasn’t used to the aching in his bones or the creaking of his joints yet. Not like his companions who had been old when he was young. And yet, somehow, they were still children while he wasn’t.

The lady’s hand touched his arm again and brought him out of his reverie. She was still smiling. There was something about her that reminded him of his sisters. This lady was a fighter too, in her own delicate way. She certainly had fight in her, and a strange obtuse wisdom that came from the weird and wonderful. Her smile directed him to the waterfowl in the pond, and the curious squirrel that had come to investigate.

“Do you miss the days when they used to talk?” she asked.

The man in the wheelchair laughed delightedly. The man on the bench felt a tightness in his chest. He did miss it; more than he could say. There was so much he couldn’t voice. There was a sense of obligation and burden that weighed over him. Some of it was his, but some of it he had been forced to carry. There was a painful confusion of higher creators in his life, and it left him unsure and subdued. So he didn’t comment. He didn’t tell them how much he missed it. He didn’t tell them of the memories and animal voices he heard when he closed his eyes. Or that some nights, when he woke cold and trembling, he would pull himself from his bed and creep to the wardrobe and press hopefully against the back of it.

Somehow, still, the lady seemed to know. It often seemed as though the things she didn’t know and the things she ought to know had become jumbled somewhere. She looked at him with the clear and clever eyes of a child, but she didn’t push him to talk. Instead, she turned her gaze to the pixie-faced old man who was grinning at the sky like he could still reach it. They all had their attention drawn by a squeal and the clomping of tiny feet. Two small children raced each other, screaming and hollering, along the path. If the children saw them sitting there they paid them no mind. As the parents hurried to catch up they cast warm familiar smiles at the characters by the pond, but they had no time to stop, and the recognition was distant and unsure.

As the sounds of the family disappeared into the distance the three turned back to each other with a single sigh. Each one of them would remain adamant that it was one of the other two who had sighed. Days like these were all too common now. It seemed as though the best they could hope for was the doff of a cap from a professor, or the sleazy casual glance of a Hollywood producer.

Never one to be deterred, the man in the wheelchair rummaged in the pockets of his tattered green coat. The warped discoloured threads of age looked like the skeletons of old leaves, and the whispering trees echoed in his movement. His rustling produced a bag of fairy biscuits, and he scoffed one greedily as he watched the ever-eager ducks. With wide eyes he offered the biscuits to his companions. The lady on the bench eyed them suspiciously. The man with the cane paid them no attention, and when they turned to look they could see in his faraway gaze the disinterest of all the people who passed them by. With a firm but sympathetic look the lady at his side pulled one of his hands from the top of his cane and placed a biscuit in it. He looked up and whispered.

“They were happy then...”

“They’re happy now,” she replied. “They’re just as happy now as they were then. It’s you who’s not as happy now. You see nothing but change, and it scares you.”

“It doesn’t scare you?” There were tears in his eyes. “Things are even more different now than they were for you.”

She whipped a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at his face with a smile. “Sadness is for mock turtles, and keeping time is for rabbits. When you get to my age you realise that nothing ever really changes, except for the everyday changes that serve to keep everything the same.”

“You sound as mad as a hatter,” he commented.

“I can knowledgably assure you I’m not,” she smiled.

The man in the wheelchair chuckled at her surety. “Right you are, Wendy.”

The lady on the bench smiled at him sympathetically, but didn’t bother to correct him. She turned back to the other man and motioned for him to eat the biscuit. He took a bite, and, to her immense relief, remained the same size.

“There are all kinds of madness,” she continued. “Nostalgia is one of them.”

The man with the cane opened his mouth to object, but remembered that the lady at his side had stared down kings and queens before he was even born, so his opinion, however regal, was unlikely to sway her. He took another bite of biscuit. She looked into the distance and tried to remember. It was hard. She knew full well that at his age she had been desperately poking around rabbit holes in search of her youth. They’d all been there. Some days she still was. She’d never told him their companion was wheelchair bound from jumping out of windows. Nostalgia was a powerful thing.

There were the good old days. That was true. But these were good old days too. And one day these days would be the good old days they remembered nostalgically. It would take time, as all things do, but they would learn. They had all the time in the world.