Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

 

I was on my afternoon walk: another 3856 steps according to my iPhone health app. It also informs me that I’m walking less this month than I did last month but walking more this week than last week. Okay. I was listening to Folk Alley Classic Folk Stream: a playlist of folk songs recorded before the year 2000. And as I turned the corner from St. Paul Avenue onto Howell, the station played “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” performed by the Kingston Trio. How many versions of that song have I listened to over the years! And it is even possible that this version by the Kingston Trio was one of the first I had ever heard. The Trio also had sung “Tom Dooley” and “The MTA Song” as well, songs I had listened to and had taken into my social consciousness even then. As I listened, I experienced somatically a feeling that in the past I had associated with nostalgia. It began in my stomach as a spreading tension and an unpainful tightening that spread upwards into my chest and head. It was an emotional tension. Nostalgia was a certain longing for an idealized moment in some vague past to which I would wish return though fully aware such return was impossible. My father used to announce, “If I knew then what I know now,” without any awareness that if he knew then what he knew now his whole life would be different and I, to whom he was speaking, probably would not exist. I have long rejected the legitimacy of nostalgia because it tastes too much of regret, a dissatisfaction with the present and an impossible return to an absent past. Nostalgia looks back through filters for what one imagines had but probably did not exist. Nostalgia is stuffed replete with what should have been. But I became aware that the feeling I experienced at that moment listening to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” by the Kingston Trio wasn’t at all a longing for an irretrievable past moment but a present happiness that spoke of the pleasure and enjoyment that in my early years I had known from that song and the culture out of which it came and to which I was joining. I experienced happiness listening to the song and not regret, glad in the present hearing that the song existed then and belonged still in my life. My life had continuity.

Nostalgia, then, is not regret for a lost past but a memory of joy that reaches into the present. Nostalgia was not longing for a lost past but an acknowledgment of a happiness that was now re-experienced under stimulation of the present. Hearing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” returned that joy to me: I didn’t want to go back there: I had already been there. And now the happiness I had enjoyed then returned to me now. The walk was more than a mere 3856 steps: it was more than 60 years.