Preemptive Nostalgia

Right now my head is in two places.

One of those places is Nashville, with respect to which moving plans are slowly falling into place. Kate and I are headed there in a couple of weeks to apartment hunt, and we've been getting the skinny on the best neighborhoods, etc, from my future colleagues. We're talking about what we want in an apartment, what sorts of friends we might have, where - if anywhere - we'll be able to find gay people, and whether I should contemplate doing with pie what I've been doing with french toast. We've been doing research into Nashville and Tennessee writers we might like to read; I recently bought a collection of short stories by Peter Taylor and am currently accepting further recommendations. Meanwhile, I've also been trying to figure out how to teach five hundred years of world history in one semester to a seventy-student class (the answer: teach it by focusing on seven cities whose histories encapsulate broader themes in modern history, specifically Berlin, Nanking, Luanda, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Delhi, and Mexico City), and Kate's been trying to find some sort of library-based employment (tips kindly accepted). And, of course, we've been getting ourselves all excited by watching Robert Altman's Nashville and vowing that we, too, will wear rhinestones and bouffant hairdos when we get to town, just like the folks in the movie.

But the thing about moving is that you have to leave somewhere behind before you get somewhere new. So the other place my head is is the Valley, with respect to which I'm feeling mighty nostalgic - never mind that I haven't left it yet. I always knew that my stay here would be brief, and I've done a pretty good job getting to know the place, but that's just making it all the harder to leave. Some things you just can't do anywhere else, or not just anywhere else - last Sunday's trip, with two of my favorite people, down Route 47 for some strawberry picking, followed by a visit to the Montague Bookmill (about which I've spoken before) and ice cream and cow-petting at a nearby creamery is a good example. The sun was shining, the pollen was flying, and nothing was stolen from my car during the whole time we were parked at the Bookmill, a fact unremarkable in itself except that I had accidentally left my door wide open for the almost two hours we were there (whoops). Will any of those things be possible in Nashville? Sadly, I don't think they will be.

And now I've just started reading Home Town by Tracy Kidder*, and it's making things worse. This is because it's a book about Northampton - about the people, the politics, the streets, the history, and the buildings that make up the fabric of the community, centering on the (true) story of a morally conflicted local cop named Tommy O'Connor. It's a bit dated now (most of it is set in the mid-1990s), but it captures the look of the place precisely. Observe:

Men and women, women and women, strolled arm in arm past the street musicians. Now and then Tommy would see a cellist seated on a chair outside a coffee shop, or a troupe of Bolivian panpipers on the sidewalk by the Unitarian church. ... People with that drifty academic look headed for the readings at the bookstores, and people of the avant-garde, in collarless shirts, the occasional beret, headed for the old bank building that had been recycled into an art gallery. Tommy would glance, and glance again, at the little knots of costumed youth loitering in Pulaski Park and by the Information Booth - skateboarders with their baseball caps turned backward, homeboys with baggy pants and gold chains, Goths in torn black clothes, adorned with spikey jewelry. Often, out in front of the Haymarket coffee shop, a group of Gothically attired youths sat in a circle on the sidewalk - some of Northampton's vegetarian anarchists, talking revolution and for now impeding only food traffic.

And:

No one seems in a great hurry, but many seem serious. No one dresses to say, "I'm rich." If anything, most say with their costumes, "I'm smart." Many could be blue-collar workers or perpetual graduate students, or both. Or financiers. Guessing professions on Main Street is tricky.

Reading this, I think, "Gosh, I miss Northampton!" And I realize that, even as I go about my day among the very people and streets Kidder's describing, I'm already consigning these last few weeks in Northampton to the realm of memory. It's a bit like watching something on the DVR at a slight delay - the Saturday Night Live episode you're recording is 45 minutes along, but you're still on minute 37 - or like watching a movie where the soundtrack is a split second behind the image.

Am I being a bit dramatic? Yes indeedy. But I'm being honest, too. Moving is both sad and exciting - I know this because I've done it an awful lot lately. And the weirdest time is the time just before the move, when you can see the end but can't quite get there yet. And trying to look ahead feels a bit like trying to run underwater. But what else are you gonna do?

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* Kidder is probably best known for Mountains beyond Mountains, his biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, and The Soul of a New Machine, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the fledgling computer industry.