Keeping the Faith

It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog with any regularity that I love my nostalgia. I find pleasure in the act of rediscovery and reexperiencing, be it through talking about the past, looking at old photos, rereading a book, watching a forgotten episode of a TV show from my childhood, or listening to a song from earlier in my life.

It’s thus with a double shot of nostalgia that I recall “Keeping The Faith,” a Billy Joel song from 1983 that I listened to more about a decade later, when I was merging into my teenage years and beginning my life-long love affair with music, and more particularly first experiencing that pleasure of listening and re-listening that comes along with owning music. By the time I was listening to music of my own choosing, Billy Joel wasn’t really cool anymore--he was a soft rocking adult contemporary artist less favored by kids than the parents of kids my age, and hadn’t yet achieved the status of musical legend and icon (not for lack of accomplishment, more because I think the world just needed another five years-to-a-decade to let his best work marinate and agree that, OK, this guy was worthy of that kind of objective reverence). In any event, when I look back on my initial appreciation of Joel, and particularly “Keeping The Faith,” there’s an irony to feeling nostalgic about one of my first encounters with nostalgia.

I remember listening to this song in middle school, and hearing wisdom about how Joel lost a lot of fights but it taught me how to lose OK and immediately applying the lyrics to my own experiences backing down from bullies or, more metaphorically, getting shot down when I asked a girl to slow dance. I appropriated the lyric, I’m not ashamed to say the wild boys were my friends to apply to a pair of unruly boys I’d hung out with a lot in elementary school, one of whom my father had had reservations about inviting back to the house after he made a lot of noise and a mess of my toys when he came by. I hung out with these guys a lot less by middle school, and was ready to look back, unashamed at these beginnings because they’d made me to the person I’d become—at thirteen years old.

I make light of this reflection, because looking back, it silly to have the warm fuzzies about your past when you’re barely a teenager. But then, a few years ago, I was at a bar in Oregon and overheard one of my friends in his mid-twenties talking about how a band from his high school years—a band popular after I was already out of college—had just celebrated the ten-year anniversary of their first album. I nodded along, on the fringes of this conversation, as he said, we’re getting so old! I wanted to say something along the lines of just wait until you’re over thirty, but cut myself off, remembering my own, younger waves of nostalgia and how it felt to be dismissed by my parents or older co-workers. I could recognize that they were objectively right that I was not actually old--at least not nearly as old as them--but that didn’t lessen my own sense of time passing, or even, when I thought about it long enough, of mortality.

No, when I looked around that bar, I observed there were more people closer to his age, and so I would be the old man who was out of touch if I said anything at all, not to mention that, in that moment, I was suddenly aware of my own relative youth in the grand scheme of things. Though approaching my mid-thirties felt ancient in that conversation, I had still not yet broached the barrier of what most folks in contemporary US society would refer to as middle-aged. How many people in my life would hear me lecture these people, just five-to-ten years my junior that they weren’t that old, only to roll their eyes at the implication that I was.

I had a mentor during that time in Oregon who was cagey about his own age, but once addressed it head-on, telling a group of us, I stopped trying to guess people’s age. There’s no point. Because there are always some people who are going to surprise you because they’re much younger than the way they conduct themselves, and people who look a lot younger than they are; I decided, what’s the point?

It’s the kind of perspective that, after a certain point in life, I think we all know to be intrinsically true, but that still feels profound when you hear it stated so directly, so incisively.

Taking his meaning out of context, however, and applying it to my own purposes here, who’s to say that thirteen-year-old’s sense of nostalgia is any less real or valuable than a twenty-five-year-old’s, than a thirty-five-year-old’s, than a sixty-year-old’s? Sure, the older we get, the more time has passed in our lifetimes and the more we have to get nostalgic about, but when we’re younger, aren’t the changes, too, more intense? In a lot of ways, my world changed much more between the years I was six and thirteen than it did between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, not to mention that I had no prior experience of change to compare these shifts to.

So, I say to my fellow nostalgia-philes, not to be embarrassed for looking back fondly at however long or short a time ago, and to my fellow increasingly old curmudgeons who think those people younger than them are not so old to chill out, too, because we’re all dealing with our own perceptions of the passage of time in our own ways.

As for me?

I’m going to listen to my 45s
Ain’t it wonderful to be alive
When the rock n roll plays
Yeah
When the memory stays
Yeah
I’m keeping the faith.