Good Old Days

In a popular moment from the final episode of The Office Ed Helms’s Andy Bernard recalls spending most of his time feeling nostalgic for his college days in Cornell. At this point in the show, he has returned to work at Cornell, and laments that he looks back fondly at his days as a paper salesman. He arrives at the point: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” The observation is obvious enough to be funny—because of course it’s only in nostalgia that those everyday things take on a rose-colored tinge. Just the same, it’s also a profound and universal enough point to resonate with fans of the show and beyond.

As anyone who reads this blog with any regularity can probably tell, I have a soft spot for nostalgia. I like to think that I look at the past with a critical lens to cultivate lessons from it, isolate formative moments, and explain how my thinking has changed from one time to another. Nonetheless, there’s also an element of celebrating what was inherent in probing years gone by, and I have to acknowledge a tendency to look at the various moments in the past as “the good old days.”

My son is getting older. He still doesn’t have the capacity for language to fully understand my stories or the world view to, I suspect, much care about his old man’s history. But I can see myself slip into the role of older man storyteller, relaying people and places from my past for a laugh or to teach a lesson.

I imagine telling him about the easy comfort my childhood best friend and I found in each other’s company, and how he would work on computer programming while I made my first attempts at writing a novel for countless hours in his room while we played The Breakfast Club in the background.

I imagine telling him about the guys I played basketball with in high school and developing nicknames for what we took for cool plays like thrusting the ball between our legs en route to a layup.

I imagine telling him about my friends from the college newspaper staff and staying up into the wee hours the night before our weekly paper went to press.

I imagine telling him about my friends from summer camp jobs, or riding out a blizzard watching movies with the friends from my office job in Baltimore. I imagine telling him about when his mother and I were still new in our relationship and we had our first kiss calf-deep in the Pacific Ocean, or how we maintained a long distance relationship by eating dinner together over Skype, early for her, late for me to adjust for time zone differences.

And of course there’s the fact that even now, these may well be good old days in the making, while Riley still likes to cuddle and isn’t self-conscious about anything and hands me books to read him to him on the floor and very much likes Daniel Tiger; heck, we even have good old days gone between us that he’ll never remember, like when he used to rest is his forehead against my chest while I carried him in the Babybjorn and fall asleep or when I read the entire catalog of Calvin and Hobbes comics to him to entertain the both of us during his first summer on earth.

Yes, for all of their challenges, for all of my thinking forward and thinking back, these are good days. They're just not old yet.