The rebirth of memory

Perhaps it is just because I am one of those baby boomers, but I tend to be more and more prone to nostalgia. This year is the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Even though I wasn't there, I am still bathed in nostalgia for that heady time.

Recently, the New York Times did an article on the packaging of the Summer of Love as commercial nostalgia. In it, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater opines on the topic of nostalgia: It "is a corrupting emotion. You're imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You're imagining something that wasn't true. It's a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world."

It was probably a good thing that these darkening thoughts were not in my mind as my gal pal Jean and I arrived in New Orleans for the first weekend of Jazz Fest a few weeks ago. Both in need of some emotional R&R, we were looking forward to re-enacting a memorable Big Easy time we had shared almost 12 years ago. New Orleans is a nostalgic city for me. But the drive in from the airport was a sobering reminder that this New Orleans was a different place -- a city devastated by a harridan named Katrina, a city that has lost almost half of its population. The French Quarter was still familiar in its rowdy charms, although quieter. In Faubourg Marigny, the music spilled out of the clubs into the street and Trombone Shorty brought down the house with every song at Cafe Brazil. Gallatoir's was packed with its nattily-dressed Southern ladies and gentlemen. And the Jazz Fest was jumping out at the fairgrounds. Everywhere there were banners proclaiming the theme of rebirth.

It was only in between those two cleaned-up tourist destinations that one could see what Katrina had wrought. The leveled homes, the ugly FEMA trailers everywhere, the ubiquitous graffiti circles that indicated how many people were found dead and alive in the ravaged homes.

Jean and I had decided that we would not just "let the good times roll" but would try to get ourselves up every morning and give something back to this city that had given us so much pleasure. We signed up for Habitat for Humanity and got our bedraggled, tired old selves out to Baptist Crossing in the Ninth Ward at some ungodly early hour. Pounding nails for eight hours in the Louisiana sun may sound like hell, but it was one of the best experiences I have ever had. We created our own construction crew and somehow actually figured out how to put siding on a house so it was straight. We worked along side Liese and Nat, two musicians who were buying these colorful houses, not only with their money but with their labor. A local gal named Sarah, proud of her newly rehabbed lime-green house ("I picked the color out myself!"), brought us homemade pralines and sweet potato pies that put one into sugar shock, and she made sure we knew that she appreciated us coming down and helping out. She also wanted us to know that we shouldn't feel sorry for her or anyone else in her neighborhood. She shared with me something her mother used to say: "Lord, disturb my comfort so that I may be a comfort to others."

Nostalgia can be its own comfort and its own trap. According to Eustis, it can also be progressive; something that drives people to imagine a world that is different. "The dream is real," he is quoted as saying in that New York Times article. "The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that everything is possible, but we don't want to do anything about it."

Dr. Michael O.L. Seabaugh, a Cape Girardeau native, is a clinical psychologist who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. Contact him at mseabaugh@semissourian.com For more on the topics covered in Healthspan, visit his Web site: www.HealthspanWeb.com.