here we are in january, time for putting away the holiday décor and making resolutions….or what steve harvey calls “lies.” my goals for 2009 included a few of the usual suspects: getting back to exercising, enjoying our home state, and making more of an effort to connect with folks around me. one way to combine two things on the list: walking through new neighborhoods.  i had a great experience visiting “greater downtown oregon city.” i put that in quotations because the area is much like my own st. johns in north portland. cool in the same way, having the feel of a small town without being too far. it’s a quick shot down i-205 south….but i digress. back to the oc: i went for a ride on the municipal elevator, the only place recently i’ve found outside of the rose quarter where they have a live person running the controls. then went into a little resale shop: coin corner and hobbies on 7th street. i tend to like looking in thrift stores anyway, but what caught my eye was a fabulous collection of toys from my childhood: playskool, fisher price, and something that caused the biggest déjà vu attack ever, a magnetic board framed in red plastic that i remembered playing with in first grade! wow. i am a sucker for nostalgia.

webster defines nostalgia as “a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life.” maybe it’s because i have a big birthday coming up, or maybe it’s because we’ve had so many funerals in the family recently, but i long to remember times past. i love to look at pictures and ask my aunts and uncles about what they’re life was like “back then.” watch them squirm trying to explain away their polyester bellbottoms, or smile telling stories about when i was still a baby.

i also wonder about the children around us, and consider what they will be nostalgic about in the future. how will spirit week be celebrated for 90s day? zeros day? what is it about our culture that will be worth preserving? how will they do so? is it enough to pull out cousin benny’s baby book or pop in the dvd of the grandparents’ anniversary party? it’s a great place to start.

my father got me in the habit of taking pictures at every family function, documenting the who/what/when/where/why to save for posterity. facebook is a great place for sharing photos, and i do so frequently. i also have fun with an aptly named family.com, a website we used for our reunion. for actually printing the digital shots i like to use winkflash.com. great prices, reasonable shipping. (and it’s hard to get a memory card pasted into a scrapbook.) this way i can reminisce about the past and look forward to the future, in a community of folks hopefully doing the same.

the point is we have to document our lives in order to share them with others. and that’s the best part of nostalgia, remembering together.