Nostalgia

I was reading Robert Day's article "We'll Always Have McSorley's" in The American Scholar online. It is an elegiac memoir of his time living in New York and visiting McSorley's pub. Day's writing were a nice start to this morning's thesis writing. But the ending seems almost a call to his girlfriend of the time, Lola, to meet him at McSorley's, today. Another scholar, Robert Wolff recounts how he rekindled an early romance later in life. Is there something about middle-aged scholars, or just men, that we wish to find some one who has known us so long that we are different from now until then?

With the ubiquitous presence of the internet, I never try to communicate with old flames or crushes. My name is unusual enough that they could find me in a minute via google, and contact me by email, social media or phone a moment after that. I confess I google old friends, to see what they are up to- but many have lives that don't revolve around the exchange of information virtually, and others have names that generate so many hits, it would be hard to find them.