Apartment hunting, pickup basketball, and the fullness of the word "nostalgia"

Mostly rambling about a walk in the park

The past couple weeks of my life have been a haze of scrolling feverishly through facebook listings and cold-emailing strangers, as I try to find a halfway decent (read: mouse-free) Vancouver apartment for a halfway decent (read: less than $2000/month) price. Scrolling and emails, the twin scourges of modern existence, right?

There’s something properly alienating about interacting with strangers like this, so calculating and impersonal, and housing—a basic human need—turned into a strategic asset in this perverted game. In the world of the online apartment hunt, other people aren’t people; they’re either friends or they’re enemies, or they’re irrelevant. It doesn’t help that the Vancouver housing market is so damn hot that my laptop practically scorches my fingers. The wildly inflated rents make the whole exercise feel that much more irrational.

The good news is that I’m writing this from the shelter of one of my favourite moods, which I experience specifically when walking through city parks on those perfect summer evenings that seem to bring everyone outside. It’s a pocket of enchantment in the rough fabric of this state of general disenchantment I find myself in. I hope you can find your own little pocket today, too.

So, my grade ten English teacher hated the word nostalgia.¹ In particular, it peeved her when students used “nostalgic” to describe a setting, as in, for example, “the forest was beautiful and nostalgic.” She told us that it’s an empty descriptor, because nostalgia is an emotion that requires a subject and an object. You feel nostalgia for something. Saying a setting is “nostalgic” is like saying a setting is “remembering”—it doesn’t make sense.

I appreciate my teacher’s perspective—she had to read a lot of mediocre short stories by teenagers who didn’t particularly want to write them, and she was just trying to elevate our vocabularies—but I have to disagree. Because when the July heat finally breaks, and I walk through the grass that glows in long patches of evening sun, and I watch the playgrounds and tennis courts and picnic tables fill with beautiful strangers, nostalgic is the only word I have to describe the atmosphere.

I’m sure part of what happens is that summer parks remind me of another time. This is something I know we all experience. I know you’ve felt fall’s first breath on a fresh morning in September and suddenly you’re eight years old, walking to school and full of first-day butterflies. Maybe for you it’s the smell of rain-wet pavement, or the sound of a pigeon’s cooing, or your crunching footsteps on firmly packed snow, but I know you know the teleporting power of the senses.

It’s true that this particular park reminds me viscerally of being a kid. Behind the wading pool, there is the kind of patch that appears to an adult as just a few feet of brush, but to a child as a whole world ripe for exploration. There are two trees with forks so low to the ground that you can step right into them, small woody fortresses with branches rising up on all sides. To me and my brother when we were little, it was immediately obvious that one of these trees was good and the other was evil. The world through a child’s eyes is so complex, and so simple. One tree was our home base, and the other an alluring but treacherous no-man’s-land. We organized quests that took us from one tree to the other and back again. We gathered sticks and pine cones, clambered along branches, and traced paths in the dirt, and a few feet became acres, the hours months.

This wasn’t an especially formative experience, but for some reason whenever I smell pine needles, I still find myself first in the trees behind the wading pool. Then it’s summer camp, family hikes, and all the rest but first, it’s this park. Walking here now, and especially watching the kids in the playground swinging from skinny arms and legs and climbing through their imagined worlds, scraping their knees and getting back up again, I ache sweetly with remembering.

But the nostalgia is more than that. I’m not entirely sure how to describe it, but I feel a nostalgic longing for other people’s lives, not just my own.

In my opinion, you can find some of the best people-watching spots in this city by the basketball courts. To see a properly exciting game, you’ll want to head somewhere busy, central, and deeply cool, like Christie Pits. But if you’re there not so much for the basketball and prefer a more lowkey people-watching experience, I recommend someplace a little quieter.

This park where I am now is ideal. Demand for court space isn’t so high that players have to form defined groups to compete for it, but there are still enough people that a little ecosystem develops on the sidelines, as players stop to rest and passersby stop to watch. The youngest boy here is maybe eleven, and the oldest men are in their fifties. The court is a tangle of brown, black, and white limbs, the cross-section of ethnic backgrounds remarkably wide. All these different bodies, working to perfect the same motions, exchanging the same nods and shoves and slaps on the back. These guys share a common language that seems to blunt the edges of their differences—which is cliché to say, but also true and I think kind of miraculous.

I’ve never been big on team sports, and the language that goes spoken and unspoken here is one I can’t claim to understand. For all the days I lingered in this park as a kid, I only ever set foot on the basketball courts to cut across them, or in the winter, to climb the piles of artificial snow deposited here by the zamboni from the neighbouring ice rink. And yet, when I watch these strangers playing pickup, on a level I know how they feel. The fraternal energy and sense of purpose that radiates from them resonates with something inside me, and I recognize the thrill of adrenaline, if only a little distantly. I know the ache in the legs, the salt on the upper lip. My body remembers, in a way, even if my brain doesn’t speak the language.

As a side note, I think this is a beautiful way to feel connected to someone you don’t know! It fuels curiosity and builds empathy. It’s good for me to take breaks from the hellish housing facebook groups to go outside, see some real people, and feel our shared humanity, because when I wander back to my laptop I’m able to see the strangers there in a more generous light.

Still, there’s an undeniable gulf between a stranger’s experience and my perception of it. This isn’t a simple process of identification = gratification. I don’t look at other people and see only myself. I don’t find it satisfying to watch them just because watching is a gateway into my own memories, my own personal nostalgia. There’s something captivating about witnessing an experience you know you can’t quite access, and realizing other lives will always be other to you.

It isn’t that I want to occupy other identities either, and it isn’t necessarily about vicarious pleasure. Probably a part of me wants to know how it would feel to be one of those guys on the basketball court; but I think more than that, I just like that they’re there, doing their own thing, taking up space and making something interesting out of life. I don’t need to insert myself into the picture. Strangers—with their hobbies and their jobs, their styles, with every little indicator of how they approach life and what they choose to pour their energies into—are reminders of the many weird and wonderful expressions of the human experience that exist outside of mine.

Like many people (I think?), I’m afraid of dying, mostly in the sense that I’m afraid of not living before I’m dead. It’s cruel that we’re born into a world of infinite possibilities—an infinity with restrictions, but an infinity all the same—and then we have just a speck of time to do and see and feel and become as much of this everything as we can before we’re gone.

A few days ago, I scrolled through most of the instagram account of my future roommate (normal person behaviour?), and there’s a photo there of a Sylvia Plath quote: “I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want… I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.” I’ve had the same thought so many times. Part of what makes watching strangers captivating is that it lets you almost taste the shades and tones of possibility not otherwise available to you. If we can’t personally have the infinite variation of the human experience, the next best thing is to witness to it. I like watching strangers go about their lives not simply because I know what it’s like to be them, or because I want to know what it’s like, but because I don’t—because there’s something deliciously unfathomable about other ways of being that remain other.

And so, I think we love other lives a little for their sameness and a little for their difference. Dear somebody, I love you because of the little trace of me I see in you and the little trace of you I think I could discover in me. But I also feel the gravitational pull of everything unknown, the strangeness of the stranger.

But we were talking about nostalgia. Warning: We’ve reached the obligatory and awful part of this post where I (virtually) whip out the Oxford English Dictionary and hit you with a lesson in etymology.

The word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, meaning return home, and algos, meaning pain. The pain to return home. I began by telling you about the ache I feel for my own return home: the childhood experiences this place evokes for me, the personal sense-memories it brings to the surface. I’ve tried to explain also that the midsummer park and its strange strangers stir in me a longing for others’ experiences, and also a different kind of longing for otherness that doesn’t seem to concern me much at all—sort of like humanity’s longing for possibility, or maybe experience’s own longing for itself. I hope it makes at least a little bit of sense to you why I think nostalgia is the right word to describe all these kinds of longing: they’re painful in a bittersweet way, and they concern the gravity of pasts both real and hypothetical, the yearning for everything that I and We were and might have been.

There’s one more piece, which is maybe the hardest to put into words. Walking through the park, watching the groups of late twenty-somethings spread their blankets on the grass and pass around hand-rolled cigarettes and containers of fruit, watching the middle-aged women in expensive leggings walk their dogs, watching the business suit-clad men pausing on park benches somewhere between A and B, I think I can feel other people’s nostalgia. That is, I can feel their pain for their own return home.

I sense these people’s childhoods stirring inside them, and the way they ache with all of life’s possibilities. I see it in their body language and in their faces. We all seem to be reaching for an uncomplicated kind of peace and complete presence in the moment that our overburdened adult brains just aren’t capable of. I think the adult who carves a slice of “leisure time” from their workday to do recreational activities, and whose mind darts all the while from processing the past to worrying about the future to dwelling on the hypothetical, is worlds away from the child who can abandon themselves completely to being in nature and playing the game at hand.

When I think about nostos—about the return home—I think about music. To be honest, sometimes when my friends try to explain to me the genius of a piece of classical music, it goes a little over my head (playing music falls into roughly the same category as playing team sports for me), but I’ll always remember this, from one pretty cool friend. You can resolve a chord progression by ending in the same place you started, and this is called returning “home.” But sometimes when there’s no simple return—when you end on a chord that recalls the resolving chord, but isn’t quite the same—it can be more potent, more emotionally wrenching. A chord like this moves people not because it’s a return home, but because it’s the home we can’t return to.

I think summer evenings in the park are like chord progressions with no simple resolutions. I think the happiness most (adult) people feel here has a little tinge of sadness, because it’s intertwined with some other past or possible happiness, whether in memory or in the imagination. This isn’t to say that no one here is genuinely happy, or that adult happiness just some pale imitation of the purity of childhood wonder. If John Green has taught me anything (and really, he’s taught me everything), it’s that the human capacity for wonder isn’t bounded by age. I just think that when you grow up, even genuine happiness in the place you are now contains a little twinge for the happiness that you once called home.

I feel that twinge, and I sense it in these strangers too. There is my personal longing, and there is theirs, and then there is a shared longing that is greater than the sum of these personal longings. It hangs in the air, it acts on all of us but belongs to none of us. It belongs to the park. This is what I mean when I say that the park is nostalgic, and when I insist that “nostalgic” is anything but an empty descriptor.

At this moment of transition in my life, it feels so healthy to breathe in this air, and I’m grateful for parks, and other people, and home.

At the end of grade ten, one of my classmates gave my English teacher a card wishing her “a beautiful and nostalgic summer.” I can’t think of a better way to end than to pass on that wish to you. <3

1. Shoutout to Della for reminding me of the silly times in Ms. Stoyka’s class