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Let me be honest up front: I don't want to go back to my childhood. (Adolescence would be worse yet.) I don't particularly want to live where I did then, either. Life wasn't any simpler; it was just complicated differently. I wouldn't trade my current problems for the ones I had then, even if in some ways those ones were smaller.
But damned if nostalgia doesn't get me sometimes.
I walk past the food trucks on MLK, and remember in high school how sometimes my mom would come home with a plastic bag full of shish-kebabs, still hot from the food cart selling them down on the main street with that red light cars only mostly stopped for. (I wish I could remember its name. The important streets in Quito were all named after important dates, which made remembering them for history tests in Spanish class much easier.)
Or I remember sitting up on top of the roof of that house, looking out over the whole city--we were high enough on that hill to get an impressive panorama--and wondering which of the green-tipped hills near us would be built over next. When we first moved into that house, cows would (rarely) meander past when they escaped from the pastures up the hill. By the time we left, we were solidly in the middle of a neighborhood, not on the edge of it, and we couldn't take the dog up the hill to run wild between grass and trees, because it wasn't safe anymore.
Of course, the dog was dead by then. It's not all good nostalgia. We were away in the United States on furlough, some friends--I can't recall who--were house-sitting, and our beautiful, stupid, aggressive dog was poisoned. Probably by the same people who robbed the house next to ours three times, and robbed our house once. We never did get a break-in until poor Cessna was dead. He was poorly trained, didn't get enough attention, savaged smaller dogs twice... We weren't very good dog owners. I don't think any of our neighbors held it against us, though. Having a big, aggressive dog was pretty much the way to not get your house robbed. Some time after that the whole street chipped in for a street guard, but he was held up at gunpoint twice. Still. Fewer robberies on the street, after that.
That's the thing about nostalgia. It's all mixed up with the good and the bad. I remember the sharp, dry-dust taste of the air in that city, and I remember the nose bleeds that would hit every time I went back to 3k meters above sea level after more than a weekend anywhere lower. Endless perfect temperatures and hailstorms that would flood the school basement. A high school with no violence and relatively little social bullying, and endless days of boredom after I'd exhausted the school library and had no other source of books to turn towards. All the excitement of when classes were cancelled because a transportation strike shut down the city, all the irritation when a tear-gassed riot meant not being able to go into various neighborhoods without eye-watering pain for a few days.
I expect everyone's childhood is like that. A little good, a little bad, a lot of things that seem more important in hindsight than was realized at the time. What I need to get over is the effort to recapture it. The Quito that's there today isn't the one I grew up in. The person I am today is not the person I was in high school. Trying to get back there does no good at all.
But sometimes I miss the view, the air, the dinners. And the dog. He deserved better owners than he got.
But damned if nostalgia doesn't get me sometimes.
I walk past the food trucks on MLK, and remember in high school how sometimes my mom would come home with a plastic bag full of shish-kebabs, still hot from the food cart selling them down on the main street with that red light cars only mostly stopped for. (I wish I could remember its name. The important streets in Quito were all named after important dates, which made remembering them for history tests in Spanish class much easier.)
Or I remember sitting up on top of the roof of that house, looking out over the whole city--we were high enough on that hill to get an impressive panorama--and wondering which of the green-tipped hills near us would be built over next. When we first moved into that house, cows would (rarely) meander past when they escaped from the pastures up the hill. By the time we left, we were solidly in the middle of a neighborhood, not on the edge of it, and we couldn't take the dog up the hill to run wild between grass and trees, because it wasn't safe anymore.
Of course, the dog was dead by then. It's not all good nostalgia. We were away in the United States on furlough, some friends--I can't recall who--were house-sitting, and our beautiful, stupid, aggressive dog was poisoned. Probably by the same people who robbed the house next to ours three times, and robbed our house once. We never did get a break-in until poor Cessna was dead. He was poorly trained, didn't get enough attention, savaged smaller dogs twice... We weren't very good dog owners. I don't think any of our neighbors held it against us, though. Having a big, aggressive dog was pretty much the way to not get your house robbed. Some time after that the whole street chipped in for a street guard, but he was held up at gunpoint twice. Still. Fewer robberies on the street, after that.
That's the thing about nostalgia. It's all mixed up with the good and the bad. I remember the sharp, dry-dust taste of the air in that city, and I remember the nose bleeds that would hit every time I went back to 3k meters above sea level after more than a weekend anywhere lower. Endless perfect temperatures and hailstorms that would flood the school basement. A high school with no violence and relatively little social bullying, and endless days of boredom after I'd exhausted the school library and had no other source of books to turn towards. All the excitement of when classes were cancelled because a transportation strike shut down the city, all the irritation when a tear-gassed riot meant not being able to go into various neighborhoods without eye-watering pain for a few days.
I expect everyone's childhood is like that. A little good, a little bad, a lot of things that seem more important in hindsight than was realized at the time. What I need to get over is the effort to recapture it. The Quito that's there today isn't the one I grew up in. The person I am today is not the person I was in high school. Trying to get back there does no good at all.
But sometimes I miss the view, the air, the dinners. And the dog. He deserved better owners than he got.