Nostalgie

I went back to Laguna Beach the other day. I just had a yearning to revisit some old haunts, wander around, and be with my own thoughts. We were in Orange County, and I felt a little guilty for not using every moment of my time there tending to certain family members, but I'd spent much of the first day with my mother and that was depressing enough. I told Monte I needed a break from being a good person. "Good person? I think you've been striving for Jesus," he said, in his blunt Monte way.

So I took a leisurely drive down to Corona del Mar and North Laguna. They're still great areas, the kind of places where you can smell the sea, whose side streets have cute houses and flower gardens, whose citizens sit with friends drinking lattes after their bike rides. There was the old Port Theater, and the wonderful drum-shaped toy store sign, and the Indian restaurant we always liked. I went past Begonia Park, where Teresa, Donna, and I once shared a heart-shaped cake to celebrate my pending marriage, and the alley by our apartment on Acacia where we sat around with friends and hosed the mud off our bikes. But the area has gotten decidedly upscale. Or upscale-er. Now there were pricey boutiques, an excess of salons, a feeling more precious than I recall.

Further south, it's the usual story: hills where we once rode our bicycles have been transformed into fancy shopping centers and housing developments for people with money, and our funky little trailer park community, El Morro, is vanished, razed to make way for an RV campground. I knew all this, but I still felt a pang as I drove along PCH, whose every rise and curve I could recall from the many days my bike wheels rolled along them. Some young lyra-clad cyclists went by in a group, punching their pedals hard, maybe having fun, but they looked awfully serious.

The town of Laguna Beach was even more cluttered with personal memories, so familiar, yet so strange. Naturally, it was crowded with visitors, as it always is during the summer, and many of the old standby stops I remembered were gone, but it was unequivocally, distinctively Laguna and every corner reminded me of something. Looking up, I saw the tall hills above the canyon road, looking down, there was the grate on Forest Avenue into which I once dropped the keys to the VW bus while there with my little girl, and oh my, we were stymied. (I don't remember how we solved it; I wonder if she does.)

There was the Presbyterian Church where she attended preschool, and the art supply store that still smells the same --a stuffy, almost-kindergarten smell of paper, paint, and creativity, and the movie theater where I saw "Stand By Me" with Steve and Monte in 1986.

I tried to find a certain consignment store I used to like but came instead to a very expensive designer resale shop run by a woman from France. I peeked at a few price tags...even the stuff on the 50% off sale rack seemed out of my league. I sighed and mentioned wistfully to the woman that I used to live here and was visiting, and how everything seemed different.

"I feel zhat way in Paris," she said. "Eez not my Paris anymore. I have only zee memories. But eez a very strong feeling. Sometimes I feel so sad, my heart, eet hurts, and I think why do I have to feel this way? But then I think eez kind of beautiful too, this sadness. Nostalgie...this eez zee word for it. It eez how it feels to be alive."

Forgive my ridiculous attempt at writing in a French accent, but I'm trying to let you hear her, and you'll have to work with me here, because she really did say this in a very Parisian way. And the matter-of-fact and fatalistic ease with which she embraced the subject reminded me that all of us walk around sometimes with our hearts a little achey, and that when we go back to a place where we once lived, it is not the place we're yearning for but the years that have fled, and the people we have loved. It hurts. There's no sense denying it. But yes, it's kind of beautiful too.

Eez very French, in a way...mais oui?