Back to the present

For most of the past year, the gym where I work out (is that the right term? better, perhaps the gym that I attend, or in which I happen to pass the occasional hour) has played, over its weight room loudspeakers, a single radio station: a satellite station that's dedicated to current pop and alternative hits. And while I've enjoyed learning the basic contours of today's teenager's sonic landscape, it's also been frustrating, in no small measure, because the same station has a rather unfortunate habit of almost never announcing the song's singers, or titles. So while I've heard a good slice of what's currently at the top of the charts, I know almost nothing about it. It's as if I were a tourist in a crowded market in, say, Minsk: I hear a constant stream of sounds, and yet have almost no way of contextualizing them.

Recently, though, some blessed soul managed to switch the radio (whose controls are generally hidden, and locked) to a second station: one that specializes, instead, in Nineties rock. In short, my wheelhouse: so far, over the course of about five hours of exposure, there hasn't been a song I haven't known, and in fact I still own many of the tunes played. (Or perhaps I should put it this way: this morning, in the shower, I found myself wondering why I hadn't yet heard a single song by the Nineties megagroup Live. Four hours later, I went to the gym, and the first song I heard was by Live). And so, all of a sudden, wandering into the weight room is a bit like coming home: it's as though I suddenly stumbled, in the middle of that Minsk market, on a gaggle of my college friends.

Obviously, I'm pleased with the warm nostalgia and evoked memories that this new soundtrack evokes. At the same time, though, I'm also struck by how odd it is that I feel more at home, in a way, in the past, rather than in the present. And perhaps, I suppose, the 19-year-old kids who work out beside me feel exactly the opposite: where they'd been swimming, for the past year, in a familiar pool of top-40 hits, now they're suspended in an antiquated realm of what they likely merely consider classic rock. Pearl Jam's early songs evoke, for me, conversations in parking lots, and mixed tapes, and stories of San Diego. To today's sophomores, though, it's more likely music by a 40something.

And of course Cleo is closer in age - it boggles my mind to write this - to a sophomore than a sophomore is to me. She lives, in other words, in the present - as most youths do, and always have. She's comfortable with her current routine, and any discussion of old patterns - of her favorite baby toys, or songs - evokes more of a blank look than a glean of nostalgic pleasure. Sure, we're all shaped by the past, to an extent. But those of us who love the past, and consider the present something of a foreign territory, are no longer merely young.

But, but... At the same time, I think it's also fair to say that what we all love is the familiar. I smile, while about to lie back on the bench rack, because I know the Cranberries tune that's now on so intimately. And Cleo pads confidently into her school's hall because she knows just what it looks like, and holds. Our points of reference may have been forged in different eras, but we all take comfort from a sense of the known.