“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Beautiful and Damned‘
Celebrating the 20th year of this website has ushered me into a room of nostalgia and deeply-buried remembrances. Even our recent visit to Ogunquit had me revisiting our very first trips there, and as a preamble to those new posts, I dug up these photos from way back in 2003. The world was very different then. At that point in time, the post-9/11 atmosphere felt dark and tense, but looking back at it now feels so much more innocent and kind. Maybe the natural progression of life is toward a dimmer, darker place – or maybe that’s just my perception as I look back over the last twenty years of this blog and compare the world today as it was back then.
Taking more cues from Fitzgerald, who wrote in ‘The Great Gatsby‘ that “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window” I am looking through a window that peers out onto the beach of Ogunquit, where my 28-year-old self is posing for pictures that Andy so graciously agreed to take, back when pictures of myself were a priority, and a way, I now see, of documenting the youth that we would all yearn for in some way.
While I’m glad to have had those youthful, mirthful days, I’m one of the more uncommon people in my circle of friends who doesn’t quite dread getting older as much as others seem to be doing. The wisdom gained is worth more than the svelte figure and thick, dark hair given in exchange for it. That may change a bit as our health concerns grow ever graver, but for now I’m ok with embracing the advance of age. The other option would be bitterness, and I’m bitter enough without adding something over which I have no control.
Twenty years ago, our Ogunquit trips were usually made over Memorial Day weekend, and the vast majority were filled with rain and cold, dreary weather. Somehow we didn’t mind. It was enough being near the sea, listening to its calming rhythmic spell, even when it was wild and destructive. There was also something comforting about all the rain – it forced an appreciation for all else that was good and enjoyable – the delicious food (oodles of lobster and fish), the musical enchantment of a piano bar (back before bridal showers were such an obnoxious thing), and the simple hunkering down in bed with a then-new-boyfriend while outside the weather raged. That magic was something we would retain throughout the ensuing years, and no matter how much we cursed the rain when we were at home, we made our peace with it whenever we were in Maine.
Our time in Ogunquit was often imbued with a warm, sepia tone of contentment and calm, and some bit of prescient understanding in those early days had me writing it all down in whatever notebook I brought with me. My favorite memories were not the fancy dinners at Five-O or the current show at Ogunquit Playhouse, but the simple moments of sitting at a cafe along Shore Road and notating our adventures as tourists and fellow-vacationers ambled by in the happy haze that being on vacation affords.
“It was too late – everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Beautiful and Damned’
For all of the changes that have come over the past twenty years, and the restaurant turnover alone would make your head spin if I tried to go through everything that has opened and closed in all that time, some things have remained surprisingly, and pleasantly, the same. While the lines that furrow the brow and frame the eyes don’t go away when we are out of the sunlight as they once did, the feeling of calm and tranquility that comes from any stretch of time on the beach has stayed constant. The water still goes in and out quicker and more dramatically than you think it will, the sun rises over the sea every morning even when it’s disguised by cloud cover, and thanks to some manipulation and care by local officials, the sand shifts and swirls but never completely disappears.
Indulging in nostalgia is a trap I do my best to avoid – I find it hinders appreciation of the present moment – and my mind has typically focused on what is to come, living in the imaginary and hopeful world of future possibility rather than the still stagnant pictures of the past. There are benefits and drawbacks to both, and so I try to find a balance, reconciling the past and incorporating the lessons learned into some better future. Sometimes that helps in making more informed choices – sometimes it’s enough just being happy in the remembrance of beach days long past.
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Beautiful and Damned’
