Not Nostalgic for Nostalgia

When I was around 8 years old, I stumbled upon a television news report about Parkinson’s Disease. I sat down and watched in horror as the reporter tried to interview a patient whose replies were incoherent and whose arms and legs writhed uncontrollably. I did not understand what I was viewing, but I just knew that I never wanted to have that disease. Sometimes you get what you don’t want though I am lucky to have gotten the rigid type versus the flailing type.

That was in 1974, the year that I fell out of a maple tree and snapped the ulna and radius bones directly next to my wrist leaving my hand hanging at a really strange angle. My sister, who was reading in a nearby lawn chair, heard my wrist snap and rushed over to help cradle my wobbly hand. Off to the emergency room we went.

I followed the broken wrist with a litany of self-inflicted childhood injuries that required stitches or tetanus shots. By self-inflicted, I mean how was I to know that if I used several glass Pepsi bottles for target practice while out in the woods with my pellet rifle and didn’t clean up the glass that I would later trip and fall onto that same glass and that a shard would cut my leg so deep that it caused my brother, who was washing his car when I stumbled out of the woods, blood dripping from my jeans, to exclaim loudly “That’s bad! I can see the bone!” before taking me to the emergency room to be sewn up, leaving a thick scar still visible now 50 years later? I should have known, but no helicopter parents flew over my childhood. I am a member of the last generation free from suffocating societal oversight.

I had not thought of those days for a long time until I recently found a box of old photographs from my childhood. Photos that should have triggered a wave of nostalgia to wash over me, but didn’t. A strange reaction since I have always been prone to nostalgia.

To me, nostalgia can best be described as as a yearning attached to a memory triggered by some stimulus of the senses. I suppose that the memory could be positive or negative. I cannot imagine being nostalgic for a painful memory, so maybe that explains why I don’t look fondly back on those childhood accidents. Or maybe that’s the difference between nostalgia and PTSD. Anyway, another explanation revealed itself to me.

Neuroscientists think that nostalgia comes from the release of dopamine into the brain’s reward center. As my Parkinson’s advances, I can confirm their suspicions as I have become less nostalgic and more indifferent, detached, and pragmatic. This is different from apathy, another hallmark of Parkinson’s that I have discussed in prior posts.

So, I was somewhat surprised during the recent renovation of my old BSA motorcycle to experience a now increasingly rare bout of nostalgia. The Spring weather triggered a memory of how pleasant it was to ride up around the Saluda watershed. Thinking back clearly, they were hard rides, exciting rides, but really not pleasant rides.

I had forgotten that the BSA is a beast to ride. Hard to start, slow to stop, with a hot harsh vibrating engine and requiring daily maintenance, the reality of the renovation and of keeping the BSA roadworthy dissolved the nostalgia. Or maybe my Parkinson’s meds had ran out.

Either way, I have become more of a pragmatist than I used to be. After going through the necessary pre-ride checklist - battery charged, headlight working, fuel level and oil level good, spark plugs clear, chain tensioned and tire pressure affirmed - then watching my son ride it around the yard I felt the very non-nostalgic urge to sell it.

Nostalgia can be seductively dangerous. It tempts you with the promise to repeat an emotion that is captured in the past. Not only has the Parkinson’s made me not nostalgic for the past, I am not even nostalgic for the nostalgia that I used to have. I have no idea if other Parkinson’s patients experience this lack of nostalgia. Maybe is it peculiar to us “long haul” patients.