Fabricated Nostalgia

Anemoia is feeling nostalgia for something you never experienced. What about the regret of being in time and a place you were but did not know it well enough to fully experience?

In my early 20s a friend took me to a bodega in Spanish Harlem to buy weed. I do not remember why we went that far north to buy. Both Tompkins Square Park and Washington Square park had resident dealers standing around mumbling at passers by that they were selling. I would return to that bodega a few more times.

Even to my naive eyes the bodega was an obvious drug front. There was not much stock and what they did have was covered in dust. In 1991, a dozen or more years after he hit three home runs in the World Series, there were Reggie Bars on the shelf by the register. On a pegboard across the counter hung items in yellowed and faded plastic.

To purchase weed you just asked for a “Buddha bag” and they sold you a tiny ziplock with a few grams of dry seedy marijuana. On the bag was a sticker with the word “budda,” which we pronounced like Linda Richmond on Saturday Night Live. Even then the dime bag economy was shrinking the amount of pot you could get for ten dollars.

That version of pre-Giuliani New York City does not exist. I only lived in a glimpse of it. I yearn to go back and soak it in.

Every place I have lived I experienced a pervasive feeling of having just missed something. A sense that it was better before I arrived. Living in Hawai’i was the first time I was able to connect with this sense of loss. It was not a matter of being unable to enjoy where I was in the moment. I experienced a looming vague idea that if I had just arrived sooner everything would be better.