The neighborhood where I grew up in Roanoke Virginia never was trendy. But today it’s best described using one of my mother’s favorite phrases: it has kind of “gone to pot”—a reference to the process of sending defective industrial parts back to a giant pot to be melted down and turned into something new. Of course, my childhood neighborhood is not likely to be melted into something new anytime soon. 

On the other hand, having it frozen in time offers me a field day for my favorite sport: indulging in nostalgia. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to the study of history. 

But local nostalgia is far sweeter than the academic pursuit of history. Most of the buildings on Williamson Road, the stretch of road that encompassed my family’s whole life, may be falling down. Or they may have been “repurposed.” But they are still there.

The elegant Post Office (hushed, with gleaming wooden furnishings and rows of polished brass boxes) is now hollowed out and holds a small grocery. The internal parts of that historic building were moved to the main downtown post office and set up as a “display.” Fortunately. 

The dazzling Sears store, where we kids once waited in the parking lot for Santa Claus to be dropped to the roof by helicopter (!) in no way reveals its magical past. It was gutted, a third story was added, a dull 1980s façade was slapped on, and now it serves as a Roanoke City public office. Someone deserves a lump of coal.

But the truly dismal apartment building where my parents were married in 1938 hasn’t changed much at all: they were married by a Salvation Army captain, my father in traction from a car wreck on top of Natural Bridge, my mother a runaway from her impoverished immigrant life in Brooklyn, pursuing a romantic quest to take care of her dashingly handsome, thoroughly forbidden beloved. 

Today they’d probably have worked the whole thing out on What’s App. And I wouldn’t be here. 

As I drift up and down my neighborhood, or chat excitedly with the only woman left from “my time,” I find myself wondering what nostalgia will look like in the future. In our wired world, where you can push little screens to see anything anywhere, where we are so mobile that many people barely know their neighbors, much less spend their childhood in-and-out of each other’s houses . . . seriously, what will nostalgia look like? There won’t be many picture albums, since everyone’s pictures are online. (What do we do with 14,000 e-pictures anyway?) 

Nostalgia, though, won’t disappear. It is a strong force in the human experience. People who claim not to be nostalgic (starting with my brother) usually have a different way of experiencing and expressing it. Not an overtly gushy response, as I have, but a subtle, practiced set of actions that link back to how things used to be done. Maybe it’s where the silverware goes in the kitchen, or which laundry detergent is bought. Or maybe it’s the manner in which cars are parked. But it’s there.

I often wonder what nostalgia gets us. In the arts, the answer is “a lot.” Think of how much art is based in longing and yearning. The German noun Sehnsucht (sehen, to see, suchen, to seek) is a metaphor for describing a vigorous artistic aesthetic that shaped much art in the Romantic era. Seeking, sighing, longing—these provided inspiration to painters, poets, and composers in the early 19th century. They captured the past, washed it over with clouds of nostalgia, and gave it to us—treasures that could point the way in an uncertain future.

On a related note, I have some time before heading off to a place with a much longer past: Russia. I’m thrilled to be back on the Russian Waterways, a river journey that absolutely takes each traveler deep into Russia’s ancient past. Not long ago, popular interest in Russia had waned. Universities were reducing or cutting their Russian/Soviet Studies departments, since the Cold War was gone and forgotten. Or so we thought.

Moscow gleams as a modern capital, but its past, with both beautiful and terrifying realities, lies only centimeters below the surface. For that matter, our own course Imperial Russia has never been more popular, as students and adults wake up to realize they want to learn more about the powerful, and once-again relevant Russian Bear. 

Back here, with the hot days of summer, you may be dipping a toe into your own past: visits to childhood homes, boxes of photos and letters pulled out of too-hot attics, and satisfying (or hilarious) afternoons spent baking cookies from your grandma’s recipes.

These nostalgic journeys are just as valuable as any academic undertaking. They are our personal versions of history, literature, language, and the arts. We don’t always have time to explore them. But when we do, let’s give them the honor they deserve. Print some of those pictures so your children will have photo albums to look at. Find something to cut out (not too many newspapers around but you can find something!) and make a scrapbook. Or at least pile up a shoebox filled with treasures. And don’t ever feel you are wasting time as you stop everything to do this, looking back, and teaching the lessons of the past forward into the future.