My sons circa 1988

Although I write about the past quite often, I don’t think of myself as nostalgic. Last week, for example, I uploaded hundreds of photos from a CD-ROM to iCloud. Even though I enjoyed revisiting my life, I wouldn’t want to return to those not-so halcyon days of diaper training or middle school dances. Looking at these images of yore, I was pleasantly reminded of how our little family took almost everything in stride, even Hurricane Hugo. 

But we did and were almost always happy ­– that is, unless the Braves lost, the Gamecocks lost, Al Gore lost, or work drama intruded, which, of course, it did perhaps more than occasionally. 

After her stint as a stay-at-home mom and kindergarten aide, my wife Judy worked as a school psychologist, and I taught at a prestigious prep school. Nevertheless, despite the occasional workplace kerfuffle, we loved our jobs, and I don’t see how you can be happy if you don’t enjoy your employment.^[1]

In fact, there was only one job I have enjoyed more than teaching at Porter-Gaud and that was bartending at the Golden Spur, a bar located in the student union center in the Russell House at the University of South Carolina back in those enlightened days when 18-year-olds were allowed to purchase alcohol in addition to being eligible to join the armed forces.  

You punched a time clock at the Spur. Since you could get draft beer at happy hour for a quarter, I suspect that my hourly wage would seem downright Medieval nowadays, but being poor wasn’t shameful back then. I didn’t own a car until I was 25. I got by on my charm. 

But man, what fun I had slinging the suds, engaging with the clientele, flirting with customers and my fellow bartenders. I never looked up ruefully at a clock ever. And then other times we’d bartend frat parties at Belle Camp. When I matriculated at USC, I was anti-fraternity, but these parties made me realize that I had been too severe a moralizer. These parties were fun. One time, a preppy girl took my hand, pulled me away from my station at the makeshift Budweiser truck mobile bar with beer taps sticking out its side, and started dancing with me. She did some kind of sorority sway; I did the wa-wa-tusi like Bela Lugosi. 

Your friendly (and apparently stoned) Golden Spur Bartender

It was fun, memorable. 

So sure, I think about the past occasionally, but I don’t dwell on it. It’s the future that hijacks my thoughts when I lack the good sense to savor the eternal now. The planet is coughing up phlegm. The Fertile Crescent is virtually uninhabitable. Connecticut-sized slabs of glaciers are sloughing off into an ever-rising ocean. 12% of the Republican Party think that the Deep State is run by extraterrestrial pedophiles. Millions of people worship a wrestling promoter.

So yeah, I can see why nostalgia might serve as a refuge. I ain’t judging.

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^[1] Confession. I don’t use the word “kerfuffle” in conversation. It’s a Britishism. Perhaps I chose it because I just got back from Oxford. Maybe the background conversations that didn’t register took root somehow. Anyway, I don’t like kerfuffle. It’s too cute sounding. I should have used my ol’ go-to snafu synonym: “conjunctification.”