Nostalgia: Jennifer Hirschman

Growing up the oldest of five kids I have memory upon memory of movies, re-enactments from those movies, inside jokes, wrestling matches, riding our bikes all over town, and lots of music. We grew up with small amounts of money, but huge amounts of love. We had one TV that took about five minutes to “warm up” before we could see the picture, no video gaming system to be found, and one phone on the wall in the kitchen.

This meant spending our days making up games, riding bikes, recording commercials on our tape recorder, and on our bad days fighting about anything and everything. What we didn’t know back in those days was that we were making memories that we would still be talking about today; stories we would tell over and over again to our own children, whether they wanted to hear them or not.

Something else I never considered when I was young was the feeling I would have when hearing an old song we used to listen to. I didn’t realize that when I would watch any of the Rocky movies with my kids it would take me right back to laying on my living room floor with freshly popped popcorn, surrounded by my brothers.

When I long for those days of being a kid and begging our parents to PLEASE let us rent a VCR and a movie for the weekend, I don’t think about the difficult times, or how life was hard for my parents. I just miss the laughter and the stories that always seem better or funnier ten years down the road.

This summer we had a family reunion with my siblings, our families, and our parents; 27 of us to be exact. It was the first time we had all been together in five years. It was full of stories and reminiscing. We watched our kids play together and make memories of their own. We laughed at the same stupid things we always have and teased each other endlessly, picking up where we left off.

I know people around us get tired of our stories, especially our spouses, but it takes us right back to being a kid again. For a short moment I can escape the worries of being an adult and being responsible for my own family. I can just reminisce and remember things being much more funny than I’m sure they actually were.