Gonna write a sentimental journal

And hey, barkeep, what’s keeping you? Keep pouring drinks for all these palookas. Hey, you know what I thinks. That we toast to the old days and DiMaggio too and old Drysdale and Mantle, Whitey Ford and to you.

— Tom Waits, A Sight for Sore Eyes

Four years after his death in 2015, The New Yorker published an essay by the great British neurologist and naturalist Oliver Sacks that opened like this:

My favourite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime — jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on — but she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.

I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up. I stopped near a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains go by, and after a few minutes Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What are you waiting for?” I said that I was waiting for a steam train. Liz looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There haven’t been steam trains for more than forty years.”

Nostalgia for steam trains, let alone that for phaetons and surreys, has diminished with the passing of Auntie Len’s generation into history and the ongoing disappearance of most contemporaries of Sacks, who was born in 1933 (and whose sympathetic portrayal by Robin Williams in the 1990 biographical film drama Awakenings you might recall).

But my own experience with aging has left me amenable to the view that it’s not adapting to the new so much as ringing out the old that will be the more onerous undertaking in whatever time we have left.

Maybe because I’m 20 years younger I don’t fret as much about the ubiquity of cellphones as did Sacks, who absolutely loathed them:

I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to their phones or other devices — jabbering, texting, playing computer games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

But I do appreciate his point about the old civilities, as when passersby would meet your eyes and comment on the weather instead of either listening to whatever’s being piped out of their earbuds or speaking loudly into their gadgets.

Back in the day,  when you saw someone alone talking in a loud voice, you knew they were in the middle of some sort of psychotic break and could prepare yourself either to help or, more likely, take evasive action. Now it’s just as likely to be someone recounting the previous night’s sexual gymnastics to a friend, without any apparent concern for passing strangers who really didn’t want to know.

I was never a stamp or a coin collector, but I miss the fact that others were and seemed to derive a lot of unaccountable pleasure from the hobbies.

Never had a chemistry set, but I wish the nerdy kids still wanted them.

I don’t miss sunburns or bug bites, of course, but I miss the time when we didn’t worry about sunburns or ticks transmitting Lyme disease.

I miss suntan lotion as opposed to sunscreen.

I miss the time when people mostly believed what they read in newspapers or in authoritative TV and radio broadcasts from what were broadly deemed to be reliable sources.

I miss the era when politicians who lost elections didn’t claim that the voting system was rigged or that judges who ruled against them were corrupt morons.

I miss hearing classic rock songs on spinning vinyl for the first time.

I miss transistor radios and portable record players you could play in the backyard.

I miss the yellow plastic spiders that made 45s playable.

I miss using Kwik Lok bread clips as substitute guitar picks.

I miss playing the bass part of Sunshine of Your Love.

I never rode in them more than once or twice, but I miss Mustang convertibles and woodie station wagons.

I miss the post-war optimism and the rise of a booming middle class.

I miss drive-in theatres and poodle skirts and Elvis and Marilyn.

I miss being innocent enough to enjoy I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver and The Twilight Zone.

I miss cars that looked like cars and movie stars who looked like movie stars.

I miss the way flattened shirts and pants used to emerge from the spring-loaded rollers of the wringer washer my parents had in the basement, next to the gurgling drain.

I miss handing my mother those wooden clothespins when she was hanging out the laundry on hot summer days.

I miss sticking those same wooden clothespins on my fingertips and pretending they were tiny crocodiles when my mother wasn’t looking.

I miss Plasticine and hula hoops and dinky toys and tin wind-up toys and plastic molded dinosaurs with tiny inscriptions of their names on their tails and Silly Putty and Meccano sets, even though everything I ever built was crap.

Which was also how Plasticine and Silly Putty tasted.

I miss the way the kindly German mom on our street carefully perused the names of the dinosaurs on their tails and taught us to mispronounce triceratops as trice-er-up-a-tups.

I miss tabletop hockey and Coleco CFL Edition electric football and, as God is my witness, the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Edmonton Eskimos.

I miss George Reed and Ron Lancaster and Tommy Joe Coffey and Garney Henley.

I miss Bobby Rousseau and Dennis Hull and Stan Mikita and Dick Duff and Terry Harper.

I miss Danny and Dick and Ward Cornell and Red Fisher on the old Hot Stove League.

I miss the “il lance … et compte!” of René Lecavalier on La Soirée du hockey.

I miss that goal everyone remembers from ’72: “Cournoyer qui s’avance. Oh, Henderson a perdu la passe. Il a fait une chute. Et devant le but. ET LE BUT DE HENDERSON! Avec 34 secondes encore!”

We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger.

I miss the anise seeds at the middle of multilayer jawbreakers, three for a penny, and 12-cent Fanta and Cream Soda and Mountain Dew and penny slot machines in outdoor roller-skating rinks at the lake.

I miss rented bowling shoes.

I miss playing Monopoly and Clue and Risk and Battling Tops with my cousins.

KerPlunk not so much.

I miss that first staggering glimpse of the Milky Way away from city lights.

I miss bread trucks and milk trucks and the rattle of glass bottles in crates and caddies.

I miss the whispers we kids weren’t supposed to hear that Mrs. S— was having an affair with Wally the milkman. I miss the good mood whistling Wally was always in by the time he got to our end of the street. I miss the melting ice dripping from the back of his truck and the snail trail it would leave on the pavement.

I miss Mad and the Silver Age of comics.

I miss Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan call.

I miss Carol Burnett’s Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan call.

I miss not knowing what a racist bastard Edgar Rice Burroughs was.

I miss Paul Williams singing “Just an old-fashioned love song, playing on the radio.”

I miss living in a time when Helen Reddy’s unvarnished armpits were a story.

I miss the Beatles on the cover of Life.

I miss that longed-for first kiss.

I miss the neighbourhood kids and all my friends as they were when we first met.

I miss my green Mustang bike with the high handlebars and the wide banana seat.

I miss lovingly teasing my little brother.

Oh, did I say lovingly teasing? Sorry, I meant maliciously tormenting.

I miss my mum and dad.

Which is where the list, if one is being honest, stops being a catalogue and starts becoming an anatomy.

Because all these things — steam trains and station wagons and jawbreakers with the little aniseed nucleus hidden like a prize at the centre of geological time — are not really equivalent losses. Some are artifacts. Some are customs. Some are entire atmospheres. And some are merely delivery systems for people who are no longer here.

One of the sneaky things about aging is discovering that memory is a terrible archivist and a brilliant propagandist. It keeps almost nothing intact. The details dissolve. Faces blur. Conversations survive only as fragments. Yet somehow the emotional weather remains uncannily preserved, as if the climate of a vanished day can outlive every fact that constituted it.

This is why the nostalgia industry — which now appears to account for approximately 73 per cent of all entertainment, politics, advertising and social media (note: completely bogus statistic cited authoritatively with the brazen, barefaced bullshitosity of Trumponomics) — gets the mechanism exactly backward. It assumes we want the objects back. It thinks what we miss is vinyl records or muscle cars or rotary telephones.

What we miss is being the sort of person for whom those things were present. No, not the sort of person. Rather, being that person precisely — still residing in what English poet A.E. Housman sadly called the land of lost content.

The distinction sounds trivial until you examine it.

Suppose tomorrow morning someone were to present us with an immaculate recreation of 1964. The same cars. The same prices. The same music drifting from transistor radios. The same cigarette smoke hanging over restaurants like weather. The same television programs. The same baseball cards in wax packs.

I would hate it (unless maybe they threw in my old bangs, still attached to my head). And I bet you would, too.

Not because it was inaccurate but because I would still be me. You would still be you.

But the crucial ingredient would be missing.

The blue, remembered hills to which nostalgia denies us visas is not the past. It is ourselves. As we were then. And we can’t get there from here.

I think this is why old photographs can feel so unsettling. We imagine we are looking at evidence. What we are actually looking at is proof of extinction.

Not extinction in the dramatic sense. Nobody in the photograph necessarily has to be dead. They may all still be alive. They may be sitting in adjacent rooms watching cable news or still arguing over whether Fred Mertz was too old for Ethel.

Yet the people in the photograph are gone.

The 16-year-old is gone.

The newlywed is gone.

Even the child himself is gone.

What remain are successor versions connected by paperwork and continuity of consciousness and a legal name. The photograph is not a window into the past. It is a mass grave of former selves.

Aging, at least as I have experienced it, consists largely of becoming a museum curator for exhibits nobody else remembers. You discover that entire continents of shared experience have disappeared.

Mention party telephone lines to someone under 50 and they look at you as though you are describing a 19th-century maritime superstition. Explain that people once drove for hours with no seat belts while children bounced around the rear compartment like unsecured luggage and they assume you are putting them on.

And then occasionally you find another curator. You mention the smell of mimeograph paper. Or the sound a rotary dial made returning to zero. Or the peculiar heaviness of a television set that required not merely ownership but commitment.

And suddenly a stranger’s eyes light up.

For a moment two private museums become one.

This, I suspect, is one reason old people tell and retell 40-year-old stories that younger people regard as merely repetitive. The stories are not merely reports. They are preservation efforts.

Each retelling is an attempt to save one more species from oblivion. The tragedy, of course, is that oblivion remains undefeated.

Dief and Lester B. are gone. The mom-and-pop corner stores and dépanneurs are gone. The little rituals are gone. The world that produced them is gone. And eventually the people who remember them will be gone too.

What remains, if anything remains, is the odd fact that love seems capable of surviving the demolition of nearly everything else.

Long after I have forgotten the make of the car my father was driving when I was five, I remember the shape of his hand (not to mention the way he used to open his door to spit out splats of chewing tobacco). Long after I have forgotten what my mother said, I remember being comforted through the Player’s Navy Cut haze.

The factual content evaporates. The meaning does not. Which suggests that perhaps nostalgia is not really directed toward objects or eras at all. Perhaps it is a form of gratitude that has misplaced its address.

We think we are mourning the disappearance of steam trains or penny candy or Saturday cartoons or old hockey greats. But what we are really mourning is the fact that these things once carried people we loved through time alongside us.

And that, unlike the ever-evolving iteration of the train engine, DiMaggio and old Drysdale are never coming back.

I just wish the barkeep would.