its genetic...

one of my favorite author/narrator is Garrison Keillor.   i don't think of him often but when i do, the last few lines of Lake Wobegon instantly appear in my head,

"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known."
Garrison Keillor.

it may take a few times to read it and digest it to understand its full meaning.  all i know is that it delights me.  its really not a stretch to compare his statement to Dorothy when she woke from her technicolor coma,

Dorothy: "Well, I - I think that it - it wasn't enough to just want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em - and it's that - if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!"

i am oddly pulled to "old world" pictures and collectibles.  i don't mean "old" old, but nostalgic replications of "old".   Thomas Kincaid has often tried to lure me in to collecting his porcelain houses complete with street lights, snow, carriages and hurried shoppers, men tipping their top hats to passers by as they make their last minute purchases,  women with long flowy dresses, adorned with fancy hats, furs to block out the cold,  white gloves and buttoned shoes, window shopping in pairs.  it all looks so beautiful and when i see these things there are feelings that well up in me.   feelings as if i have lived there, known that life and i become melancholy and home sick.  how funny to be home sick for a time that i never lived.  perhaps that time never did exist.  artists and the like do like to prey on our yearning for simpler, more romantic, more polished time.  i.e. Norman Rockwell.

  

" the good old days".  what does that mean really?   these villages Thomas Kincaid sells never existed in my experiences.  but yet i feel the memories.  a friend, a long time ago suggested that it was just in our genetic makeup to be attracted to that unknown era which Thomas Kincaid loses himself in his gardens, landscapes and his collectibles.  i suppose you can buy the fantasy through installments of more money than you can really afford.  yet you still feel the yearning.  its as if by owning these beautiful things will make us feel comforted and back to our youth.  but again,  my youth never looked like that.

i tried my best for many years to make that "certain something" come alive in my home.  God it was so exhausting i finally cried uncle.   a full blown Martha Stewart nervous breakdown.  no more electric reindeer on the lawn for me.

here and now really isn't all that bad.