Bagels and Bad Writing

I got to thinking about nostalgia this evening, as I was shaping my second batch of soon-to-be successful bagels. (All you need is this recipe - it's magic, I promise you.) The wonderful world of social media seems to have irrevocably altered the way we hold on to things, how and what we remember. Occasionally the impulse to facebook search an elementary school acquaintance, a boy I kissed in high school, overtakes me, and I find myself privy to intimate images and descriptions of that person's life. Of course these people have inevitably changed in the years, sometimes decades (decades!) that have passed since our last contact. They're not really there anymore, on that page. They wouldn't know your long hair or your step on the street. But just a passing scent in town, or a tiny window of dialogue at a biergarten, can transport you back to that moment: a moment you cherished, laughed at, despised, despaired over. Walking past your childhood home, biking by a former workplace, retracing the steps you travelled between the library and home: they recall all of those windows in time that had been previously forgotten, somehow. And there seems to be some sort of connection between this small, bright Bavarian kitchen, with its big white cupboards and ordered tea on the shelves and mason jars filled with seeds and roasted nuts and dried apples, and those moments. That wave of emotion. This keen sense of loss and recognition that tears at me, that makes me feel aged and impossibly young.