Nostalgia?

Okay, so I was driving to work the other day and I while I was waiting at the fifth stoplight (all of them red. Just my luck.) I noticed the car in front of me. Well, of course I noticed, it's just, I mean, I paid more attention to it than I normally would any other car. Anyway- The car had a long white body and a brown strip along either side. I recognized the car immediately as a station wagon. But then, that's just like saying something was a van or a truck. It surprised me then that this car, this station wagon, was a Buick. Thats the reason why this car caught my attention. I had no idea that Buick made station wagons. With this model specifically, I tend to try and avoid it. Whenever one passes me on the road I look the other way as a wave of nausea sweeps over me. I really don't like station wagons.

The reason? Well, I'll tell you. With painful, unwanted childhood memories, I try my best to block them out. Unfortunately, whenever that happens I find myself utterly surprised when something shakes my memory. Like the other day looking down my nose at the hideous car. Ugh. You see, my family use to own one when I was younger. In fact, I don't remember owning any other car (aside from my dad's work car). This was our family car. Thankfully it was replaced with our fifteen-passenger-van.

That car had a lot of memories, most of them still make me sick. The car was long, as station wagons go, and the flat bed in the back folded out into two benches, on either side of the car. As children, one of our favorite games was to see how many kids we could stuff down inside the space between the benches and still be able to close them together. (Youngsters that we were, the idea of having the ability to still breath wasn't something we cared about. Air was air and it was always there.) I think the most we ever got was three, unless you stuffed in the littlest ones first.

We did all of our traveling in that car; vacations, church, store trips, everything. As a child the most vivid memory I have with that car is my constant feel of being car sick. That smell of hot fabric and the rush of heat whenever we climbed inside. The car was always the same as the weather. If it was hot outside the car would be hot too. If it was freezing outside the car would be freezing too.

So, sitting there in my car, in my twelve year old Buick Skylark, I felt a rush of memories sweep into the front of my head which left an awful, familiar sickness. An after-taste of my childhood. Eww. Does nostalgia have an opposite?