Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I am drippingly sentimental about anything that makes me yearn for my youth: old Sesame Street episodes, Members-Only windbreakers, and 1980s synth-heavy British bands like Loose Ends, Soul II Soul, and New Order. In no way, is this a complete list. Back then, I blissfully saw the world through innocent eyes; the complexities of the era were beyond my reach.

Like those wearing red hats signifying their longing for another age, I, too, embrace melancholy and wistfulness. Those are awesome feelings. Feelings that make us feel socially connected, and our authentic selves. But on the surface, mental travel to a “simpler time” is a quick and narrow journey. It blocks out the larger context of our memories or the less-than-perfect reality for other people.

Often nostalgia can look like that woodblock key handed to us at the Interstate rest stop. It opens a door, but the past is really a little room and kind of smelly, yet, in our mind, exists as a golden age. One we urgently grasp for.

We hold on because, on many levels, we are in the midst of a sea change with strong winds. Our current state of political gridlock in America is mostly a reaction to perceived demographic shifts. Nostalgia, like what we see being weaponized today, requires loss; some exist forever in a state of mourning because of the belief that something has passed from their lives. Much of what fuels the agitation in political discourse is this sense of the elegiac.

Today’s complex though seemingly easy poem, understands the powerful set of symbols and archetypes that are employed in the service of toxic nostalgia, images that exploit people’s unwillingness to forsake the past and its harmful values. The future, the poem seems to say, is not only an inevitable fact, but is rightly willed, by forces of good.

After the Farm was Sold to FedEx
by Carlie Hoffman

My grandfather is still alive
and living upstate, smoking
on the porch with one leg up.
He’s watching a cloud of boys
toss a baseball back and forth
with such grace and economy,
sneakers kicking dust
into apricot mouths,
sweating backs colorful and clawed.
He is watching them move
toward their most
primitive selves: flaming horses
in the old barbed-wire farm.
So much of what’s been lost belongs
to the ground—
newspaper headlines, the family
name—all drunk
and dreamed away. Soon,
every voice around 
wills the present tense.
Like their country’s flag,
all the mothers wave dish towels
out the kitchen windows
for their sons to come inside
and wash their hands.
Wait, he says, and the wind
catches. The boys drop their mitts
offhandedly on the grass.

“After the Farm Was Sold to FedEx" by Carlie Hoffman from WHEN THERE WAS LIGHT © 2023 Carlie Hoffman. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.