Liberty Family Restaurant

Food for a journey. Father’s Day, 2018

A fellow Rochester-area blogger wrote about nostalgia recently:

“Nostalgia, for me, has always been mixed with an almost supreme sense of sadness. A kind that is difficult to articulate really. It’s not a sadness that makes you cry, or sleep, or want to talk about it. It’s a quiet one—one that you only ever share with yourself, with your own memories. It’s like all your past selves are standing with you, looking over your shoulder. It’s odd in that way—you’re alone in it, but it’s not lonely. It’s mournful because your past selves, your earlier lives, are gone, but you can still feel them and see them around you. You still remember them, but you can’t reach out and touch them. You can even put yourself back there, but it’s almost too sad to do it. And it’s overwhelming in the way it comes over you, like you’ve stepped back into your life after years away to suddenly realize how much has changed.”
— Sarah, The Pastiche Blog

Nostalgia comes from the modern Latin, from the Greek algos “pain, grief, distress” and nostos “homecoming,” being originally derived from Proto-Indo-European *nes- “to return safely home.”

The Old Norse word “nest” is a cognate, meaning “food for a journey.”

Nostalgia was originally thought of as a medical ailment. Swiss mercenaries had a longing for their homeland that was so strong that it would lead to sickness, failure to thrive, and even, supposedly, death. One theory at the time was that the mercenaries’ ears had been literally traumatized by the ringing of cowbells in the Swiss Alps.

I can’t conceive of an evolutionary reason for nostalgia to exist. But it does. That being the case, perhaps it is up to us to supply the “why.” One of the more intriguing discourses on this issue essentially argued that nostalgia provides existential meaning to our lives by, in part, connecting us with the past, and our past with our modern self. Almost like a show-and-tell. Nostalgia lets/forces us to hear our own cowbells again, while sharing our current experiences with our past selves (or, cows with bells) through some sort of quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance” communication, like when Dr. Strange brought Peter Parker’s uncle back to life for his birthday to share like a 5-minute catch-up session.

I heard someone opining once that memory isn’t like accessing a card catalog, it’s more like taking out a piece of putty or clay, and every time you take it out you’re not just looking at it, but sort of molding it and shaping it and imbuing it with “presentness.” So, somehow, looking back on a past self isn’t just sharing the experiences with that person, and vice-versa, but maybe imbues that person with a little presentness, and imbues the present self with a bit of the past.

In that sense, the booths of Liberty Family Restaurant are filled with so many of my past selves. They can all see my present self. My memories, the context of my 2018 life, is ink-transferred onto those past selves, and vice versa.

Liberty was, somewhat inexplicably, my dad’s favorite breakfast spot. Jim’s Diner used to be located kitty-corner from Liberty, and I once suggested we try it out. He declined, reasoning, why go there when we had Liberty right here?

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to check the specials; they’re on a white board above the coffee station in the exact center of the restaurant.

Pro Tip #2: They have real maple syrup! Seems to be off-menu. Just ask!

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My dad (almost) always brought in his real maple syrup. I bring in my real maple syrup.

One of the first times he took me on a jog with him, I remember, was a pleasant summer Sunday during the Clinton presidency. After we made it back home, he made blueberry pancakes for everyone. Of course there would have been real maple syrup then, too.

Time travel by looking at old pictures to find some good ones to screenshot for this post. I see the woodworking my dad did in the first few months of 2017: “A Miss Liberty beer flight for 7. (Poplar, cork) 2017” and “Shot glass display. (Oak, black threaded rods) 10/2016,” and some of the landscape photos he took during a commute to work . A picture from a hike in February 2017: “First hike of the year, hopefully the first of many,” and a picture of a “beautiful day at Cobbs Hill” on May 21, 2017 — a day that also has a separate, non-Xonuts-related, bittersweet, joyous, and melancholy meaning for me. In one way, my May 21, 2017, past self was more belonging in that day than any of my other selves; in another sense, he was lost there, because he knew far, far less about that day, and the year to come thereafter — far, far too little to be able to put that day into any kind of context.

On September 16, 2017, a friend and I went to Liberty, one of the very first times I’d gone with my dad not being there. Except he was.

Listen:

Wood was crafted. Beer was known to be crafted. And…

In springtime (when it was above freezing during the day and below freezing at night), the sugar maple trees in our yard would be tapped, and the refrigerator was filled with jugs of sap. Then, little by little, the sap would be boiled down into a few ounces of maple syrup. It was a little more watery than the stuff you get at Wegmans (otherwise, we’d have to boil it down to about a shot-glass-amount) but the taste was the same. It was an appropriate quantity for at least one good pancake breakfast in the dining room.

Taste and smell are particularly strong nostalgia catalysts; this is probably because those senses hit the amygdala faster. As devotees of The Xonuts Blog will know, I’m always locked and loaded with real maple syrup. My dad (almost) always brought in his real maple syrup. I bring in my real maple syrup. As my family and I ate blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup after that jog back in the 1990s, I was communing with a 2018 version of me who was eating real maple syrup’d blueberry pancakes at the Liberty Family Restaurant. And with a 9-year-old past self who was learning how to tap trees at Cumming Nature Center, and a three-months-ago past self who was at Cumming Nature Center with Dave’s nephews, who were learning all those educational trifles for their first time, too. And we were all with all of the past selves and dads at Liberty, and all of the past selves and dads in the dining room at home.

There was always some kind of music playing over in the living room. Sometimes it was mainstream,

sometimes esoteric,

sometimes unheard-of.

Ringing of cowbells.

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