I recently spent a couple of days with friends I hadn’t seen in decades. Something about the pandemic, as you may have noticed, has led many of us to want to reconnect with people we haven’t been in touch with for a while. I think the pandemic has led some of us to appreciate the value of our relationships with others more, and maybe to take them less for granted. That’s the case with these friends of mine, with whom I spent a lot of time in my 20s. We reconnected and had a Zoom conversation about a year ago, texted here and there after that, and finally made arrangements for me to go up to New York State and spend a couple of nights with them at their summer house on the Delaware River.

It was a great visit. You know how it is; when you see people who you haven’t seen in a long time, you don’t know how it’s going to be. I have reconnected with people who, either they changed or I changed (or maybe both), and I found I no longer had the desire to continue to be in touch with them. These friends in New York, happily, were just as I had remembered them; warm, welcoming and caring, with the same sense of humor and liberal attitudes.

It turns out that their house is not far from Bethel, NY and the site of the famous three-day Woodstock Festival of 1967. There’s now a Woodstock museum there near the site, and we visited it while I was up there. Woodstock was such a pivotal moment in popular music and for the whole “hippie generation.” I wasn’t there, being a few years too young, but of course I had the album, which I practically memorized. In the museum, the mementoes, the visuals and the recordings relating to that weekend, plus integrated exhibits that portrayed the major events happening in our country during that era and a sampling of the trends and styles of those years, the whole mix really took us back to those times. The museum was very well done and it’s worth a stop if you’re ever in the area.

I’m not usually a nostalgic person, but as I drifted from one exhibit to the next, I found myself feeling a pang of longing for those times. And at first, I wasn’t sure exactly why. I didn’t literally want to re-live those times, which included the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement and numerous assassinations. I think it was partly that I loved the music of the era. My stage in life (my teens and 20s), the lower level of technology and a slower pace of life also made things seem simpler. And it was also a time of idealism, and renewed hope for a future society in which there was less violence and more peace and harmony.

So I think these are the things my heart was responding to. It’s easy to romanticize the past, of course, but I had that moment of cherishing some of what felt so good about those times: music that spoke to me, greater simplicity, idealism and hope. The times we live in now feel so different in many ways.

But that’s a conversation for another day.