This is another post that isn’t quite what it says on the label. The anthology, Life on the Border, is the other Bordertown book I hadn’t managed to get my hands on during my initial encounters with the series. So this wasn’t a reread for me, but a first read.
You can see things differently, without the haze of nostalgia. As a refugee from Minneapolis (the winters, people), I laughed a little to see it described as one of the hotspots for today’s youth culture in the introduction. There are things that change between writing and reading. It wasn’t Prince I saw play “Purple Rain” at First Ave., but Amanda Palmer. But that shift in perspective doesn’t make things less, it just makes things different. And my laugh was an ironic one because, while it wasn’t a Bordertown book that sent me to Minneapolis in the first place, the choice to move there was influenced by a book by one of the Bordertown writers.
The thing that allows for nostalgia in the first place is change. The recognition that you are different, and the past is not a thing that can be gone back to. Contemplating change is an excellent thing to be doing when reading Life on the Border, even if you are reading it for the first time.
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