Travel theme . . . nostalgia

Another of the niche areas I have identified to try to build some copywriting work within involves travel.

I haven’t, myself, gotten to travel a great deal.  But I have done some traveling.

As a writer, I find the idea of travel starts the minute you walk out your front door.  Should you walk, rather than drive or take public transit, you may find things right outside your front door.  I believe it was Thoreau who referred in one of his works to having traveled widely just within the town of Concord.

You can also mentally travel back in time and recall how things were in the place you grew up as opposed to how things are now.  Several of the municipal electric companies in this area build their annual calendars around precisely this concept.  Sometimes, you can even do some of this vicariously. 

I’ve often tried to reconstruct the landscape of bygone days in my paper journals:  and from time to time I’d get an occasional assist in that from my older brother.

I grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts.  I remember when Lynn was still pretty much a GE town.  I remember the Hillside Five and Dime and Sandy’s Barbecued Chicken in

Wyoma Square

.  I remember the Elm Farm grocery store in downtown, and the A&P near the high school I attended.

I’m not quite old enough to remember the movie house heyday, which my oldest brother does remember.  If I’m not mistaken, and the height of the age of movie houses in Lynn, the city reached a total of 12 theatres.  At least one of those was a drive-in, but most were regular movie play houses:  smaller versions of what we today call the cinema.  I remember the Paramount, the Warner, and Lowe’s, and vaguely recall the drive-in.  I don’t remember the Olympia and any number of others.

Much the same when I do travel:  I like an element of old-time-iness to the travel.  This is why I’ve enjoyed visiting places like living history museums, taking cruises on old-fashioned steam vessels, or travel by horse-drawn carriage or steam locomotive.

In some ways, there are forms of writing that revive that spirit of nostalgia.  Handwritten journals capture the way of the life of those who kept them.  And there’s still a certain grace and elegance involved in correspondence that involves letters written and exchanged through the regular postal service versus using e-mail.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons people so look forward to Christmas season mail:  that remains the time of year . . . even if as some people I know do defer the mailing of Christmas cards until about this time of the new year.

This allows them to separate the preparation and mailing of Christmas cards out from the rest of the bustle of Christmas and give the correspondence the attention it deserves.