When I stepped outside this evening it was still warm and bright in Texas. That surprised me since I had spent the past hour with my thoughts in the cool crisp weather of the state of Nostalgia. 

My mind was trapped in a loop:

 I’m staring at the patterned stamped-tin ceiling of the Red Lion Pub. When the meal is done my parents and I go upstairs into the Red Lion Inn proper, and we look at a diorama of the town of Stockbridge which contains a model of the Red Lion Inn itself. If I look closely enough will I see a little version of me looking at a model me, thinking about whether or not there is a tiny stamped ceiling downstairs?

Will he have spent the morning at the Norman Rockwell Museum looking at portraits and scenes frosted with so much small town sweetness they could be packaged and sold as a kind of fudge in Ye Olde Shoppe. 

This town has frozen itself in a nostalgic dream of itself that makes me look out for Rod Serling to monologue. It has painted itself onto the surface of a mobius strip of the way things were, but weren’t really,except in Mayberry or Pleasantville or Utopia or Eden or Madame Tussauds. People come to Stockbridge to look into a pair of fun house mirrors of time where reflections extend to infinity, going further back and further back. “I’m in now, drinking a pumpkin spice latte, looking at a Post-War then, that looked back fondly on a Depression Era then, that hugged the one-horse open sleigh days to its chest. 

It’s actually a lovely town. It’s possible I am confusing it with the place from Midsommar.