Nostalgia Like in Once More to the Lake

Nostalgia Throughout these past few years I’ve noticed my parents restricted my freedom more and more as I grew away from adolescence and grew into adulthood. It had begun to finally frustrate me and the last straw was during Sunday dinner when my dad banned me from working a part time job. I was confused because with my age I really don’t need their permission but thankfully mom explained, for dad was a man with few words, about their unreal desires to keep me their kid forever and stop them from ageing away in time. I felt horrible that through my dad’s eye he saw me as a walking, ticking time bomb reminding him of how old he is. At first I did not see the big deal about it, but then all of a sudden an overwhelming flood of fear consumed me when I realized that like my dad I also feared my age, for I no longer had and never could duplicate the comforts I had in my teenage High School years. These past 4 years of my life I had been pretty much care free occupying myself with typical teen stuff like homework, sports, and friends but now at this moment, minus the homework, it has all slipped away. The sports that dragged me from bed at 6 o’clock on Sunday mornings in order to get to practice in time, or the friends that would joke around until 1 am in my garage even though we had morning practice the next day, were all gone now that everyone chose their own path after High School. It was at that moment I realized that what White had experienced in “Once more to the Lake” was about the same of what both my parents and I had experienced through my shift from High School to College.

In White's essay the theme is the passage of time and the changes that it brings. Returning to the lake after many years with his son, White confronts multiple changes as he struggles with the illusion that the world of his childhood, and his present existence within it, remain the same. On the first day of fishing he observes the campers swimming in the unchanged lake “one of them