“I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.” ― Kris Kristofferson
Nostalgia (from classical Greek νόστος [nóstos], "return," and ἄλγος [álgos], "pain") is a feeling of sadness mixed with pleasure and affection when you think of happy times in the past, also described as a feeling of longing for a past time, situation, or event. Literally, it would be something like the pain produced by the impediment of return.
Nostalgia is, then, the sadness for the absence or impossibility of return; of the return of someone, of the return of something, of the return to the homeland, of the return of anything past that we still consider good and desirable. That is why nostalgia cannot be an affection proper to childhood or even to youth, these have hardly any past, they have all the future ahead of them, it is an affection proper to maturity and above all to old age.
I must be getting old then.
The more I take part directly or indirectly in the unraveling of the current Chivas saga, the more I find myself thinking back to the Good Ole’ Days when Club Guadalajara might not have had the best players in each position but we had the players with the biggest hearts stalking the pitch.
From my youth, names slip back from the past. My first memories of el Rebaño Sagrado. Ricardo "El Snoopy” Perez, Fernando “El Sheriff” Quirarte, Eduardo “El Yayo” De la Torre, “ El Emperador” Claudio Suarez. Skilled, up to a certain point, definitely yes. But mostly all heart.
Heart. Resilience. Passion.
When reminiscing over the recent history against Cruz Azul with my good friend, erudite, Chiva Historian, and Archivist, Joel González, many names came to the table. Onofre, El Cadaver Valdéz, Jair Garcia. But the name which kept popping up was that of Adolfo Bautista Herrera. El Bofo. Famous for his “Mi Angel” goal against Toluca, Bofo was all heart and all Chiva. Many thanks to Joel for taking a moment to look into the Chiva past.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and remember Adolfo Bautista, the Rebaño's fourth-highest scorer against Cruz Azul, with seven goals, behind only Eduardo de la Torre, Ramón Morales, and Omar Bravo. Of those seven notches, the first two he made wrapped in Red and White stripes were the ones that stuck in my memory.
His first match with Chivas against Cruz Azul was in the Clausura-2004. The Rebaño was losing 3-2 when the Bofo Magic appeared. When Bautista was in the zone, he was poetry in motion. Bofo tied the match with a shot, low and towards the far post of the legendary Cancerbero Cementero, Oscar “El Conejo” Perez. Nothing to do for Perez.
Even less to be done in the second goal when Bofo struck the definitive 4-3 game-winner, a chipped shot which ballooned into the net, culminating with the Bofo Shoe Throw as he tossed his shoe into the crowd.
I wonder if Bofo ever wonders about what happened to all those shoes.
Recently, more and more so, I have had to look back hard into our Chiva Collective Memory, as has also probably been the case of many other Chiva-Bretheren, to find comfort in days of Glory Past, searching, as I mentioned in my previous mid-week ramble, searching for that which dies last. That which we call HOPE.
Nostalgia is that hope to bring the past to the present. It is an "algia" (ἄλγος), a pain provoked by memory, which is a way of bringing back, albeit always incompletely, what is past, what is impossible.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote that repetition and recollection (memory) are the same, except they move in opposite directions. Memory or nostalgia is the trigger for hope and this, in turn, the trigger for change. MEMORY>HOPE>CHANGE. We relive our past to fire the flames of what we expect will come to be. Both notions are romantic and melancholy until there is action. Until there is change.
Let us hope that the action to spur the change will come soon.
Después de todo. No solo de memorias vive el hombre.
