“Are you sentimental?” I asked my barber friend Jed as his clipper glided in measured movements around my head.

“Absolutely,” he replied.  “I have a whole chest full of things I’ve saved from previous days.  Things I go back and look at from time to time.  Things that maybe don’t mean so much of themselves, but for what they conjure up.

Are you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “because the more I think about it, the more forked the road of definition in my mind becomes.  What really is sentimentality? Is it different per person?  Is everyone sentimental in some area or another?  Or, are some not at all?  And are you sentimental just from certain times in your life, such as younger, more energetic times?” I wondered.

“Well,” he said, “My wife isn’t very sentimental.  She’s more of a minimalist.” 

A light switched on in my newly barbered head.  “Can someone be a sentimental minimalist?” I asked?

Because I was suspicious that if such a definition could be had, then maybe that would fit me. 

I ruminated on our conversation as I drove home.

When I sat down to the dinner table, I asked my good wife and sweet daughter, “Am I sentimental?”

A look passed between them.  That feminine thing of theirs got the question all hashed out and answered with nary a word said between them.

“Yep,” said the daughter. 

“Yeah, I think so,” said the wife.

“But,” I protested, “I just blew close to 10,000 files off my computer the other day.  Someone who is sentimental doesn’t do that!”  (That bit of info may alert some of you who hit me up for song copies as to your future success in such queries.)

“Yep.”  They both said it, almost in unison.  I knew the fight was over, and I have been left to my personal cogitations of it since.

Deleting those files made me feel as though I had just swallowed some powerful, cathartic drug.  And yet, I look at the worn spacebar that my right thumb has swatted innumerable times.  I see where the heel of my hands have rested, sweated, and sometimes shook below the keyboard in shiny spots that mark the pressure points.  I look at the worn area on the mousepad and think grimly that lately it has made me hit it fairly aggressively to get my demands. 

I think of all the journeys that this machine and I have made together, think of the different countries, cities, and locales we have visited together.  I don’t like to think of changing over to the new machine that is supposed to arrive here in a couple of days, and yet I look forward to the new machine.

I have this old backpack.  Every time I hoist its pleasant weight up on my right shoulder, or both, if it’s a long haul, I know I’m with an old chum.  Back in the day when I first purchased it, backpacks were a new thing to me, yet quite old by then to the world at large.  It has a buckle that got itself slammed in a door in Toronto.  It carries the faint, still familiar smell of McDonalds French fries purchased in Germany and portaged some 2 miles back to the hospital where my good wife awaited them.  Okay, it doesn’t still carry that smell for you if you pushed your nose into it, but it does for me.  It leans in to Indian food, anytime we are around it, because it was there, on site, when the real stuff was placed in front of us in that country itself.  It’s been stained with my sweat and tears both, and kept pace with me as I raced to a flight that hardly had the patience to wait for me.

It has a pocket where I know my wallet will be, and a place especially for my sunglasses.  This computer has kept it company in its rearmost pocket for about as long as I’ve had it.  If anything is missing from any of the pockets, a small bit of panic ensues, at least in my wife.  That all being said, though, I sometimes look at new backpacks.

But I’m not sure any of this defines sentimentality. 

Maybe it’s nostalgia I’m actually trying to define.

Recently, one of my friends who lives in Kentucky left me message. 

And I heard it, ever so faintly while he was talking.  A train horn.  It stopped me right there.

Another time, I was driving in central Kansas, and saw smoke up ahead.  I recognized it for what it was and had the A/C turned to outside air before we got there.  I inhaled deeply, for as long as it lasted.  It smelled just like it used to here in western Kansas.  You never forget a stubble fire smell.

An old friend of mine, I called him Uncle Alan, although he really wasn’t my Uncle, said the most lonesome sound for him was the sound of the table being set for a meal, and being sick in bed.  I dreamt about that sound as I fell asleep while sitting in ICU beside my wife in the wee hours of the morning.  It provided a sense of normalcy in an otherwise very unnormal time. 

I suspicion I don’t have anything definable or tangible to relate sentimentality to like my friend Jed, but maybe, just maybe, the womenfolk have a point.

Perhaps it’s like a phrase from an old poem that,

‘Somehow, I’ve learned how to listen

For a sound like the sun going down.’

And I realize the sun doesn’t make a sound when it goes down, yet the feeling it gives makes a sound to my soul that is peculiar and mysterious only to me.

Startling in their clarity and exquisitely beautiful are the charms of certain moments.