I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
          --John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason


Saturday, March 30, 2002
I remember chocolate cigarettes. We got candy cigarettes too, but I liked the chocolate ones. Both kinds had red endings to show the cigarettes were lit. On the candy ones the red was a candy glaze, painted into a sort of cavity at the end of the cigarette; on the chocolate it was brighter, redder, and thicker. The candy cigarettes were white because they were made of candy; the chocolate cigarettes had a white paper sleeve like real cigarettes. The white paper sleeve made them a little harder to eat, since somehow you had to do something with the emptying paper. I would bite it or carefully rip it off to try to make it conform to the diminishing chocolate. I remember crumpling the paper in my mouth, where you could hide it so that what was visible looked fine. But as the paper got wet it became harder and harder to slide the chocolate you were nibbling through. Until it got wet enough that it would just sort of dissolve off, but then you had this slightly sweet slightly gummy paper in your mouth. Still, it was worth it. Candy cigarettes were sturdier, and came in dusty and bleached packs; chocolate cigarettes would break before you finished the pack, but they looked so wonderful, all those chocolate cylinders packed loosely in their sleeves, and the packs were somehow nicer, brighter and I think wrapped in cellophane, to prevent the chocolate's going stale.

I remember Connie's, a store near our rented cottage in Stormville. It was about a two minute drive to Connie's, which was a general store, dark brown and musty inside. We used to get our candy and chocolate cigarettes there, and comics , and gliders made of balsa wood, and also (for more money) propeller planes powered by a rubber band. You put the plane together (I remember delicately fitting the tail stabilizer into its razored slot on the fuselage), and snapped the red plastic propeller onto the front. It had a hook on the bottom which the rubber band attached to; there was another at the rear of the body of the plane (itself a thicker oblong of balsa). There was also some landing gear of metal wires and plastic wheels (none of this was on the glider.) The plane also had dull red insignia printed on the body and the wings. You then spun the propeller clockwise (but how did we know it was clockwise?) and it would sometimes fly a little bit. The propeller would also make it roll if you didn't spin it too tight.

I remember that when we tried walking to Connie's, it was a really surprisingly long walk -- it was so fast by car.

I remember when we first visited Stormville, when the Herings decided to buy the place (we rented from them).

I remember their kids had no trouble running barefoot on the gravel, but I hated it. Farther up the hill, where our cottage was, the road was rutted dirt, and then grass. There were also the remnants of a stone barn that had stone wasp nests in it. There was a wasps' nest in the portico to the cottage too, and I got stung above the eye once.

I remember a spider in the bathroom cup (at the top of the stairs: my parents' room was to the left, and my room to the right).

I remember the first night there when they gave me sheets (that came with the cottage) they had blood stains on them, but my parents said it was ok and they somehow didn't bother me (even though I remember them).

I remember that it was there that my father first showed me Superman comics. He'd also read Kipling out loud to us: I knew Gunga Din and "O East is east and west is west" and "The Road to Mandelay" by heart.

I remember that later he got me a record of Frank Sinatra called "Come Fly With Me," which had "The Road to Mandelay" on it as its last song. But Sinatra didn't sing the whole poem, which seemed a gyp to me. I still loved the record though.

I remember that when my parents were away in Europe and my grandmother (uptown) was taking care of us in Stormville, we found a dog and were very happy. Later we drove to Connie's to get some dog food, and the dog bolted the car in sheer joy (it had been subdued till then) and we realized it must have belonged to the owners (who lived out back).

I remember that when I was very little my uptown grandparents used to rent a bungalow on Long Island (Amagansett, I now know) called Costic's house. This was before the Long Island Expressway, and it took forever to get there. But I liked it, although my only actual memory of the place (rather than of driving off over the Triborough Bridge to get there -- "Triborough" also seemed to me, like "Fort Tryon," some accented distortion of my grandmother's) was of standing in front of my grandfather on the beach and watching the waves foam and churn at our feet, frothing white and then a light brown as the sand got stirred up. It was beautiful. I remember standing there a long time, my hands held up from behind by my grandfather. Somehow the foam and froth reminded me of shaving cream -- not the way it looked, but somehow because it had both the foaminess and the insubstantiality of lather.



posted by william 7:15 AM
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