I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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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

Friday, March 29, 2002

I remember PF Flyers. They had some wedge in the heel that helped you "run your fastest, jump your highest!" (Or was that line from the Keds ad?) They were Pepsi to Keds' Coke.

I remember "roofing" -- in a variant of stoop ball we'd throw the ball against the side of a building. If you could throw the ball so that at its apogee it got higher than the building (and hit the side on its way down) that was called roofing, and you got bragging rights. This came up when they opened a new playground near P.S. 166: we used to play in this arid back alley during recess, but when the new playground opened just down the block there was a lot more to do. The playground was bordered on one side by a very tall building, and it was that building that the really athletic kids could roof. I certainly couldn't.

I remember monkey-bars. Now I think there are only a couple left in New York, because they're supposed to be so dangerous.

I remember swings, and lore about kids who could swing so high they could flip over the bar. In swinging too there was the equivalent of roofing -- getting higher than the bar. I don't think I ever saw anyone do it, but people claimed they had. Hugh Cramer told me about "centrifugal force," which like the speed of light seemed a magical concept.

I remember different surfaces in Riverside Park: hexagrams which were bad for skating on, rough black asphalt, and smoother, newer cement. There was also the Promenade (which you can see in You've Got Mail), surfaced with a newer, more pebbly asphalt. After reading Hugh Atkinson's The Games (one of two or three books whose sex scenes I remember vividly and would read over and over again: they were better than the sex scenes in The Hundred Yard War, a football book which never was explicit for long enough -- I kept somehow imagining that if I read it with more attention it would somehow unfold its hints into something entirely satisfying: I thought real sex would do this too, at that time) I used to run on the Promenade every morning, intending to be an Olympic runner. Later I joined the track team and we would run around the Reservoir in Central Park.

I remember that in The Hundred Yards War (was Dan Jenkins the author?), there's a sex-scene that begins with one of the players pissing outside into the ocean -- "a phosphorescent stream" -- and a woman comes out to where he is and touches him "with her hand, a soft, warm, working hand." But then? Not too much. Whenever I pissed outside in the pitch dark I would be disappointed -- with the book, I think -- because piss just isn't phosphorescent.

I remember kids climbing over the cyclone fences into the playground -- they were too high for me, and I remember the feel of your Keds or P.F. Flyers when you stuck the front part of your sneaker into the fence as you tried to climb up -- unpleasant. There were two places where there were holes in the fence at the bottom, and I'd always go through those, sometimes getting my jacket caught.

I remember -- more fastidiousness for symmetry -- that I hated the training wheels on my bike because they didn't both touch the ground (the black asphalt) at the same time. I thought this meant there was something wrong with them or they were mis-installed. I insisted on getting larger training wheels that effectively turned the bike into a trike.

I remember my red trike.

I remember riding with only one training wheel, a bit later, and then finally learning how to stay up on a bike -- also on the promenade. Hugh Cramer tried to teach me, but it was my father who succeeded. He also taught me how to swing up into the saddle and to swing off. He could also push his bike one-handed just from the saddle, which I never quite mastered (and still don't know whether I would say I can do).

posted by william 7:33 AM
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