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

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

I remember that my Chelsea grandfather used to wear a hairnet to bed. I think he had curly hair (like me), but the hairnet straightened it. I hated my curly hair too, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Once I tried a trick I read about in Gunther Grass's Cat and Mouse, and put sugar water on it (a kind of home-made version of the "greasy kid stuff" from which Brill Cream offered itself as a large step up), but it wasn't worth it.

I remember Dog Years, by Gunther Grass, and the day I realized that the dog on the cover was made by a hand and its five fingers. (There was also a red tongue painted into the mouth, which is why it took me a while to see the fingers.) My parents had it, but I would see it most often in the waiting/changing room at the exercise class at the Breton Hall. It was another cool adult book, but much longer than Cat and Mouse, so I never read it.

I remember Old Gold cigarettes. My father's partner, Ed Zeitlin, smoked them. When my father started smoking again (for a brief period when I was eight or nine), I think he started with Old Golds.

I remember "I'd walk a mile for a Camel," and the shoes with worn out soles that the smoker, relaxing and tilted back in his chair, showed the camera.

I remember what I thought of as sex-based distinctions between my mother's and father's preferences. My father liked Pepsi; my mother I noticed once had a Coke. My father read the New York Times, my mother the Herald Tribune. My father was a CPA, my mother a lawyer. (I remember the law professor at Columbia she worked for, Willis Reese. Later I confused him with the Knicks' star Willis Reed.) My father took the subway, my mother the bus. And my father's parents were my Ashkenazy uptown grandparents, my mother's my Sephardic downtown grandparents.

I remember that the Knicks were the Knickerbockers, and the Mets were the Metropolitans -- the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club. A friend at school made fun of me for thinking that Knick was short for Knickerbocker, but I knew I was right. I was unhappy about the word Club in the Mets' official name -- I thought it was a team. (This was before the announcers routinely talked about teams as clubs.) Club seemed so unserious, so uncaring about the rest of us, so...clubbish.

I remember Ralph Kiner and Lindsay Nelson (I can't remember who the third member of their team was.)

posted by william 6:58 AM
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