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

Thursday, April 11, 2002

I remember when I first got glasses. My third grade teacher told my parents that I was squinting in class. As far as I was concerned I could see perfectly well. I was reading -- trying to read -- a Modern Library edition of Ben Hur, by Lew Wallace, a dark blue hardcover with very thin pages and very tiny print, and I thought that was why I was squinting (if I was squinting at all). (I'd just seen some of the Carlton Heston movie.) So I didn't accept any of this squinting business, but it was off to my mother's eye doctor, and the various lenses, etc., and then the bad news, that I needed glasses. I was inconsolable, and for some reason I had to wait outside in the bright sun while they talked about the prescriptions, etc. I leaned against the building -- a kind of rough sandstone, I remember, with a swelling at its base at just the right height for me to bury my head in my arms -- sobbing. Some old ladies came by and asked whether I was ok: and I said I was, but I wasn't. And then I tried to tell myself I'd be like Clark Kent with my glasses, but that didn't help.

I remember that when I got them, I thought there had to be something wrong with them since they made the floor at school (green and white squares) seem to tilt. But other kids who wore glasses said that I'd get used to them quickly, and alas I did.

I remember determining one day at my pediatrician's office that if I really didn't want a shot they couldn't physically force one on me, and I screamed and fought my poor septagenerian doctor and her nurse and my grandmother for a full twenty minutes or so, just to see where it would go, before I finally relented. I don't know why I relented, except that it seemed to me there was no other way for this situation to come to an end. I guess they outwaited me.

I remember that there was a stand with perforated cellophane sheets of dozens of lollypops in my pediatrician's waiting room, and after a visit you got one of the lollypops. I think I insisted on one after the shot.

I remember that my pediatrician used to make house-calls, with her big black bag. I remember thorassic knocking, which I think is rarely done any more: but she would tap on my chest and back while listening with her stethoscope. I loved her. She would begin and end visits by washing her hands and making amazingly large soap bubbles as a trick for the kids, which would hang from between her thumb and fingers. I could never do it myself no matter how hard I tried: it seemed a secret art, like whistling with your fingers, another skill I never mastered.

I remember running home from school on 89th street, past the Home for the Aged on 89th and West End. On sunny days very old people in wheel chairs used to sit outside, and I remember one extremely elderly woman in particular. I used to run past, and think of them thinking of me and saying to themselves, "Look how young and energetic and agile he is. Oh, to have those days back! He has no idea how sad it is to be old and unable to move." So I thought I did have an idea, and that in my way I was entering into sympathy with them for their wistfulness about my own youthful obliviousness. But of course I was wrong.

I remember the extremely elderly woman, who would sometimes feed the pigeons. She was very thin and had a blanket over her and a bit of a wispy white beard. We became friends a little when she asked me to move her one day. She spoke only Yiddish, it turned out, but we could communicate through my rudimentary German. I would often move her into the sun when she asked.

I remember also being a Shabbos goy. When I went to buy something for my parents at Cake Masters, the orthodox Jews on Broadway would often ask me to buy them papers and to push their elevator buttons for them. I didn't know whether to tell them I was Jewish or not -- somehow it seemed impolite, as a way of trying to get out of this favor that they wanted me to do for them. And since I wasn't a believer I didn't feel that the truth that would have been important to them wasthat important. (Plus they weren't supposed to be using Shabbos goyim anyhow -- I knew that you weren't supposed to make your man-servant or your maid-servant work on the Sabbath.) Once I had to bring the newspaper up to this guys 14th floor apartment, and then he got out a cigar box full of change, which he scrupulously avoided touching. He told me to take fifty cents, and I thought, toying with the wickedness, that I could take it all, since he couldn't touch the money to stop me. But I didn't take anything at all, not even the 50 cents -- I just left.

I remember being surprised that certain of my friends were, first, Protestant, and then, Catholic. That seemed odd. There was a Haitian girl in my class whom I had a crush on who was Catholic. I found this out in French class where she did very well. There was (and still is, I think) a Yeshiva on 89th and Riverside (Chofetz Chaim, I believe, after the Hassidic master), and my tough Christian friends would talk about rumbles with the kids at the Yeshiva -- about how they would beat them up on their way to or from school. I didn't approve but didn't have the guts to disapprove, and talked myself into disliking the Yeshiva bochers. Then one day one of them got to talking to me on my way home from school, and although I tried to dislike him I really couldn't. He told me that he was surprised by the amazing bad language -- language it had been my recent glory to learn -- that the kids up the street would use. I felt slightly sorry for him, and slightly guilty for looking down on him and for feeling as though I'd just been confirmed in the superiority my tough friends claimed and which I realized I didn't really believe, as though he'd turned out to be a slightly younger version of myself, whom such language still shocked. But I think I see now he was very interested in this language, and not nearly so disapproving as he was affecting.

I remember the first time I heard the word "motherfucker." A special education kid in my school -- the only kid as tough as my friend Hugh Cramer -- cussed me with it one day, on 89th and West End. I remember being amazed by the powerfulness of the imprecation.

posted by william 11:30 AM
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