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

Monday, April 07, 2003

I remember Mrs. Kahn. I think she was my teacher in the second half of fourth grade. I can't quite place when she was -- Mrs Brenner was my fifth grade teacher, and I remember a platinum blonde teacher I had in fourth grade (I thought her hair was gray, but my mother told me it was platinum blonde: an odd oxymoron, like white gold), whose name I just can't quite recall. Mrs. Park? Except that was the name of our French teacher. Miss Luberg was my great third grade teacher. Miss Comiskey my terrible second grade teacher who got upset when I answered "What's 3-5?" with the the result "negative 2." "No! If you have three pencils and I take five away, how many will you have?" I'd already considered this: "I'd owe you two." It must have been a cold winter, because when I told my father about all this, and he asked (very impressed with me) how I knew about negative numbers I told him that I knew that there were temperatures on the thermometer below zero. Mrs. Nichol (hah! until typing it now I always thought it was Mrs Nickle) was my superstar first grade teacher. She was wonderful. But Mrs. Kahn. I was always in trouble with her. One day my father said he was going to see her. I didn't realize it was parent-teachers night. He asked whether there was anything I wanted to tell him before he went. I didn't. This was a mistake I always made, not 'fessing up when a pardon was offered in advance. He left. I said to myself: he'll never find her. He probably looked up her name in the phone book. But he won't know how to spell it: Caan, Kahn, Kaan, Cahn: there must be a lot of them. He'll give up. Unfortunately for me it wasn't my bedtime yet when he returned. I remember hoping against hope (I guess I knew he'd find her) that the minute hand would make it to the 12 before he made it home, and that I'd be safe asleep. But no, there was his key in the door, and his long dark navy coat: and there he was, shaking his head at me. He'd found her.

posted by william 8:13 PM
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