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, November 24, 2003

I remember the woman I called "The Prejudiced Lady" on 91st street whose dog I walked (sometimes with the Weisers' poodle). She'd broken her hip and couldn't walk her dog herself. I walked her (the dog) morning and evening. I tried to get there at 8:10, since I had to leave for school at 8:30, but sometimes I wouldn't get there till 8:25. (She'd leave the door open when she went to the bathroom for her morning rituals, so I had some leeway since she wouldn't know just when I arrived.) Then sometimes the dog would pee inside, and she'd be very angry at me. She gave me, I think, $5.00 a week. I remember once coming out of her building after walking her dog and seeing someone trying to file through the chain link lock I'd locked up my bike with. (I thought that the clear plastic sheath around the chains was part of the lock, maybe to prevent files from working. It seemed one of those odd, adult innovations that they no doubt had reasons for but which made no sense to me.) He was concentrating pretty hard, but when I said "Hey!" to him he looked up and asked, "Is this your bike?" He must have been thirty or thirty-five. When I said yes he apologized. He put over convincingly: that had he known it was my bike he wouldn't have tried to steal it. But of course I was a complete stranger to him. Nevertheless, I believed him. And I felt it was just a little odd that someone twenty or more years older than I was should be apologizing to me the way he had just done.

The prejudiced lady hated Mayor Lindsay. He had let "the niggers and the spics" ruin the city. The first word I knew, maybe from To Kill a Mockingbird, but not the second. My parents told me that it referred to people who spoke Spanish, mainly Puetro Ricans (they didn't use the word "Hispanic"). So I imagined its derivation: from Spic and Span. They were SPANish, so they were called SPICs as a kind of not-so-witty reversal. The person who got me this job -- perhaps Mark Dollard? -- warned me she was prejudiced. I think she used this term when I came in to find her watching a news show (she was always sitting on her chair, on a crocheted blanket with her metal cane in hand, watching TV) about black leaders agitating in Bed-Stuy (maybe) about no longer using books with black print on a white background. Rather black students should be given books with white print on a black background. That seemed vaguely interesting to me. But it was calculated -- really calculated, at least by the TV station -- to inflame the likes of her. I tended to maintain a diplomatic silence, though sometimes I would start arguing passionately against her. At the time my conscience wouldn't let me listen to vicious opinions without ever lodging a protest, no matter how ineffectual. Alas, things have changed since.

I remember that she used to send me to pick up pepper steaks for her dinner at the Chinese Restaurant on 91st on the East Side of Broadway. This was a restaurant I took my parents to a couple of times in those years, and that I went to a few times in college too, until I found out about Empire on 97th.

posted by william 4:05 PM
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