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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.
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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
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
I remember spending Christmas with the Clurmans in Quiogue. They were Jewish but had a tree. It was a white Christmas, and somehow that was when I became aware that white Christmases were rare, that it usually didn't snow in New York or Long Island until January. I think that was the weekend I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull there, and either I loved the name Jonathan and so read it, or that it made me love the name Jonathan, so that I liked Jonathans after that, from the book of Kings to my best friend Jonathan D, sister of Belinda D (whose name made me interested in Pope).
Saturday, December 25, 2004
I remember that my father was strongly opposed to the plastic Christmas tree the Hoges got one year. (The Cramers also had a tree, and so did some Jewish and half-Jewish friends.) It seemed interesting that my father was so against it, so that I took it that somehow plastic Christmas trees were Christian -- normal American, like baloney or peanut butter and jelly which we never ate -- whereas Jews, or at least Ashkenazi Jews, supported real evergreens.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
I remember climbing a mountain with my Uncle Cico, the athletic smoker and my mother's cousin and blood brother who had a lot of sex and died young. I remember that this was either in Yugoslavia -- the Yugoslav Alps, I guess, or in the Dolomites, at Cortina d'Ampezzo or Tre Crocia above Cortina where we stayed and hiked a lot.
Cico was willing to be very adventurous, and so we went up meadow after meadow. I remember being struck by all this land thrust up into the sky.
I'd seen the Matterhorn, I think on our first trip to Zurich, and that was a mountain (one moreover I'd seen in a movie -- not I think Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" -- in which I remember my shock at the scene of a murderous climber cutting a rope, and little else) which seemed pure mountain, rocks and icy peaks thrust into the heavens. Something to climb, something to see.
But as I say, the mountain we were climbing was land: meadows, fields, rock walls, and it was strange and odd to keep finding these fields in the sky. And I remember thinking each time that one more pitch (not a word I knew then) would get us to the top; and finding at the end of every rise another rise, with more strange, aerial land, behind it. We never did get to the top, and I remember this as frustrating, strange frustration though to find that land extended, since that's what land does. But it was so odd to have it just go upwards and upwards, and it made me feel, I think, what extension really was: land but not ground (not Wittgensteinian ground, anyhow, which is neither true nor false).
Sunday, December 19, 2004
I remember the emergency pull-off bays on the West Side highway, on the west side of the road, between the highway and the river, which we always passed late at night, going home, downtown, from my uptown grandmother's or even north of that. I didn't know what they were. The didn't have the Emergency Stopping Only signs to be seen now. They were just these neat half-moons that could fit a car or two if they were angled, and reminded me of the semi-circular arches in my wooden blocks set -- the kind that hollowed out a regular sized oblong block, and that I think were supposed to be catenary and that I think weren't. It was as though these parking spots were flattened blocks on their sides. And sometimes there would be cars parked there, on hot summer nights, between the highway and the river. I was always curious about them, and about the credentials and expertise that entitled some cars to stop there. They seemed glamorous, full of know-how, part of that other life I would know as an adult but didn't yet and didn't have any explanations for. It's not that I knew that people were kissing there, or having sex; I didn't. But I knew that something was knowable that I didn't know, and it was purely glamorous, and had to do with the general world of the city and not with my own particular world.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
I remember (home with a fever today) how my father would shake down the mercury thermometer before taking my temperature (also that they called having a fever "having a temperature"), and how my parents would have trouble reading it when they were done. I didn't see why it was so hard till college, which was the first time I did it myself. I didn't understand, either (and still don't), why you had to shake the thermometer down, since the mercury thermometers that told the outside temperatures rose and fell. Why don't medical thermometers fall?
I remember my parents telling me that mirrors were backed by mercury. I think this is true, though for a while I thought it was false, that this was one of their fallible bits of information, like pi equalling exactly 22/7.
And I remember our English teacher -- Mr. Donahue, I think, though it might have been Mr. Baruch -- telling us how little balls of quicksilver would go squirting around over a surface if you tried to catch them. He said that we might have had this experience if we'd ever broken a thermometer. I seem to recall the experience itself, but I might just be recalling imagining it.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
I remember my father taking me on some Saturday mornings to -- I think -- NYU alumni association sponsored performances at Town Hall. But I might be conflating times he took me to NYU events and times he took me to Town Hall. At Town Hall I remember in particular one performance: an actor doing Browning's "Pied Piper." He was in costume, with pipe, and so on, but otherwise alone. He was very good. He must have done other things, but all I remember is the Pied Piper. I think we'd just learned the story in school -- at any rate it was relevant. My father might have read it aloud. I know that we had a record of James Mason reading it, and I wonder if there's any chance it was him. But I doubt it -- at least the actor I remember doesn't at all coincide with my adult sense of James Mason.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
I remember my uptown grandmother's pots sometimes boiling over -- big pots with soup or knoedel in them. And it just seemed part of the cooking process: she knew what she was doing, and boiling over was one of the things she did. She certainly acted that way -- she was never upset about things boiling over. And the food was always delicious.
Friday, December 10, 2004
I remember playing in sand, and not knowing what the seive was for. Pails go back as far as I remember, but the seive was something different. I remember seives around the sandbox in Riverside Park on 93rd street, and also on the beach with my uptown grandparents -- Jones Beach or maybe Long Island Sound. I picture them as plastic, but have a bare sense that they were metal, the pail especially. I remember learning that they filtered the sand from the larger stones, but that the result was the reverse of what you wanted: a seive full of stones, rather than fine sand. Only later did I somehow learn that you could seive the sand into the pail.
I also remember my parents taking us to the Lido off Venice, and my being amazed by sand like talc, outside the Lido Hotel. But this was years later.
And I remember talcum powder, which my father used after shaving, before it turned out to be bad for you and they started using cornstarch instead. I loved the smell. (They also dusted it on you in the barber shop after doing the back of your neck.)
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
I remember going to the gas station once and being served by an attendant smoking a cigarette. I knew you weren't supposed to do that. My parents asked him what he was doing, and he told them, with an air of great expertise, that if you pour gasoline on a lit cigarette it would put the cigarette out. I didn't know whom to believe -- him as someone who did this for a living, or my parents who after all were this time in sync with the government warnings: extinguish cigarettes. I thought the attendant was probably right, that is right most of the time, but that it might be a stupid thing to do anyhow. This was one of those instances where I tried to picture what would happen. It was hard to imagine the cigarette not going out if you poured a liquid on to it.
I remember that when I was much younger my mother told me that a diamond was the hardest substance in the world. I was very impressed by this, which came up with respect to her diamond ring, and my uptown grandmother's. (I associate this memory with the terrace outside my grandmother's building, overlooking the river.) But thinking about it, I had challenged her, asking her whether a cinder block dropped on a diamond wouldn't crush it. (I think I'd just got interested in cinder blocks. At the time I thought, somehow, they were solid. I remember it was later that I discovered they were not just very large cement bricks.) She said it would, but that this didn't matter, since that was just a question of scale (though she didn't put it that way, naturally.) Of course, we both were wrong. A picture held us captive -- we couldn't picture it otherwise, even though it was otherwise, just as with the gasoline and the cigarette. I was just as glad to get away from the gas station: my parents might have been wrong, but in this case that embarrassing possibility didn't seem as important as usual.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
I remember different food habits and utensils, that marked family differences. That is, I remember that the Schubins, I think, had corn-cob holders in the shape of corn-cobs that you stuck into the ends of the cobs; also they ate their corn with butter, which we didn't. I liked the corn-cob holders. I thought they should be symmetric (since they had different designs) around a cob, but no one else seemed to care. I remember that most of my friends had salted butter -- the Hoges I'm sure about -- whereas ours was always unsalted. I preferred salted. And I remember that the Hoges, again, had plastic mustard dispensers, sort of like at the movies or ball-park, maybe even sometimes pump style, with crusts of dried mustard around the spout, while we always had glass jars and used knives and spoons. We never ate peanut butter in any form, while most of my friends brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, sometimes at least. We never ate jelly either, but always jams, preserves, and marmalade (and honey too). But I got to eat PBJs on white bread at my friends' houses too. And they had buttered bread with cold-cuts, which we didn't. Salted butter. After sleepovers we got frozen orange juice, whereas at home it was always fresh-squeezed. I liked those more American utensils and products better, and it always felt a little bit like going out to eat when I ate at their houses.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
I remember, my memory jogged by just rereading Catcher in the Rye, that when we were doing public speaking I think in seventh grade the kids in the class would yell "Digression!" whenever the speaker went off topic. I remember the way Peter Rogers would lean forward, listening intently, ready to yell digression if a syllable went off, as though being the first to answer in a quiz contest. I have some sense that I was absent the day the procedure was explained. (Or maybe this happened at Riverdale, and it was Eric Grabino, and they'd all learned to do it before I got there in tenth grade. And it's interesting that this makes me realize that Eric as the Peter-Rogers figure at Riverdale, although we were never really friends, and Peter and I were.) So somehow I didn't quite know what a digression was, in this sense, and why you were allowed to task someone for digressing. The whole idea of the speech seemed digressive: you were up there talking about something you wouldn't otherwise be talking about. It wasn't as though there was some point you actually wanted to make. And now this whole blog is a kind of digression.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
I remember writing thank you notes for my bar mitzvah presents. This was at my desk in the Monaghan's house, the house we were renting in Quiogue, near Westhampon Beach (when we passed the sign coming from New York my sister and I would always cry, "I'm in...[our rear seat passing sign] Quiogue!").
This was the same desk where I wrote my frustrating report on Oklahoma, a state I'd picked only because of the musical which contained "Oh what a beautiful morning," the song my uptown grandmother said my fallen uncle liked so much, (although I liked getting all the mail from the Oklahoma chamber of commerce, and learned a lot about Tulsa); and where I would occasionally write the postcards to Wengen that my grandmother had left for me to send when she and my grandfather were away for the summer.
The thank you notes were a shock, the downside to the reward for all that practicing for the bar mitzvah. I thought the reward was the end of things. But then my mother came with all these cards and envelopes, and I found myself writing to all her friends.
And what I was thanking them for was mainly Savings Bonds, the ersatz money that kept tantalizing me in the envelopes they came in. I'd see something that looked like money, green and elaborately arabesqued, but never was. I remember my downtown grandparents had a lot of savings bonds stuck in their desk drawers too, and it just seemed so pointlessly adult to have this money which wasn't money but only future money, money that belonged to some unimaginable future that only adults would care about (the bonds came with a chart of dates showing their absurdly discounted rates every few years till maturity; and there was an ad campaign on TV which sold them as gifts which were far cheaper than their face value, a value which made kids' faces light up), money that is now for me long spent.
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