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

Sunday, September 18, 2005

I remember that the thing about noticing my grandfather violate the family rule about crossing streets was that it was a transgression of a boundary I thought impermeable between our customs and those of other people when they differed from ours. I remember, for example, the Hoges using whipped butter, which we never did and which just seemed wrong, as wrong as still others' use of margarine; that we had fresh squeezed orange juice, where others -- even the Herings! -- had frozen, which my father was explicitly against, or store-bought. I remember seeing Colgate in other people's bathrooms, when we used only Crest (the only one then approved by the American Dental Association). I remember that we didn't eat peanut butter and jelly, when they did, or eat Wonderbread either. I remember that we had salad every night, and rarely had desert (though we had ice cream on Comet Cones when my father was working late and my mother wasn't). I remember that we always ate with our parents when they were home, which other kids didn't. I remember we took baths, and at night; other kids took showers, and often in the morning.

All of this was as right as my grandmothers' phone numbers, and the voices you'd know would answer. And then my grandfather ignored the rules, thrillingly and -- though it's too strong a word -- shatteringly. And those voices won't answer either, though I still remember the numbers.

(I don't remember, I just realized, my downtown grandmother's old number, before they moved to Chelsea. But I do remember learning the new one: AL5-4895, adding Algonquin to the list of exchanges that till then for me only included the wonderful strange Trafalger, and my uptown grandmother's Wadsworth. Hugh's Endicott was next, then Murray Hill, and finally Butterfield, when I met the Sterns. The Chelsea number was the first number I remember actually learning. Trafalgar: it sounded liks something from my uptown grandmother's Austrian language, especially the way she pronounced it, trilling the R. It's association with English history was a real surprise to me.)

posted by william 12:43 AM
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