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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
Sunday, October 29, 2006
I remember the bathtubs in my grandparents' houses, which I would use when I slept over. My uptown grandmother's tub was bigger than ours -- taller, just as her ceilings were higher and the after dinner fruit she put out bulkier. The water filled more quickly and deafeningly. There was a blue streak down the porcelain where the water crashed into it from the spout. The feel of the porcelain was rougher, less glossy, more matte. Her tub all seemed older, not statelier like her curtains, but erect and somewhat joyless in a way that would have been stately and patient if our own tub hadn't seemed so much more obviously how things should be. I guess a place for the flow of water should not look pursed, as hers did. Or maybe the tub just seemed that much more appropriate for my grandparents to take a bath, but not at all appropriate for a kid. It had no knowledge of me or what my bathing would be like. Floating toys would have made no sense to it, with its strange soap (again bulkier than the Dial we used) and odd rubber non-slip soap-holders, and narrow ledges (here it offered less than our did, in keeping with the way it just wasn't accommodating).
I remember when my downtown grandparents moved downtown the thing I was surprised by was their tub. It was small, and had only two faucets and not four. It was the first tub I'd ever seen where you had to pull up a piece of metal (on what's called the "diverter spout") to take a shower. It light blue and not pleasant to take a bath in. She had a rubber mat so you wouldn't slip when showering, which also meant that this was basically a shower not a bathtub. There wasn't much light if you sat in the tub either, so it was hard to play in and hard to read in as well. She also had a reservoir toilet, as opposed to the toilets at home and in my uptown grandparents' house, which was the standard flush of water from the building itself -- you never had to wait for the reservoir to refill. I liked my own bathroom best.
Friday, October 27, 2006
I remember spending the week with Nina and Yossi at Rae and Celeste's house in Lexington while my parents packed up our Cambridge house and moved us to Sharon. I remember some level of jumping on beds, pillow fighting, but I may be mixing memories; I spent such a lot of sleepovers there. In general, I was happy enough to be with my best friend (Nina), and I didn't mind having my brother along too much. But by the week's end, I longed for my mother, and I remember one telephone call with her, telling her how much I missed her, crying, asking why she hadn't called me more often. As best as I can make out, she'd figured that if she spoke to me less, I wouldn't think of her as much, wouldn't miss her as badly. During that phone call, somehow it came up that they had seen Tootsie, and that it was not an appropriate movie for children.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
I remember not understanding why Casper the friendly ghost had a round head when all the other ghosts had a little triangle of sheet jutting upwards where their cowlicks would have been. (I now realize those triangles must have been meant to represent the corner of a sheet. Or maybe not?) Casper couldn't have been bald -- he was too young. And it turned out the angled ornament could be found on other juvenile ghosts too, friends of Casper's, and not just adult ghosts. I liked Casper's cue-ball smoothness, which went with that sense he gave of always smiling. But I just didn't understand the iconography on a purely surface level.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
On memory:
My almost-five-year-old daughter just informed me that, "It's complicated, because grownups can remember when their babies were babies, but children can't. And it's funny, because it's so close to them."
Monday, October 23, 2006
I remember being among the last three to finish the red workbook in first grade. I remember not caring about this; my teacher and others (parents? classmates?) wanted me to feel shame, hoped that this or something would motivate me to work faster or more consistently, but I didn't care. What would be the point of working faster? If you finished the red workbook, you had to do the blue one. Why rush to the next boring job?
I remember finding red dots on my stomach when I went to the bathroom one day, sometime in the spring. I showed my teacher, and I was sent home with Chickenpox. While I recovered, my father made me finish the red workbook and some horrible textbook from Hebrew class, too, where you had to copy the letters in script over and over again.
What I really wish I could remember is what I thought about, what I daydreamed, instead of working. This was before I began reading, before I sneaked books into classrooms to read under my desk. I wish I could recover the activity of my mind before I loved books. What was in there?
I remember my friend Miri Midlo saying, "I'll come to you," when she meant, "I'll come to your house." I remember working out that she and all my Hebrish-speaking Anglo-Israeli friends must have imported their syntax from Hebrew: avo eilaikh. I remember knowing that this was not English, that it was wrong. And then I remember hearing myself say, "I'll come to you," when I meant, "I'll come to your house."
Friday, October 20, 2006
I remember holding grudges against literary characters. Specifically, I found Jo's rejection of Laurie so painful I could barely tolerate reading the story. Even years later when Laurie married Amy and Jo married Father Bhaer, I was still bitter, still brokenhearted. The other case I remember was a lasting and murderous grudge against King David's general Yoav son of Zeruiah. I hated him for killing Avshalom and making David cry. I have since realized that as a general and statesman, Yoav did the right thing: He had to end the civil war and reinstate David. But back then I cared nothing for strategy or politics. I loved David. Only his feelings mattered.
I remember that on the first plane trip I took, when I was eight and we crossed the Atlantic, I noticed a fly on the back of one of the seats as we were getting off of the plane. I thought of it flying at six-hundred miles an hour in the plane, as though I were a seasoned denizen of what for the fly would be a science fiction world. And I thought about how strange it would be for it to be four thousand miles away, an awe-inspiring distance for the fly -- and yet here it was, across the world, on a different continent, still buzzing around. And here it is, being remembered decades later, in a different millennium, that particular fly.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
I remember leaving the camp social early so that I could be up to see the hot air balloon festival. The fantasy of the social--that we would get dressed up and go to the ball, that like Cinderella we'd be recognized for the hidden beauty usually masked by our clumsy, clunky, everyday selves. Unlike the wicked stepsisters, our whole bunk was in it together. In the hours after dinner and before the social, strange alliances arose. Girls who never normally spoke put up one another's hair. We shared blow-dryers. We voted on each other's outfits. Even the squeamish took off their glasses and put in contact lenses, exchanged application tips and makeup, and drew on blue, green, brown, black, grey, or purple eyeliner. We had all seen those John Hughes movies, so we knew how it worked: you were your undesirable, ordinary self until some opportunity or crisis (in our case, the social) arose and then you transformed into a different, truer version and found yourself loved by the one you liked best. Apparent losers had the most to gain, but somehow their stylishness became a cause for the cool girls, a measure of their power to transform, their ability to become Pygmalion or, for us, Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club.
With regret, I left the ball with my mother before midnight, before finding a prince of any kind, and dutifully went to bed. In the cold before dawn I dressed in a new long-sleeved dark rose dress made of sweatshirt material. It kept me almost warm as I stood on the hill in the shocking chill, watching with my family as the balloons and the sun came up. I was thrilled to see them, felt myself heated and alight and floating as one by one they ripped their colors away from the grass, up past the trees, brightly up into the colorless sky.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
I remember my mother telling me the the stories of The Merchant of Venice and Maupassant's The Necklace, while we walking somewhere in the neighborhood. (Why were we walking? My father was the one who took us for leisure walks... I don't think my mother ever did by herself.) I think I had asked her who Shakespeare was, and she was introducing me. I remember thinking that it was perhaps not impossible to avoid shedding a drop of blood or overweighing the flesh -- one could collect what spilt and put it back into the body. (!) So I wasn't as fascinated by the story as my mother was trying to get me to be.
There is a set of late ninteenth/early twentieth century stories that I associate with my grandparents' house, because I read them there, from my mother's books. And Maupassant is in that set, but I'm pretty sure that I read him only in Bangalore, and a lot later than the other stories.
Monday, October 16, 2006
I remember spending a long summer afternoon with a young woman who asked me a lot of questions. I was about five. She was a member of our havurah community. I remember hearing some of her conversation with my parents, some murky yet light notion of these being tests, her wanting to learn something [from me? was she in graduate school?], and then I remember spending time with her in her apartment and on her second-storey porch. She had a table the shape of a spool of thread, possibly a telephone-wire spool. I loved this. It reminded me of dolls' houses or of the scene in Dumbo with the mouse's things: a spool for a table! But this spool was grownup sized, and I could be the mouse. I liked all the things she asked me, all the things she wanted me to do; I liked her; I liked having her attention all to myself all afternoon. Her warm focus felt like sunlight.
I remember that in the winter she killed herself, and I overheard hushed, lost talk at the havurah about car exhaust and the note she left, and where could she be buried, and about her parents' grief. I remember asking my mother why she did that and my mother saying that sometimes people hurt and feel sad in a way that they think will never go away.
I remember refusing to wear sandals without socks. On my left foot and foreleg, I have and had a pretty big hemangioma, and I hated it. I wanted so much to be symmetrical. I remember drawing on my right foot with purple marker to try to even things out. I remember the bitter realization that I loved toenail polish on my right foot, that toenail polish made the right foot glamorous, grownup, perfect, but that even with toenail polish, the left foot could never be redeemed. I remember refusing to go outside without socks on, knee socks on in the heat, and my father calling me in from upstairs, calling me in off the street, sitting down with me and talking me out of the socks. I don't remember what he said, but I do remember sitting on his lap and crying.
I remember walking with my mother along Mass Ave by the new bus depot, crossing the street, making up rhymes about the unfortunate foot and the kinds of questions people asked me about it:
Did you go into the kichen with a very careless cook?
Did you get jam on it or other sticky gook?
Did some purple bugs come sit there for a look?
And there was one about kicking a train, or something like that. I don't remember it. I remember sitting down and writing out each of the rhymes on half a folded piece of paper, and illustrating them. On the front I wrote, "Roz's You and Foot Book" in big letters, and decorated the title with flowers. My parents photocopied the pages, stapled them into booklets, and I colored in some of the copies. My first publication.
I remember a summer morning eating Rice Crispies for breakfast at the little wooden table by the wall in our kitchen on Locke Street. I couldn't have been more than 6 years old, since we moved before second grade started. Somehow I realized (read it? mom read it to me?) that there was a competition in which children were drawing and submitting their pictures of the Rice Crispies box, and I decided to enter. I drew the box--Snap, Crackle, Pop, smiling around a big bowl of cereal--with colored pencils. Sitting still and doing this, out of the blue, on a whim, and working from start to finish without interruption felt luxurious. Summer meant that my mother didn't insist I had to go anywhere or do anything; on the contrary, she lent me her fancy pencils to color with. I remember feeling proud of my work. There was a surprisingly fair resemblance between what I had made and the image on the box. I knew that older kids would probably send in better pictures, but I wrote my name and age on my picture and felt that for myself, it was a good job. I must have finished at least kindergarden, for I remember addressing the envelope myself. When, sometime later, I received bike reflectors and decals with Kellogg's characters on them in the mail, I felt delighted that my picture had won the contest.
I remember fingerpainting with my mother. This was a big deal, so we must not have done it all the time. She put down newspapers on the kitchen table, and then she rolled out a long strip of thin off-white paper and got several jars of gloopy paint out of a box (but I have the feeling there weren't all the colors--I'm remembering green and blue and black, no red), and we proceeded to make a mess. I remember feeling surprised that one could do this at home.
I remember shrieking "yikes" on the playground in nursery school. Four of us played superheroes together (I was Batgirl, and Justin was Batman, but I couldn't tell you the names of the other two, though Supergirl was my best friend at school). This mostly meant we ran around and tried not to be trampled under the feet of the big kids, the kindergardeners. Yikes was to be shouted breathlessly and gleefully after any near miss. We thought it a grand word.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
I remember the first time I read to myself. My mother had been reading Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry* to me, and I lost patience waiting for her to have time free to read, or maybe I lost patience watching the words over her shoulder, waiting for her to finish the word, the line, the page. I took the book and sat in my father's big green chair in the library and read the rest to myself. Crazy freedom, needing no one, to read all alone, so fast, to fly through the words light as my eyes would carry me. I remember finishing the last page and bursting into angry tears: too short, too short! Where was the rest of the story? For a long time, my parents would ask me how I liked a book by inquiring whether it was a chapter too short.
*Around the same time, I remember sitting in the bathroom with my mother while she explained that it was important to remember the names of the people who had written the books that you loved. I didn't understand why this was, but I believed her.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
I remember thinking of time in increments of one and two. So, an estimate of a period longer than two days but shorter than a week was '(the day after)(the day after)+ tomorrow', and so on. I think I did know how to count, but hadn't formalized the idea of addition. Also, the Telugu words for 'the day before yesterday' and 'the other day' are the same, and perhaps I generalized this as a conceptual rule.
Monday, October 09, 2006
I remember another episode of pure and amazing fun. (I think this was at the Dollards' house, or maybe a friend of theirs, somewhere in upstate New York. This was when I thought "the country" and "upstate" were synonymous, so it might not have been there. The house had a cat in it, I remember.) With some kids I sort of knew, but not well, and some friends of theirs, we went running through a large field of grain. It was amazing and wonderful to get lost in this grain forest (sort of like Carey Grant hiding from the plane). We played hide and seek and chased each other -- I think the cat might have joined us. We could hide completely and sneak around and run and trample the grain too. It turned out we were out there for what must have been several hours; it got dark which seemed part of the whole experience of manic secrecy, of delightful and slendidly unexpected ways of hiding. Eventually the grown-ups came looking for us. I think they were a little upset, but not nearly as angry as we might have expected when they did find us. I think our good humor was contagious. I seem to remember that after supper -- hot dogs and soda and potato chips and desert! -- the other kids got to go out again. But my eyes were completely swollen. I sat on an overstuffed armchair, itching and half-blind as they examined me -- it turned out I was seriously allergic to something. I couldn't believe it. It might have been the cat; no one was sure, but I wasn't allowed back out in the grain, so now the day really was over and night had come. We went home soon after.
I remembered this day years later when we read Catcher in the Rye. I understood Holden's not feeling like one of the kids anymore, not just being allowed to run around in the grain.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
I remember watching Osnat and Duby's dachshund deliver her six puppies. I don't remember how my brother and I ended up in the back room of their apartment, standing back but still right over her nest box, trying both not to crowd her and to see everything. How were we summoned? Were we home that day or did it just so happen that she delivered after school, at a time we could be called? I had a sense of this being generous on their part--unnecessary and broadening and kind of them to allow me to witness the event. Yossi was friendly with Duby, and we were all very excited, but they didn't have to include me.
In memory, it seems so brief. I think she had already had one of them by the time I arrived. She was a beautiful red color, proud, wily, and affectionate with Osnat and Duby but not with us. I can't remembere her name. Pilush (peeLoosh)? The image I have of the births was that they blooped out like those water tube toys--long little cylinders of puppy, each in its own little sack. She licked each pup off and then got on with birthing the next. It looked easy, which now strikes me as completely amazing, but seemed ordinary, obvious, at the time. The first and the last, both girls, looked just like her, but the four in the middle (three boys, one girl) were black with tan edging, like their father. The eldest was very soon the biggest, noticeably stronger than the others. The youngest was my favorite. Once their eyes were open and they began moving around, I played with them nearly every day until, one by one, the puppies were sold or given away. When spring came, they were gone, and I went back to my normal life running the streets and playing house in the entrance to the Cardo with my beloved friend Miri Midlo.
I remember not knowing what an acorn was. Which is to say, being confused about what everyone else seemed to know--that acorns came from Oak trees (which ones were Oak trees?) and that the twirly-whirlies came from Maple trees. What were those really called, and why did acorns get to have a special name that everyone knew when the twirly-whirlies, which you could spin from a height (the top of a wall) to the ground like a helicopter or open and stick to your nose to become a rhinoceros, did not?
Monday, October 02, 2006
I remember one Yom Kippur when my mother and her mother-in-law (my uptown grandmother) weren't speaking. My mother consented, for the sake of family harmony, to come with us to break fast, but declared in advance that she wouldn't talk to my grandmother. When we were there my father expostulated with her: "Come on, honey, it's Yom Kippur." We were standing by a breakfront in the hallway just between the dining room and the living room, which we were about to enter: my grandmother had gone to the kitchen to do something for a minute. My mother thought about it for a moment and relented, much to my surprise. It was a happy ending!
But it turned out it wasn't a complete ending: my mother was now willing to appear on good terms with my grandmother, but it also became clear to me that it wasn't like when she forgave me, when whatever she'd been angry about was over. And even more to my surprise, since I thought of my grandmother as wonderfully open about all her passions, it turned out my grandmother continued to harbor resentment of my mother, about which she would hint darkly to me. (Things went along ok for a while, until a bigger blow up a few months later, after which my two sets of grandparents wouldn't talk to each other at all, and yet they both spoke Yugoslav; and my grandmother and mother broke for many years.)
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