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

Thursday, December 21, 2006

I remember how the people who had authority in my cohort were the ones who were funniest (as long as they were in control of when they were funny). I remember onbe kid, a friend of a friend who didn't strike me immediately as charismatic, telling a joke on Riverside Drive about why Texans have pale thumbs. Well, he said, "It's a long story, son," hooking his thumbs onto his jacket. His timing was perfect, and I liked the sudden economy by which it turned out not to be a long story. I recognized the Texan gesture, either from Lyndon Johnson (or parodies of him), or from Yosemite Sam.

posted by william 11:24 AM
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Monday, December 18, 2006

I remember learning a little bit about debate in junior high. We got a mimeographed sheet to take home and study with a lot of whereases and then finally a resolved. But it didn't seem resolved to me, and I didn't really get how this was all supposed to have been concluded. My mother explained how to debate, how you weren't just saying what you believed but arguing on an assigned side, but I didn't as her about the terminology. Later that same year -- maybe later that week she received a resolution thanking her for being President of the building, which also had a page of whereases, followed by a be it resolved that the tenants were very grateful to her. I sort of liked and was sort of puzzled by this way of doing things.

I remember watching a little debate on TV too, with very clean-cut college adults, but it was boring. I did like watching (with similar participants) the show called "It's Academic." I could do the literature and social studies questions pretty well, but I was amazed by how good their math and science was.

posted by william 7:34 AM
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Sunday, December 17, 2006

I remember Christmas break at my Jewish grandparents' big house in Jacksonville. I remember the citrus orchard in front of the house and the river behind it. The enclosed porch that looked out over the river was too cold to really spend any time on in December, but I remember trying to sit on the wicker furniture and getting very cold. I remember feeling surprised that my grandfather made our breakfast, and that he always started with grapefruit, which we never ate for breakfast at home. We would get in late at night from our drive down, and my grandparents would give us something warm to eat and then we would go to bed and wake up early in the morning for grapefruit. There were strange things in that house, like a sewing room. And my grandfather's electric shaver. My father always had a beard, so I didn't know about razors until my grandfather let me try his, and I felt the buzzing tickling on my face.

My grandparents had beautiful clothes and a big bedroom with an ensuite bath, and my favorite thing was to stay with them when they got dressed in the morning (if I was up early enough) or in the evening while they dressed to go out somewhere. Their closets were mirrored on the outside, and I could open two doors around myself to make an infinite mirror, and I would dance in the middle of all those girls, all of us matching, dressed alike, moving in time together. The incredible satisfaction of that symmetry and coordination, that perfect choreography.

My cousin Roger and I used to play downstairs, under the pool table. This must have been a concerted compromise on both our parts--my four- or five-year-old need to play house at every opportunity joined to what possible game for Roger, at eight or nine? Something about bad guys, life on the run. We also played a lot of hide and seek. I remember the beautiful tree in the living room and sitting in a circle with all the family--my mother's siblings' families and my grandfather's brother and his children and their families, and opening presents together. I remember waking up in the morning and watching Christmasy cartoons with Roger and looking through our stockings, comparing our loot and eating a lot of cracker jacks, and for a moment feeling confused. Was this or wasn't this mine? We were Jewish--we, my family, my parents and me--but Roger believed in all this Santa stuff. I think my parents read my grandparents the riot act that year--I think it was the last time they had a tree.

I remember going out for meals in Jacksonville with my parents and grandparents and great grandmother, Babette (my grandfather's mother), and my mother's siblings and possibly our great great aunt Margaret Benjamin, who called my mother Joanita, in from Chicago. These were unspeakably fancy events; the whole family sitting down a very long table, and my great grandmother and Aunt Margaret holding court, wearing long white gloves that went up to their elbows. I felt like a princess, partly because I was dressed up, wearing a fancy frock and white tights and black patent-leather mary janes (my ideal of beauty), but more because I knew myself a part of this grand thing, this royal family, this group of important and imposing people. And the restaurant had a soft ice cream machine.

We went and returned in convoys of cars--I didn't necessarily travel with my parents--and one time I remember sitting with Roger in the back seat while he spun me a horror story about some secret association between telephone poles and scorpions. On the way home, I sat between my grandmother and my great grandmother, and, frightened, I told them Roger's terrible tale. They comforted me and taught me a coy response: mock anger that Roger would tell such a fib. Then my grandmama asked me about my likes and dislikes. All I remember from this conversation was some consideration of polka dots, about which, I confess, I had no opinion. And then we dropped my great grandmother off at her home (in retrospect I recognize her complex as assisted-living apartments), and I fell asleep on the way back to the big house.

posted by Rosasharn 4:13 PM
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Friday, December 15, 2006

I remember how funny it is that judges have gavels. I think I learned this watching Perry Mason with my mother. Or maybe she brought a gavel home that she'd got as a testimonial of some sort; or we saw a movie in which there was a judge gaveling the court to silence. And I remember just thinking the incongruity of the hammer among all these people in sober clothes -- a hammer that wasn't used for pounding nails but just to kind of hit the table in a way that made sense to me but that I couldn't imagine adults doing -- was hilarious. It was as if whenever the judges got bored they could just pound away to pass the time, and everyone had to pay attention. It seemed like an improbably great idea.

posted by william 3:54 PM
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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

I remember that Contac has thousands of tiny time pills, so you only have to take one capsule every twelve hours. Also that there is no t in Contac, which surprised me. (And that there is no e in Mobil, which fact is indicated on their stationery.) The initial and final C looked more elegant, though, once I saw it, as though they were icons of the curve of the capsule.

posted by william 11:00 PM
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Monday, December 11, 2006

I remember Andrew S. parrying insults by saying "I know you are, but what am I?" I didn't see how this could be effective -- he'd just repeat it whatever you said to him -- but I thought that the very fact that I couldn't see why this would be a good retort gave him the high ground. He did it well. I was reminded of this years later, when Pee Wee Herman got the same tone to a T.

posted by william 9:00 PM
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Monday, December 04, 2006

I remember the pleasure of scraping the yellow paint off the sides of a pencil and revealing the pure, strangely good wood beneath. It was hard to get all the paint off, but easy to get a lot of it off.

I remember the feel of a chewed pencil, the roughness of the toothmarks, and also the pleasure of chewing. You went too far if you got to the crunch of lead or graphite.

I remember later the fun of placing pencils parallel to the incline on our inclined desks and trying to get them to roll down their hexagonal sides. You'd have to bounce the desk or blow -- a good way to pass the time in boring classes.

I remember once getting into trouble because I kept dropping my pen. This was accidental, but I now realize the teacher thought I was doing it on purpose. At the time I thought I was in trouble just for being clumsy.

posted by william 10:12 PM
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Friday, December 01, 2006

I remember when relatives used to visit us in Brookline and in Sharon, I'd pretend I was asleep as they got up early to return to New York. I couldn't bear the thought of watching the car pull away, saying goodbye, even when I knew I'd see them a few weeks later. I'd hear my parents say "she's still asleep" and felt guilty but also felt like I'd done a good job fooling them. Now I can't picture saying hello, though these are different relatives (the parents and uncles and aunts of the NY crowd). Saying hello: I've been calling Israel a lot this past week, preparing a huge trip in less than 2 weeks. It's so strange to talk to my family. It's a pretty emotional experience, because the last time I saw some of them (Feb 2005), the ones I'm closest with, I didn't expect to be spending time together ever again on account of various illnesses, and here we are, about to reunite, talking about such mundane things: train stations, sleeping arrangements, timetables, and traffic.

posted by jennylewin 10:54 AM
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