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

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

I remember that Jackie, my Catholic friend, came from Texas and had a mother from Cuba. Her dad worked for President George H.W., and her family was very pretty and rich. I had my first slumber party at her house; it was her birthday and she invited all the girls from our grade. Her Cuban grandparents sent her a pair of porcelain Romeo and Juliet dolls, which she opened while we were there, although they were quickly taken away by her mother so that we wouldn't remove them from their boxes. Jackie told us these dolls cost four hundred dollars, and I associated them, and her huge, plush-carpeted house, with Texas and Cuba, revering the two places for several years thereafter. Jackie looked like a deer and was adored by everyone, although after she moved away the boys in our grade would marvel over how she managed to be a slut at the age of seven.

We had a wonderful first-grade teacher who gave us all the confidence to write even though none of us could spell. We spent several hours each week writing stories independently on lined, green sheets of paper shaped like horizontal rectangles. My father visited the class one afternoon with his recording equipment and taped each of us reading our stories aloud, then made copies of the tape for the entire class. Most of the girls' stories were about dogs and cats and nearly all of the boys' were about sports. Jackie's story was about a dog, a cat, a mouse, and a sandwich, and she read it in a breathy, sibilant whisper with no pauses between words. I thought this voice was so cute that I appropriated it and used it for several years while reading things aloud. I also appropriated her adorable grammatical tic of using the incorrect form of "to be" for plural nouns ( those girls is; we is), a habit that still occasionally plagues me in speech today. By the time the elections rolled around and we were in the fourth grade, I was obsessed with Clinton winning and thought "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was an extremely catchy song. But I reassured myself that even if Bush won, I would still be happy, because then Jackie wouldn't have to move away.

posted by Caitlin 11:56 PM
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