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, November 28, 2007

I remember asking for a horse for my sixth birthday and really meaning it. I didn't bother asking my parents; I asked Cherie and Everett, who had lived downstairs from us in our two-family in Cambridge when I was very little.

Perhaps because of my middle name, Cherie taught me to sing, "Alice, where are you going? Upstairs to take a bath. Alice with legs like toothpicks, and a neck like a giraffe. Alice stepped in the bathtub; Alice pulled out the plug. Oh my goodness, oh my soul, there goes Alice down the hole!" Though I remember singing it with her, and though I remember associating it with her and knowing she taught it to me, I can't remember the first time. She must have taught me that song in the pre-history of my mind, at a time before I can remember my memories. Everett told me (repeatedly, I'm sure) my favorite fairy tale, which was The Frog Prince, and resulted in my thinking of him as the Frog. They gave me an immeasurably beautiful ring set with a delicate pink oval gem that sometimes looked purple in the light. I promptly lost it, but would find it again among my things from time to time, always with immeasurable joy; it was a thing I coveted although it belonged to me.

They also catalyzed my family's introduction into Jewish practice, and I remember making Challah with my mother and Cherie in Cherie's kitchen (my only memory of that downstairs flat). I remember their involvement in my parents' wedding (the Jewish wedding, when I was about 4, after my father converted)--did my mother alter Cherie's wedding dress? I remember something to do with Pesach, but again I don't know what. Still, my feelings about Pesach come partly from associating them with Pesach, an air of Cherie and Everett, so there must have been a Seder together at some point. Eventually they moved out of the downstairs apartment, but I stayed connected with them: Sometimes I slept over at their new house in Brookline, or was taken for a trip--bowling, or the zoo, or something similar. I knew their phone number by heart, would call and chat with them from time to time.

I knew that they loved me, so I asked them, really, seriously, sincerely, for a horse. That was what I wanted. And on my birthday my parents brought a pinata to school (the first birthday in first grade), and sometime that day someone gave me the lovely (I say now, with adult eyes), sock-headed stick horse from Everett and Cherie. Oh the insult: How could they have misunderstood me so badly? And why would they give me something so ugly, a caricature, with yarn hair for a mane?

posted by Rosasharn 3:21 PM
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