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, January 16, 2008

I remember one time my Florida grandparents were visiting us in Sharon. I think it was the summer after we moved. They must have been taking a walk down the loop. Pleasant Street isn't a dead end, but it may as well be one, since there is no thru-traffic, just a loop at the bottom as it turns into DeHart and then back into Pleasant. Anyway, I was so used to it being a quiet road and so excited about how I could ride my bike without holding on to the handlebars that even though I didn't normally go in the street, I rode along with them. I was so busy showing off how well I rode hands-free, I didn't listen for traffic. When a car came along behind me, I was riding right in the middle of the road, and my grandfather let me have it--screamed that that was the dumbest thing he'd ever seen, and didn't I know how to ride a bike! I was frightened and shamed, and I went back to the house, crestfallen, crying. I remember sitting on my father's lap as he explained that granddaddy got mad because he was scared something might happen to me, and he had shouted at me (as unlikely as this seems) because he loves me.

I remembered this when going through my desk today (a mess ever since our move to Maple Ave), and, nearly five years after his death, I found an envelope with his deliberate scrawl on it. I left it where it was. I can't put it away.

posted by Rosasharn 2:40 PM
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