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, March 06, 2008

I remember driving across country the summer we got back from Israel. It was a long summer, a long road trip: To Lee Riley's (not her real name, but still the name I grew up calling her--nickname plus former married name) on Riverside (between 100-103?) in NYC (at least that's what I remember from when I used to walk by that building, which went co-op eventually, in my Barnard days), to Aunt Ernie and Uncle Bob's (both dead now) in DC, where we also must have visited Maynard (again, not his real name) and Lynne and Jessie and Sara, to my maternal grandparents' ugly condo in Jacksonville (this was the first time I remember visiting the condo after they sold the big house on the river), to their time-share on Captiva Island with all my cousins, to Clarenz and Daphna Hall's house in Little Rock, Arkansas (where I learned to dive off a diving board and Yoss and I were introduced to cable cartoons and Monopoly), to Arizona (where I remember the petrified forest and the Grand Canyon and the geode we got my brother, but where did we stop in between? If we visited people, I don't remember it) to Las Vegas (where I think we stayed at CIRCUS CIRCUS) to my father's mother's house in Santa Barbara (where my other cousins met us and we watched the Olympics, which were in LA that year, and where we fasted for Tisha B'Av). While we were there, I told my mother I would never eat another tunafish sandwich in my life, and I didn't for about ten years. Kosher tuna must have been easy to find on the road, but I couldn't force any more tuna salad down, as good as my mom's was. Then we began the trip back.

I don't remember the stops we made on the way back, except for Iowa City, Iowa, where we hung out with friends of my folks from their grad school days: some woman we stayed with--but what was her name? She gave me a beautiful antique black wool-felt hat, and I gave her the book The Last Unicorn, which I had just tearfully finished, for a boy she tutored in reading. And Donald Genie (how do you spell his last name? Also, I think other people called him Martin, but as that was my father's name, we called him Donald. He, too, is dead now), who had been a my father's dear friend, collaborator, and teacher at the University of Iowa. What my brother has told me he remembers from that stop (a strong memory for me, too) is our stopping at a farm, a "collective" my parents had bought in to for small money in those days, 20 years before, where we got and drank raw milk. As I think about it, I recall that on the way home, we stopped also in Toronto, with the Peleds, friends from the year before in Israel. I lost a doll there, my Baby Feel-So-Real.

I spent most of the days in the car reading. At every stop, people would give me books, whatever they had handy, so I read crazy stuff like the second volume (but not the first) of a novel called The Tontine. It's sad: I read so much (remember my dad nagging me to look out the window), but I only remember three books by name. The third is Helen Keller's The Story of My Life. Which is what made me write this post. I read that book, and, for the rest of the trip, my mother and I would sign into each other's palms. She would reach her back through the narrow space between her seat and the door (this could not have been comfortable), and I would reach forward, and we would slowly sign letters back and forth into each other's hands. I think of it now, such a patient indulgence.

posted by Rosasharn 8:52 AM
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