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

Saturday, July 25, 2009

I remember the vogue for copper bracelets that were supposed to counteract arthritis. This was early male-jewelry. All the middle aged male tennis players wore them. They looked fit and tanned, and then there was this accessory that brought out the tan, the bracelet which showed they were athletic and couldn't afford tennis elbow or sore wrists, because they played so much. The copper would also turn a little green, or stain their wrists a little green, which was cooler still. I almost wanted to be old and fighting off creakiness so that I could where one.

posted by William 4:47 PM
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Thursday, July 16, 2009

I remember watching the moon landing in a hallway in a hotel somewhere in Italy. It was on a cheap black and white TV. We never saw TVs in Italy (once we watched Daniella, or maybe her baby brother, watching cartoons in Italian, but that was it). But all the adults were clustered around the moon-landing, so the hallway was full of stopped foot-traffic. I wasn't thrilled: I guess my space-age kid attitude was more: "It's about time."

Two footnotes:

I was (and am) sure that Aldren said "one small step for a man." Otherwise it made no sense.

I was thrilled, oddly, by the slingshot flights around the moon that preceded the moon landing that spring. There seemed something really exotic about flying to the dark side of the moon, flying farther into space than the moon itself, and then hurtling back to earth, all using unexpected and unscience-fictional effects of gravity. And the dark side of the moon still retained some mystery then. No one had ever seen it. It had only bee photographed very recently and sparsely. That seemed like a new world.

posted by William 1:44 PM
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Sunday, July 12, 2009

I remember being bitten by our dog, Michael. She was a little white mutt bitch, my mother's, named for the man who found her as a puppy and gave her to my mom. She and Shandy, my father's whippet, were already old when I was born. I remember this sunny morning when Michael bit me; it was because I provoked her, though I can't remember what I did. I knew it was just, though: she was lying down in her place, and I was on hands and knees, intruding and teasing, and I got what was coming to me. Certainly she had growled plenty of warning, so it wasn't a surprise. What did surprise me was that she broke the skin, and so I had to report the injury to my father (who sided with the dog) and have my hand washed and a bandaid applied. Bill Cavish (sp?), a slim, bearded, balding single guy with a generous smile and a talent for great story-telling (a member of our Havurah community) was at the house when it happened, and I think he was a little appalled, and I enjoyed his sympathy very much, and I milked it for a story.

posted by Rosasharn 7:55 PM
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Friday, July 10, 2009

I remember that people used to say they were having a nervous breakdown. It meant they were a little keyed-up. Later I learned that they were somehow very intense. My grandfather's version was probably as intense as I could understand at the time, and the destruction of his ability to read did bother me. But I think it was only reading Marjorie Morningstar that I got a sense of them as disabling you pretty thoroughly, that and also reading that Franny in Franny and Zooey was having one. I think I understood (misunderstood) what Franny was experiencing through Marjorie.

posted by William 2:43 PM
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Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I remember visiting my great grandmother Babette, my mother's father's mother, in Jacksonville. I remember she lived in a complex of apartments (I remember the flowering trees on the grounds), and that as she got older her apartment shrunk, till she was in a two-room suite. Most important, she had a candy dish and she meant for us to take candies when we went to see her. I always chose the strawberry ones, in the strawberry wrapper, hard candies that had gel inside. I remember when I was about six she gave me a pin: a small gold chick emerging from a silver egg. My mother pinned it to the lapel of my furry purple winter coat. That was the last year we went down to Florida for my father's winter break, before he left academia.

posted by Rosasharn 10:57 PM
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I remember, after we'd seen a Chaplin movie, maybe a double-feature, my father telling me that Chaplin was as old as my grandfather but that he had a son who was my age.

I liked the idea, I think because of the complex ricochet of youth that it produced: Chaplin was young (on screen), like my father, and he had a young son, like me, and so my grandfather got to be young, like him and my father, at the same time as his son got to be the age of my father (since their fathers were born in the same year), which is to say the age that Chaplin was on screen, but being that age was really being 11, like me, so that somehow Chaplin was eleven too (as my grandfather and Chaplin both were in 1900, a fact that I always thought about which allowed his remote youth to come vividly alive for me, since I knew what it was like to be eleven, and also that 1900 was a significant milestone), and if he could be eleven, now, in his old age, then maybe my grandfather would live forever.

posted by William 11:16 AM
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Friday, July 03, 2009

I remember the Mitch Miller Show. My uptown grandparents watched it Sunday nights, I think. It was either before or after the Danny Kaye Show, so I tended to confuse them when I was little. But somehow I didn't like the Mitch Miller Show as much -- it might have been the name Mitch which I didn't like; or it might be that I don't really like the name Mitch because of its archaic association for me with the show. I remember horns that whined a little too much, and the name Mitch still has that whiney feel for me now. (Apologies to any Mitches!)

posted by William 12:57 PM
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

I remember how pretty frequently there'd be workers on the track at the 96th street subway station where I waited for the train to school. They would wear yellow slickers, like rain jackets. I loved watching the calm way they'd step between the pillars that separated the tracks when a train -- or sometimes two -- came into the station, and wait in that narrow space of safety, to reappear when the train pulled away. I'd sometimes get to the station, or get home from school, just in time to see them going up or down the tiny ladder at the end of the platform, almost inconspicuous but always a kind of option in space that I liked knowing and thinking about since no one else paid any attention to it. Except the workers who belonged to the subway and to its history and procedures in a way that was part of the solidity of the city -- the city I lived in and whose subways I now rode, just like my parents.

posted by William 7:07 PM
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