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, December 30, 2009

I remember that one day when we were just hanging around, maybe at my uptown grandmother's house, maybe at ours -- at a side- or cocktail-table, at any rate, where he used to sometimes do hand-puppet shows for me -- my father idly spun a coin, a nickel I think, flicking it with his thumb nail, and it whirled around like a top slowly drifting around the surface of the table. This was beautiful, and an amazing skill, one which I'd never dreamed existed.

posted by William 6:31 PM
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Friday, December 25, 2009

I remember the few times I celebrated Christmas as a child -- I mean enjoyed the luxuries and indulgences of Christmas. Once with the Herings (when we put up our socks and found huge stockings the next morning; I had no idea about any of this, and didn't know why my parents wanted me to tape my sock to the mantelpiece); and another time at Michael C.'s, when there was just the slightest dusting of snow and I realized that late December usually wasn't snowy yet, and also somehow what the song and the term meant, which I'd never thought about before. I believe I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull that weekend, since Michael's father had a brand new copy of it and he was very up-to-date on the books with buzz.

I think there may have been one other Christmas weekend: the weekend I'm thinking of is one where I poked a fire in a fireplace for the first time, which made me feel both little and an adult (I knew I wasn't an adult because I was doing this for the first time, and that made me feel smaller).

posted by William 10:16 PM
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Sunday, December 20, 2009

I remember that my downtown grandparents had a couple of things in their house that we didn't, in addition to the wonderful balcony overlooking Chelsea. They had a small and elegant manual typewriter, with its double red and black ribbon. I was interested in how the keys got stuck, and also in my grandfather's expertise at shifting from small to capital and also from black to red.

The red strip was below the black, so that when you shifted to red the whole ribbon went up a quarter of an inch or so in its metal guide. Sometimes the black part of the ribbon would go up a little too high and flop or crease over the pointers of the guide, and then when you tried to shift back to black it would get stuck. But my grandfather was very good at getting it running smoothly again, and also at changing the ribbons when they were no longer usable.

That was a judgment call, since when you got to the end of a ribbon it just switched directions and went backwards, each long pass (the ribbons were many yard long so each pass produced yards of type) slightly less dark than the pass before. As with my parents' inked stamp pad (and the ink they kept to refresh it but which I wasn't allowed to touch) the difference from the nth to the n + 1th use was imperceptible enough that I always wondered how or why you'd know it was time to change it. (Later I felt that way about changing razor blades and toothbrushes. Sometimes, when I was older, the thing that determined me to change a ribbon was the fact that the ribbon I'd earlier discarded was now obviously darker than the ribbon I was still using, so I'd reuse the old one.)

One thing that would help make you realize that a ribbon was getting defunct was when the type was light enough to induce you to switch to the red half, which of course was used an order of magnitude or two less often than the black. I liked typing in red, and my grandparents seemed to as well, but even so it always lasted much longer. When the red faded, it really was time to switch. My grandfather was really good at that too, whereas I would never even try to do it. My grandfather would always show me how his fingers were free of ink -- he was always campaigning to make me learn his fastidious habits and techniques.

They had a drawer full of ribbons. One day I noticed that they were all black -- the bicolored ribbons were gone! This seemed very modern to me, as though they'd joined me in the jet age.

posted by William 10:17 AM
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

I remember that business failures weren't like other failures -- driving accidents, alcohol, divorce -- that made you realize that adults could sometimes be weak and imperfect. Everyone seemed to suffer financial losses at some point, without visibly having done anything foolish. I remember my father telling someone how much he had lost in the stock market one year -- to my mind, a terrific amount. But my father was wise and cautious -- if he suffered a loss, it wasn't indicative of his own failure, but of the harshness of the world in which this loss was so easy and unavoidable. And the fact that adults constantly participated in this world, but seemed unfazed at the end of the day, made their wisdom and courage all the more impressive.

posted by sravana 5:02 AM
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Wednesday, December 02, 2009

I remember that if you picked up the extension to listen in (or eavesdrop) on an adult's conversation on a rotary phone while they were still dialing, the call would not go through. You had to try to time picking it up while the phone was ringing on the other end, ideally before the person being called answered, since it was always obvious if you picked up after the connection was made. I'd worm my finger under the handset, holding one of the still slightly scary pop-up plastic cylindrical buttons flush with the base of the cradle, wait a second or so after I heard the last number dialed in the other room (you could hear the clockwise dialing motion much better than the dial's return), and then slowly let the two buttons come up, as noiselessly as possible. (I'd sometimes do this on incoming calls as well, gently releasing the buttons while the person in the other room was picking up the handset which I trusted would make enough noise to cover what I was doing.)

I can't, of course, remember anything interesting that I heard during these conversations, but I always liked to listen to my mother talking to my father on the phone: the adult world was just like business in the movies, urgent but opaque and for me unreferential conversations about lots and lots of people and the various things they were attempting and thwarting which put the hum into city life, the buzz in the business of living.

posted by William 10:39 AM
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