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, May 19, 2010

I remember being very surprised and impressed that my father could navigate his way through unfamiliar (to me) cities like Chennai without needing directions.

I remember that when people called from the US, we would get in a flurry to finish the conversation quickly so they didn't run up a huge bill -- although, at least by the time I was growing up, they didn't seem a bit concerned about the ticking minutes.

I remember foreign mail being sent and received on onionskin paper. It was hard to find onionskin (and it was perhaps also expensive -- but wouldn't that defy the point?). My mother kept a pad of it in her closet, safe and separate from other stationery.

I remember the inland letter card -- flat-rate paper that folded into an envelope. I liked its efficient design -- how it avoided wasting paper on an envelope, how neatly the tabs closed to seal it, and the preprinted stamp and fields for the address. The only people I knew who used them were my great-grandmother and servants. I remember my mother writing a dictated letter for our servant, and sealing the tabs with rice to avoid the messiness of glue.

posted by sravana 8:45 PM
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Thursday, May 13, 2010

I remember that my father used to go to Oak Park, IL to do business with a guy named John Burg, which I somehow always heard as John Birk, which is how I heard the name of the John Birch Society, whose evil my mother had told me about. I sort of knew that he wasn't seeing evil John Birk, but I wasn't absolutely certain (why hadn't the guy changed his name if he wasn't evil?) and it never occurred to me to ask my father. Maybe I got a little thrill out of thinking he was negotiating with and even tamping down evil.

posted by William 10:08 AM
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Saturday, May 08, 2010

I remember thinking that Annelida was too pretty a name for worms, and being a bit surprised when others in the class agreed.

posted by sravana 5:31 PM
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Wednesday, May 05, 2010

I remember the time we drove through a swarm of locusts. It was summer in Maine. We were all in the car. My father, driving, my mother, my brother. We were driving back from somewhere fun. I think it was probably 1987 or 1988. It was getting dark or already was dark but not dark dark. The hits on the windshield started one at a time, sort of like big fat rain drops, those first fat drops before the downpour. We were hitting either the stragglers or the vanguard. Then we hit a dense cluster of them and the windshield went blind within a minute. My father had to pull over. It was gross. It was not easy to clean that windshield.

posted by Grashupfer 9:04 PM
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I remember confusing Wordsworth and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, partly because my uptown grandmother's telephone exchange was WAdsworth-7. I remember, remembering that, how huge the printing of the two letters at the beginning of the exchange was on the center of the telephone dial, and how small the rest of the letters before you got to the five numbers.

posted by William 7:44 PM
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I remember my father telling me it was 1,100 miles to fly from New York to Chicago. I had a map of the United States on my wall, scaled at 1 inch to a hundred miles. I could measure out about eleven thumb-lengths, which was a nice and consistently repeatable reassurance that I could use the rule of my thumb to measure things, e.g. in my geometry and science and geography classes. I think I last took Geography in fifth grade, so maybe I thought both joints of my thumb came to an inch then? Or that I was big now, in my last year at elementary school, and the top joint was already the inch it was supposed to be? But it turns out that it's substantially less than 1,100 miles from New York to Chicago, so I thought my thumb was longer than it was.

Still my father's statistics were generally right, though in need of tweaking. I remember him telling me that the earth was rotating at about a thousand miles an hour. But this is true at the equator, not in New York. I remember the facts that my paternal grandparents told me that were true: that it takes nine minutes for light to reach us from the sun (some of my school mates said it was seven minutes); that the circumference of the earth was 25,000 miles; that its diameter was 8,000 miles; that I-80 went from New York all the way to San Francisco, and that that the highway was 3,000 miles long. I realize now that the interstates must have been an amazing thing for them.

I remember also being amazed when I first learned that the sum of angles in any triangle came to 180 degrees. I think I read this in a novel, way before we did geometry. I told my uptown (paternal) grandfather this with great excitement. He was surprised that I was excited, since he knew this fact so deeply that it was as self-evident to him as that water was transparent. It seemed amazing to me that someone could just know this about triangles, as though it wasn't something that he'd once learned as I was learning it.

posted by William 9:39 AM
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Monday, May 03, 2010

I remember how glamorous I thought it was when my mother went to Chicago for the day to go to a meeting.

posted by William 10:07 AM
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I remember Hoyt Wilhelm, the knuckleballer pitching into old age. Thinking of his cracked, smiling face now is like imagining Will Rogers as an old soldier leading young'uns through a campaign. I wonder if Hoyt Wilhelm is still alive.

I remember when I learned that the Yankees were called the Bronx Bombers. It was in a Daily News back-page headline that a kid at school had: "Bombers pound Tigers" or something. Since I was a complete Mets fan (the Yankees were terrible then, and the Mets were making history), I had no comprehension of this headline till I read the article. They weren't called the Bronx Bombers in the article, but there was something so WWII-ish about it, which hearkened back to the era of Ruth, that it felt as though the Yankees were some prehistoric creature, some King Kong returning to the headlines from the past. And so when a few days later I saw a reference to the Bronx Bombers, I knew what it meant, and began to think about how wonderful the Yankees were, a sentiment confirmed by The Old Man and the Sea. They were a little inaccessible, being a Bronx and not a Manhattan team. But they were generous in the umbrella they offered their fans, in Manhattan too. Even when they were wounded and down. They never gave up, the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of New York.

posted by William 9:57 AM
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