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


Tuesday, November 30, 2010
I remember brushing my teeth with Nina at Chris's house. We could not have been more than 4 or 5. I don't know when he moved to Lexington, but it was before we were in first grade, and this was at the apartment before that--in Watertown maybe? I remember debating the merits of a variety of toothbrush strokes: side-to-side and up-and-down seemed to make sense, but we had heard that they just moved the bits around. Circles were supposed to be better, but why?

posted by Rosasharn 11:20 PM
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Monday, November 29, 2010
I remember the chocolate-covered cookies at Nilgiri's. They were sold individually, wrapped in red or green foil. It seemed decadent to have both chocolate and biscuit in the same item... decadent more in a gluttonous way than an indulgent one. I remember that some girls who had family members in the Middle East would sometimes bring Kit-Kats and Mars Bars to school, which would have partly melted and become a gooey mess with the heat by mid-day.

posted by sravana 12:05 AM
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Friday, November 26, 2010
I remember an anti-littering short we were shown in school. A guy on the street couldn't believe all the cavalier littering going on around him. He kept picking up other people's trash and putting it in the trash basket just a few feet away. There were no cops around, so he was the representative of the good citizen. Then he picked up one more piece of trash and tossed it, and suddenly noticed money in the trash basket. He tossed some litter away from the basket on to the street to get the money out, and with a smile of virtue rewarded, which made us smile too, he fanned the bill out into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 dollars! And suddenly two cops appeared behind him and wrote him out a $25.00 ticket for littering. Unfair!

posted by William 11:32 AM
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Tuesday, November 23, 2010
I remember playing with Eden in the woods behind our house in Sharon. We were allowed to go to the first stone wall, not beyond without a grownup. The stone wall was really only the foundation: a line of boulders, one after another, but nothing between them or on top. The reminder of a wall. If playing boat, we would jump from stone to stone, wary of the sharks between. The stones also served anyone determined to play house: several had flat surfaces (beds), and three tall ones in a row served for table & chairs. At the edge of the path, at the end of the wall, there was a huge old tree with huge old vines hanging from it, and we used to swing on these. I always worried we would pull them down on top of ourselves, but that did not stop us (either of us) swinging.

posted by Rosasharn 12:04 PM
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
I remember when my parents first showed me a rowboat, on Lake Carmel, near Stormville. I was surprised that a boat without a motor could float. They explained that what kept it up was the fact that it was scooped out, that it had air in it. (My mother told me that wood floated anyhow, but I think that was on a different occasion.) This seemed very mysterious to me. How did the lake know that above the floor of the boat there was air, that it wasn't a solid?

This was another of the mysteries of Stormville and of the lake somehow kept from seeping away by springs. The lake itself had that eerie authority of entities that are alive and that know how to be in the world and to interact with it, and how to use interesting items like the springs to be found in my toys.


posted by William 8:29 AM
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Thursday, November 04, 2010
I remember visiting my Florida grandparents during winter break of my freshman year. I had written to them with my dates and announced that I wanted to come down to see them, and that they should send me airfare. So they did. I flew by myself to the happy little airport on Key West, and they drove me home to the house on Little Torch Key. After New York, especially in winter, the Keys are blindingly colorful, so bright it took me a few days to get used to the intensity. Everything reflects: azure sea and creamy coral rock make a backdrop of glowing contrast for neon hibiscus flowers. Against that palette, my grandfather's turquoise slacks made sense.

posted by Rosasharn 11:41 AM
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Wednesday, November 03, 2010
I remember Angela. I learned the phrase, "Tuck in," at her huge round laden dining room table in Dursley. Her kitchen had a wall of copper pots—or I've produced them, for she was the sort of cook who would have a wall of copper pots. Her nails were always perfectly manicured, red. She had auburn hair, a wide mouth, good teeth, and smile wrinkles around her eyes. She was tall and slim and impressive and self-assured. She loved her dogs, big Airedales with names like Poppy. She was the kind of woman who could make smoking seem elegant, a long-fingered activity. In part thanks to her smoking, she had a sexy, deepish voice, and in no way related to the smoking, she had a refined accent and a languorous way of speaking: she would never rush, but when she reached a pronouncement, it sounded remarkably decisive. She volunteered in the open prison system. I first met her at a marathon card-playing session during my first visit to Steve's home in January of 1997; somehow the feeling I got was that that was Steve's family—Audrey & Arnold, Tracey & her husband, and Ian & his first wife Maggie, and Tony & Angela.

posted by Rosasharn 9:40 PM
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