“What is startling about memory is its willful persistence and obsession with detail. ‘Hold on,’ it says. ‘Don’t lose this.’ The other day I unexpectedly found myself seeing the shape of the knobs at the top of the low iron posts that stand along the paths of Central Park — a magnolia bud or perhaps an acorn — and then, long before this, the way such posts looked when they were connected by running strands of heavy wire, which were slightly bent into irregularity and almost loose to the touch. Going down a path in those days you could hook the first joints of your forefinger and second finger over the darkly shining wire and feel it slither along under your touch. In winter, you could grab the wire in your gloved or mittened hand and rush along, friction free, and make it bouce or shiver when you reached the next post and had to let go. But what’s the point of this, I wonder, what’s my mind doing back there. A week or so before he died, my father, in his eighties, he told me he’d been thinking about a little red shirt that he’d worn when he was four or five years old. ‘Isn’t that strange?’ he said.”
From “Let Me Finish,” (c) 2006 Roger Angell
This is from Angell’s memoir. In the introduction, Angell explains that he never planned to write a memoir and never kept a journal, and that an earlier piece about this father caused some consternation in the family. “Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see, and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out some other way.”
Yes. But — alas — few of of us are Roger Angell. (Oh why, oh why isn’t “Three for the Tigers” on the web? I so wish I could link to it here.)
Angell, however, provides a good jumping-off point for a memory/writing exercise. Think about a tactile experience, or some childish habit, inexplicable to the adults around you, the adult you might become. The first place my mind jumped was my practice, at age 10 or 11, of hoisting myself up between the two ledges of the check-out counters in the Giant on Ingleside Road. I was useless in gymnastics class, but I could swing my legs quite easily in the Giant, using the ridged metal counters as my parallel bars. But my mind can’t stay there — it jumps to the Friday afternoon ritual of grocery shopping, a cashier named Yvette, the plastic tags we hung on our carts until we retrieved them. (Rolling a shopping cart into the parking lot wasn’t allowed then.)
Meanwhile, as long as we’re on the subject of writers I like, I visited Valerie Frankel’s <a href=”http://www.valeriefrankel.com”_blank”>blog</a>
after a long absence. It is one of the most joyful blogs in existence, bursting with enthusiasm. But I don’t think I really understood the sheer willfulness of that joy until I read <a href=”http://www.self.com/livingwell/articles/2007/08/0807shallowval_1″_blank”>”Shallow Val</a>. I find Valerie Frankel’s alleged shallowness a far more impressive achievement than the moody brooding of so many other writers (myself included).
I’ve got one. It’s something I did constantly when I was a child and never thought about until I had children of my own and observed them doing the same thing. I knew immediately what they were doing, and wondered where in my subconscious that memory came from.
It’s when you’re swinging on a swing, and you’ve just learned that you can pump hard enough to get pretty high. When you’ve been at it a while, you start directing your eyes to where you JUST SEE SKY–no ground at all. I guess it’s a way of simulating being able to fly.
I used to do what the ladies in GREY GARDENS do: take a t-shirt or turtleneck off over my head and stop halfway, so that it would pull my own (pixie-cut) hair clear from my forehead, and swing down like a long veil, or like beautiful long hair of my own.
I would stand in front of the mirror and admire it, swinging it back and forth, flipping it off my shoulders like Cher. The pressure of the collar on my hairline, pulling it back, was comforting — as if it held the top of my head just where it was supposed to be.
When I grew up and did grow my hair long, I could never get it to swing it like that.
A walking pattern that let me keep track of which foot I started with, so I could keep them even.
No, I couldn’t <i>just remember.</i>
Thank you, Laura. One of the things I love about the Memory Project is that it both points me towards things I haven’t read yet (e.g., Angell’s memoir) and reminds me of pieces I’ve long loved but haven’t reread recently (“Three for the Tigers”).
I’ve read every word of Angell’s baseball writing, of course–his prose is a strong link for me to my own father, who first introduced me to baseball and The New Yorker. I asked Angell to write the introduction to my first baseball book, but Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward had gotten him first. (The “Baseball” documentary and book came out the same time as my book.) Just hearing his voice on my answering machine was a thrill!
So I had to settle for earning him a little extra money by reprinting his heartbroken essay about the 1981 baseball strike–a beautifully written piece, and perhaps less famous than his most widely read ones.
These past few years, I’ve been engaged in a “memory project” of my own–a series of storytelling/creative writing workshop at the local public schools. Each of my classroom visits is centered around stories from my own life, which I use to make my points about writing in general.
By spending so much time in my past, I’ve found that I’ve opened the gates to other memories…the way things smelled and tasted and looked when I was very little.
When I’m in the midst of the visits, I often feel a million miles away from the fifty-year-old man I’ve somehow become.
Clair! I did the exact same thing when I was little. About 6, I think. Only I specifically wanted long blonde hair, so I got my mother to buy me a yellow nightgown.
I’ll have to check out the memoir as a birthday present for DH, who is a huge baseball fan. Thanks for mentioning it, Laura.
Christa,
This one’s more memoir than baseball, but you can’t go wrong with Angell.
I am particularly struck by the way he writes about his parents’ divorce, and his role in one of his mother’s dates with E.B. “Andy” White, whom she would eventually marry. It’s very clear-eyed, without self-pity. And his details about his life with his father, after the divorce, is similarly empathetic and kind.
You send me to a time when I was a happily chubby kid. No one had yet made me feel ashamed of my body (that was to come) but I knew its limitations. My arms were not up to the lift, say, in a chin-up. I could do maybe three. Then someone taught us (5 kids in my family) that in a narrow hallway one could brace upper back and shoulders on one side and feet opposite, and walk to the ceiling. Nobody looks up in this world. You can hide up there (as long as you clear the closet door) and no one can find you if you don’t start snickering. And snickering is dangerous not just because you might be found, but if your concentration wanders, down you come. My sisters and brother, I am sure, slept secure for years, sure that if the bogeymen/nazis/communists/democrats broke into our home, we would have time to climb the hallways and either avoid detection or drop on them and scare them off. Laura, you inspire memory.
I am astounded that Three for the Tigers isn’t anywhere on the web. One of the greatest pieces of baseball writing ever and your mention of it immediately sent me scurrying to the bookshelf for my tattered copy of Five Seasons to read it again. Man – I love those guys.
As a young child, living in a Philadelphia rowhouse, I would go up and down the block after dinner, peering into houses through the dark screens of summer. (Someone even took a picture of my habit). But no one really minded it and neighbors would often shout hello from their dining room table or tell me what they were having for dinner.
I would come home with the marks from dirty screens on my face and get scolded by my mother before she washed it off.
Ah, memory. The smell of my dad’s Lucky Strike cigarettes in the car on a long trip to New Orleans, to visit my grandparents, Papaw and Mamaw Robertson. Papaw who smoked a pipe, and coughed like a giant buzz saw. Mamaw who walked in little mule slippers, with a fast little shuffle that I can hear even now. Her voice telling us, “You can’t sit on the beds in the daytime. Get busy with something” shooing us outside onto the street in 9th Ward, Nelson Street, that is now a wasteland after Katrina. But in my memory, I can see and hear all the other kids out there, on their bikes and metal roller skates, shooshing down the sidewalks, swerving to avoid the cracks. And me? What did I do? I watched, observed, and remembered…the taste of my Mamaw’s Lemon Icebox Pie that was soo excellent, that when she died in 1997, at age 90, my cousin Wayne mentioned it in his eulogy at the funeral, and EVERYbody in the room grinned!
The smells of New Orleans in the summertime…open canals…the big hole where they were building the Super Dome, the causeways up and around everything, looping around like giant ribbons of steel and concrete.
Riding the paddle boats at city park, jumping on the train at Audobon, straddling the limbs of the giant water oaks…and just remembering…a childhood free and easy…snow cones in the summertime, Christmas in New Orleans when it actually SNOWED!
(Laura, I think you’ve started something here…I feel a story coming on….)