Thanks for the Memory

You, it appears, have a quirky memory. In yesterday's New York Times op-ed section, the economist Paul Krugman got off a nice rejoinder about lunatic Republicans, using the trope There's no sanity clause. This took you back immediately to a moment at least sixty years in the past, from an old Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera, in which Chico and Groucho were in the midst of a riff on contracts. During the course of the riff, Chico uttered the line, "Everybody knows there's no sanity clause." Krugman's deft, Christmas-day use of the pun was effective; many of the news and opinion bloggers you follow caught it, remarking on its originality. You even Twittered one of them with the citation.

Twice during a prolonged afternoon lunch conversation with Barnaby Conrad and Sandy Vanocer, you were transported back to events you'd witnessed or had read about in order to supply a slight correction to the record, an unintentional role you played as historian. True to form, Conrad commented on this trick memory of yours. Even though Sandy's reminiscences of his past as a newsman were interesting and vivid, you were drawn into the on-going debate within you about the nature of memory, particularly the awareness that your memory of an event is tinged with the colors you impart and may well differ from the memory of another who experienced the same event. Sometimes the difference of the memory resides within the nuance of a particular word. You, for instance, always thought of David Brinkley's voice as wry and amused. Sandy, who knew Brinkley personally and worked with him considered his voice dry and bordering on incredulous. Other times, although the memory comes to you wrapped in more than one sense, say visual and aural, or visual and smell, you wonder if the memory took place or that you are remembering your invention of it, life, as it were, lived as though you had wished rather than as it actually happened. And then there is the not inconsiderable use of that word "actually." Actually means really, or existing as a matter of fact. Compare actual with fictional. Did it happen or did you invent it? Much of your writing life has been focused on invention, in some measure because you felt that not enough of note was happening to you in real life, thus your need to invent it. Possibly because you were not satisfied with the outcome of things in your real life, you sought to rearrange the furniture of events to better suit your sense of self. Possibly.

Can you trust your memory? With some exceptions, the answer is yes, particularly if the memory is of a formula, a mantra, a fact that can be easily checked against two or more sources. Can memory in general be trusted? Well, that depends, and thus does a boundary line emerge between fact and fiction, between participation in an event and self-interest. That wasn't your idea, someone tells you, that was my idea, in a grand sense taking possession of the memory. You experience a squeeze of irritation, knowing it was in fact your idea, in effect wrenching the memory back from an individual who has been suddenly transported from the ranks of family, friend, lover to opponent in the Monopoly game of memory. Then an interior voice speaks to you, Screw it. Let him/her have the memory. You know the truth. Thus in one mighty concession, you have become bigger, more humane in your own eyes, a tower of empathy. You know with rigid certainty that you would never give a woman a gardenia. More likely you would have given roses or camellias but never gardenias. Of all the flowers you know and admire, the gardenia is so far down on the list that you would not even think of it much less give it. If she wants to remember gardenias, be my guest. Thus you are delivered to the nobility of allowing her memory of an event to vibrate reality for her. But you know better; you know the truth and of course, storyteller that you are, you live in the memory of truth.

So then, all the stories you tell of yourself are true? Well, you have a point there. Although he had no say in the mentorship, you have taken the memories of being mentored by Mark Twain, and he has indirectly whispered in your ear that making yourself the butt of a story can work wonders with an audience, even more so than making yourself the hero. In fact, making yourself even slightly heroic tends to heat up the room with the boredom factor. The eyes begin to roll upward, the yawns, at first stifled, tend to break through, and there, you've done it again, you've committed the act of boring an audience.

What emerges in any discussion of memory is the literary equivalent and mixed metaphor of the political football, moved up and down the grid at will and whim, one major truth being that we cling to memories as the dear and defining gifts that they are, incredulous that anyone would think to take them away from us or supplant them with their own.

Thanks for the Memory

Another of life's great conundrums is the one related to your own past experiences, of which you feel comfortably familiar, even to the point of prefacing some observations to friends with the meme, "I've probably told you this before..." The subtext is always memory.

You frequently feel so comfortable with your past that you have become deferential to those about you when discussing it, almost to the point of, "Yeah, I did that." or "I liked it there, too."  Comfort also means you think twice or perhaps even three times about inflicting your past on anyone else until there is a clear, valid opening.

With that set-up in place, your quotients of comfort and deference become challenged when you are reminded of things you did or said in the past that you do not remember.  This is particularly telling since you are reputed to have an extraordinary memory, which is in your own opinion more quirky than extraordinary, evidenced by the fact that you can remember stories of students from your past, or some arcane fact that, while accurate, has no real bearing on anything useful to you.

In a realistic way, when it comes to memory, you are indeed your parents' son.

"Say," your father would muse aloud, "what ever happened to--" at which point your mother would interrupt with an exasperated, "Oh, Jack, he's been dead for ten years," and your father would, with equal exasperation, respond, "Not him, I mean the man who was married to--"  Another sigh.  "He wasn't her first husband, you know."  "Right.  He used to be married to what's-her-name, whose father owned the furniture stores."  "They were lighting fixture stores."  "Not him!  I mean that place where you got the sofa that had mice in it."   They could--and did--go on like that for several minutes, all to your wishing you could get the rhythms, pauses, growing sense of increased impatience, which even then you recognized had nothing to do with each other but rather each with a personal irritation about the way the past has or morphing into something that leaves you wondering which version of it is correct.

Story is such a convenient, human trait.  We are drawn to individuals who tell them well, whether the telling is simply their way of verbalizing an event in which we were present (and now see differently through the telling), making us wish we were there, causing us to fictionalize to the point where we now believe we were there.  We are drawn to individuals whose life appears to us to be a story in progress, with little time for narrative leaps.  Sometimes, in reflective moments, we seek to inject story into portions of our life that seem in retrospect to have been uneventful.  We stand as Yeats stood in his poem,"Among School Children:"

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The Zucchini as Metaphor

The Past arrives in many guises and in myriad circumstances.  Like distant relatives and lonely high school friends who have Googled out your existence, the Past is often an outright bother, something to be dealt with out of, ironically, a forward thrust of guilt, its origins in the pang by which you project yourself needy at some future moment, with no one to turn to, no one to listen to.  And so, unless you are under enough pressures of your own to cause you to be rude, you greet The Past with some apprehension, ease your conscience in advance, and agree to make eye contact with it for five minutes or so.

This time, The Past arrived in a tan manuscript-sized envelope, making you jump to a conclusion of a project you much favored being dismissed as of no use.  The return address on the envelope was Inverness, FL, which you know to be on the west coast, perhaps a hundred miles ssw of Jacksonville, likely home to Republicans but not to anything related to a publication or publishing.

The salutation immediately drew the sort of fond squirt of affection you get when The Past serves up an unanticipated banquet of memories that span some considerable variety of experiences, as it did, for instance, earlier this year, with an envelope from Vermont, relative to times a tad shy of the events discussed in what you will now call The Florida Document.  You could have guessed the author of the contents of The Florida Document after the first paragraph.  Hefting the document itself, taking a kind of Dr. House diagnosis of the amount of time you'd be spending in making eye contact with the past, you knew with a certainty who the author was, then spoke his name with amused affection; it was good to see that his generosity to words remained undiminished.

Note carefully the preposition "to" relative to his generosity.  "To" instead of "for," because it quickly became apparent that The Past to which the sender referred was a Past some considerable distance to The Past you had brought forth in memory, causing you once again to wonder about the drama built into perception, say the different visions of the current proposals for health care as expressed by adherents of the two major political factions in the U.S.  You would not expect, say, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) to describe it as you would.

Fear not, this is not a trip down the rabbit hole of politics nor is it to be a point-by-point answer to the eight pages of single-space narrative hot off the presses from Inverness, Florida.  On investigation, I did discover I had in a 2007 blog entry, mentioned the sender in connection with King City, CA, some twenty five miles south of Salinas in the long, languid Central Valley of California and, to give it a historical anchor, home of John Steinbeck's father.   About halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, King City made itself known to me because it seemed to be the default place where automobiles owned by friends in Los Angeles or San Francisco would experience mechanical failures of some sort, either northbound or southbound.

The one-sentence mention of the author inspired a barrage of events so circuitous, prolix, digressive, and possibly accusatory that you still despair of understanding their true intent.  This was a segment of The Past you had more or less agreed to make eye contact with and as such it is a valuable document, particularly since it does call into additional memory specific contacts you had with the author.

Perhaps he will be dealt with, his complaint or summons or screed accorded the courtesy it deserves of a response of some sort, but note the passive voice in this sentence, creeping in like a commando in World War II propaganda dramas.  Will be dealt with...

The larger question to be dealt with is the one that asks, What are we to make of our past?  Shall we try to approach it as though there were several versions of it, some without you as the protagonist, some without you even a significant part of it?  That surely lets the genie out of the bottle.  How could one's own past not have oneself in it as a character?  How much of your own past was the segment alleged by your mother's older sister, that you had made off with her checkbook, and where was it?  True enough, she also accused you of sneaking into her Santa Monica condo and making off with several Eskimo Pies from her freezer.  Equally true, although your Past has no such activity in it, her Past does.  Easy for you to say she was, by the time of the checkbook and missing Eskimo Pies, several ants short of a picnic.

What is not easy for you to say or deal with is the concept of versions of an event or, for that matter, of events that did not appear in the theater of your mind.  Is it all a matter of booking and dates?

In your part of the world, late August and into September are the zucchini months, days when the zucchini vines yield their own gifts in such abundance that zucchini bread, zucchini quiche, zucchini pickles,and even shaved shards of zucchini as pasta become a kind of currency.  As you are off carting zucchini artifacts to the doorsteps of friends and, yes, admit it, strangers as well, other friends and other strangers are leaving you shall we call them objet d'zucchini.

It is lovely, zucchini as a metaphor for The Past.

There are also times when The Past presents you via memory or some unanticipated associative device of an event you thought was cheerful enough or even clever, perhaps wonderful.  And now, years later, you realize--again with the metaphor--you had the associative equivalent of your zipper open, or you had completely misread what you deemed quite a nice triumph, you had made--will there be no end to the metaphor--a sow's ear of a silk purse.

Ah, Past, what are we to do with you?

rites of passage

One of your earliest rites of passage, unless you count being born as one, came well before you'd managed to put thought processes together or in any way consider story telling as an avocation.  Because of the culture you were born into, this rite of passage was managed for you,deemed a necessity, even spoken of in the Old Testament as something necessary for your membership.  Other rites of passage were presented to you at times when you were thought to have cognitive abilities, emphasized in such a way that you knew saying no to them was taking yet another step toward the edges, toward the margin, toward the place where inner fantasy and outer reality were separated only by the faintest blur.

School was definitely a graduated series of rites, during the course of which it became yet another rite to chose your place.  As the character in Hawthorne's short story, "The Intelligence Office," so plaintively called forth, "I want my place! my own place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do, which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime! "  You at least came forth with that answer supplied to you and with such other rites as first publication, first booklength manuscript written, first seemingly cosmic sign that you were on the right path.

There were other rites of passage as well, involving the sense of otherness the self can experience when falling in love and out of love, both in sexually oriented and non-sexual ways.  There were rites of passage involving rejection slips and of placing second in races or competitions, rites of first publication for short stories written pseudonymously and then booklength stories written with pseudonym.  There were rites of passage in which you experienced the sense of not being able to give away things you had written for no fee and rites of passage involving your work, if it can be called that, in television.

You used to be a fair-to-middlin centerfielder, thus the rite of passage in one pick-up game of being bidden by a younger team mate to "Throw it over here, sir."  That is a rite of passage proving to be a harbinger of many such instances where you are accorded the honorific of sir, followed by that of professor, which first came about as a vote in 1974.  These things do not make you wiser or more equipped to pursue those rites of passage that await you.  In some cases, throwing out or disavowing specific rites of passage offer the opportunity to move nimbly along the path.  Friends are great comforts, lovers are sturdy reminders of safe havens and inspiration, dogs are perhaps more remarkable even than books, music is the language of the heart when it is trying to find out what you want from life, thus you never wish to be without these and yet there are places where these things properly cannot reach you, places where you must leave all your belongings except your memories if you are to keep moving, to enter those places where you and story are one, each of you in effect trying to tell the other, to relate the true meaning each of the other.

You Can Go Home Again IF You Can Find It

On your birth certificate there is an address listed for your parents, an address on Fourteenth Street in Santa Monica. You were surely brought there from the hospital where you gained entry into this remarkable and scary planet, but your only memories of it have to do with your mother talking about "the house on Fourteenth Street" and your sister recounting tales of attending the school some few blocks away.

In recent years, you park in front of the house, watching it, as though it could give you some clue to your process if not your identity. They--your parents--carried you down that walkway, entered through that very door with you, brought you there for the first time. As you grew, stories were extended, stories in which your mother and one of two or three maids transferred you into a car along with a collapsible pram, then drove you to the Palisades above the beach, where you were walked. You have no memory of that, only second-hand source material. The house on Fourteenth Street and the rides along the Palisades were before your memory kicked into gear. You look at the house speculatively, daring it to reveal something of itself to you or, indeed, something of you to you.

There were times in more recent years when you ran from the Santa Monica Canyon/Chautaqua area to the Palisades, all the way to the terminus at Colorado. You did this perhaps a few hundred times and gradually there came a memory of having been taken to a building on the Palisades, The Camera Obscura, where as a boy you were able to watch the magic of imagery being projected on a large, circular platform, bringing in the streets and bustle of downtown Santa Monica and on one occasion you were able to see the image of your father, heading toward Second and Broadway in order, as he later explained to you, to make a guess about the relative speed of a horse, the guess backed up with money left in an escrow account, he explained, at Grecco's Barbershop.

The beginnings of memory.

The memories expanded when your parents moved inland to Burbank. There, in a Mediterranean house on Providencia Street, more memories came, memories that were verified by your parents and sister, memories of neighbors named Brown, dog named Silver, other neighbors who had the most bizarre things you had yet seen, two baby alligators which were kept in the wash basin in the laundry room.

In recent years, you sat in front of that house, waiting for it to whisper secrets. You knew that one of the bathrooms had yellow and black tiles, that the door to the bathroom had a pane of corrugated glass that matched the door on the shower stall. You knew about a waffle iron with an ornate image of a peacock on its enameled lid. Memories, albeit scattered ones.

From Providencia Street in Burbank, your family moved to significantly more modest circumstances at 6145 1/2 Orange Street in the Wilshire-Fairfax district, more west than most parts of the city. Your memory came into significant play there; you can recall secret hiding places in and about the neighborhood, the then equivalent of a skate board which was a two-by-four with a wooden fruit box nailed vertical as a kind of wind shield and trunk compartment, a portion of a broom handle nailed across the top as a handlebar, a discarded roller skate, unscrewed into two parts being the wheels. Somewhere you;d secured benough black paint to affix a crude skull and the even more crudely lettered name, War Hawk. You remember times you were bidden to take War Hawk down to the market at the corner of Sixth and Fairfax for some forgotten item which was necessary for the evening meal. You remember games with your sister, climbing a tree in front of 6145 1/2, you remember crudely assembled crystal radios which brought in KFAC, a classical music station, and thus, with ear phones, you could listen to music when you were supposed to be sleeping. You could remember your sister promising not to rat you out provided you agreed to do the dinner dishes, you could remember the patch of garden up toward the cross street where it was possible to get enough sour grass to chew on for minutes at a time.

You could remember the Helms Bakery truck and its jelly donuts which for reasons you never learned were forbidden you and which you nevertheless essayed thanks to your discovery that Earl of Earl's Dry Cleaners on Fairfax was good for one penny per every two respectable wire coat hangers you brought in. You of course recall your mother wondering where all the wire coat hangers in the house had gone.

You remember, and so you returned to see what more 6145 1/2 Orange could tell you about the small, shy boy you were. But it was not there. 6145 1/2 Orange Street no longer exists; it is a part of a large condo complex, one that looks woefully undistinguished, institutional rather than residential.

It can tell you nothing because it is a break in the fabric of your memory. It cannot tell you of your first kiss--Elise Bernstein of the flaming red hair--nor of the chocolate-coated graham crackers six for a nickel at Weiner's market on the corner, nor of Sid Weiner, who made you wash your hands before plunging your arm into the pickle barrel for one of the crunchy new pickles, nor of the Good Humor trucks that plied the neighborhood selling ice cream goodies.

It is a warning that memory is a fabric that can wear out. What used to be Miller's Drug Store at Sixth and Fairfax is now a 99
Cent Store, with no pin-ball machine where you were sent to inform Jake that dinner was ready. "You can't read that," Ruth, the saleslady at Miller's said when she saw me holding Don Quixote. "Why not?" I said. ""Because you don't understand it." "I do, too. It's an adventure." "That's what I mean," she said. "It isn't either." Which became a kind of cause celebre in which we shifted our patronage, such as it was, to the Thrifty Drug on Wilshire and Cochran, or the Sontag Drug at Wilshire and Detroit.

Memory, the thing that makes a place a place, a person a person, an experience an event.

Memory. Our story. Our interpretation. Our version. Our entire self.

Lightning in a Bottle

Memory.
Memory of things told you by others that you have accepted as real and gone so far as to build images on.
Memory of things that began entirely in your own imagination/dreams.
Memory of things actually experienced.

At the northeast corner of Fairfax Avenue and Sixth Street in the western aspect of Los Angeles, California, there was a golf driving range, extending at least a block eastward, which is still an approximation because the entire parcel was undeveloped. From time to time the Goodyear blimp landed there. That was then. Way then. Now there is no golf driving range; there is a segment of a large housing development called Park La Brea. When you pass that intersection now, you feel cheated that it is not the golf driving range of your memory. Even though your Uncle Sam, your Aunt Flo, and your two cousins, Buzz and Barbara, lived in that housing development after the golf driving range ceased to exist, you do not think of them. You could go to the very door you entered when you visited there, but you rarely think of it or them, you think of the damned golf driving range and there is that residual feeling of being cheated of something.

Just above the Pacific Coast Highway, as it runs through Santa Monica, California, is a mile-long escarpment called The Palisades, from which splendid views of the beach, the Santa Monica Pier, the ocean, and on occasion, Santa Catalina Island, are visible. You were told so many times by your parents that as an infant, you were wheeled there in a buggy by a maid named Nellie Foley, that now, as you drive below the Palisades on your way to the university, you have the momentary sense of being wheeled along that park by Nellie, a fact that is made all the more real because you do remember and can visualize Nellie's replacement, Vivian.

After you read biographical materials dealing with Mark Twain's time i Virginia City, Nevada, you sedulously began to read books about the area, including Twain's own Roughing It, and also Dan DeQuille's The Big Bonanza, to the point where you had a sense of what Virginia City was like. Then you began to dream you were there, and when your school chums, Jerry Williams and Don Pettit returned from their army days and toured through there, bringing you a facsimile copy of The Territorial-Enterprise, you understood that dreaming of that place and that newspaper was not enough; you had to go there and work for it.

Somehow you came into possession of a document that was a blank learner's permit for flying a single-engine airplane, which yu artfully converted into fake ID, attesting to you being twenty-one and thus able to produce proof should you be questioned by a bartender or waitperson where liquor was served. With such document in your pocket, you drove to Randini's, a neighborhood bar on Western near Beverly, having been told by someone that he never left it alone, nor would you. The first time you went to Randini's, you were not even asked for your fake ID, but that was not the cause for your memory. Your drink set in front of you, you took a sip then cast a eye about the room for she without whom you would leave alone. You did not see her but you did see a man emerge from the rear, leading another man by the arm. You quickly realized that the man being led was blind. He was being led to the piano, where he sat with a immediate aplomb, plunked one gorgeous chord, nodded in the direction of the man who'd led him, then nodded.

He began with and old Irish song, The Kerry Dancers, but after less than fifteen seconds, you knew you'd blundered into Art Tatum.

There are some iconic musicians of our time. Leadbelly. Johnny Cash. Ella. Bruce Springsteen. Eric Clapton. John Coltrane. Not to forget Louis Armstrong. June Carter.

Then there is Art Tatum, who simply tied the piano into long, elaborate knots, untied them, then retied them with even greater complexity and relevance. He appeared to be playing a game of cat's cradle, beginning runs with his left hand, then sending them off to his right hand like a parent sending a kid off to school. He invented, built, conflated, amused. His melodic rushes cascaded over you, dousing you in the relevance of a song you'd only thought to have heard and remembered from before.


During an interview with a New York Times economist writer, Terri Gross paused for a time-out, during which came music I first thought of as modern classic, then of bebop, the as the hands of a well-educated stride pianist. But then I knew: the song was Cole Porter's Let's Face the Music and Dance, the pianist was Tatum, modern and unique in voice after all these many years, and although I'd heard Tatum on record many times before, I was back in Randini's with my forged ID.

The Palimpsest of Memory

1. If a thing is worth doing, it is really worth doing well?

2. Does memory improve or degrade an event?

3. Does memory improve or degrade a person in an event?

4. How does our version of an individual or event square with a performance of that person and/or event featuring that person?

5. Which is more important in our recollection of an individual or an event involving that individual, ambiguity or agenda?

6. Why is it unseemly to speak ill of the dead?
a-Adolph Hitler, for instance
b-Richard M. Nixon, for instance
c-Henry Kissinger may not be dead, but he is toast.

7. How are we able to impeach a president for lying about sex and not be able to impeach a president for lying about causus belli?

8. At what point do we want to upwardly embellish a pleasant memory?

9. At what point do we want to add more vitriol to an unpleasant memory?

10. At what point does memory of a person or event become a handicap?

Bonus Questions: Even if we are telling events as directly and guileless as possible, does it follow that the reader will believe the narrator?

How can the writer learn to imply that any given character is telling the truth?