I’m forgetting my nouns. Other things too (walking into a room for something—what?), but mostly nouns. I say “thingy” a lot, and roll my eyes, even as dread snakes through my gut. Maybe I’ve used “thingy” since I was 13 and, amusingly, just don’t remember. Maybe it’s a peri-menopausal symptom (someone—who?—told me about this). But it doesn’t really matter whether hormones are to blame, or whether it has ever been thus: I’m abruptly and acutely aware that I’m forgetting.
When I was young enough never to imagine aging in anything other than abstract, philosophical terms, I worked the Sunday shift at Edwards (why no apostrophe? Why, when the owner’s name was Edward?) Books & Art at Yonge and Eglinton. I’d score the upstairs, with its Edward-proscribed stool, and plant myself behind the counter, and I’d read. It was Sunday, after all: the customers trickled, at best, and tended to be browsers, not buyers. On other days I’d read fiction, but on Sundays it was all about the New York Times Book Review. Voraciously democratic, I read every review—every single one, whether the book in question appealed to me or not. I could feel things stirring in my brain, as I read: connections; shadows that weren’t quite ideas; ideas that I had to scribble down on the backs of the flyers we always had stacked on the counter. I gleaned strange and compelling tidbits from reviews of books I never intended to read because they were about politics, or physics, or a dead musician or actress. Words written about words got me all fired up to write words.
A few years ago, my parents gave me a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. Reading it continues to be a ritual, but it’s been devoid, for the most part, of the kind of glorious agitation I felt when I was 22. Because my Sundays aren’t just about sitting on a stool, in silence broken only by Bach or Vivaldi or possibly early Beethoven? Because I’m older, and not nearly as voraciously democratic about ideas as I once was? Because I’m older, and things don’t stir in my brain as they used to?
Today, though, I felt an Edwards echo. It’s spring, at last: everything’s Kodachrome green, and the cherry tree next door is shedding blossoms like snow, and we can sit on the porch again, with paper and laptops, coffee and maybe Baileys. I’m not writing, but I’m starting to think about thinking about it. All of this, and who knows what else, contributed to some sort of NYT-related alchemy.
I read every article in every section of today’s paper, except the ones about business and sports. (OK, so “democratic” I’ve never truly been, not even in the halcyon year of 1990.) Strange and compelling tidbits abounded, from the profound to the prosaic. I read about Kris Kardashian (who, pregnant and grieving for her friend Nicole Simpson, wore some of Nicole’s maternity clothing to O.J. Simpson’s trial, at which Kris’s former husband was defending him); Victorian death rituals (a paper band attached to the brim of a hat that had belonged to a four-year-old boy: “In affectionate remembrance Richard Nicholls Milliken Born Feb 11 1857 Died Dec 23 1861”); the connection between destructive factory fishing and World War II; DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, who use social media to document police brutality, cities in flames, the places where black men have died: “Our demand is simple. Stop killing us.”
There were connections, too, as there always seem to be, when you read enough. From that article about Victorian death rituals: “I wished I had saved a lock of my sister-in-law’s long black hair. Not just because I loved her, but also because I am selfish. Will someone feel the same about me? Isn’t that what we all want: to be remembered?”
And from an article about Frida Kahlo, this quote from an art museum director: “This continues to hit a nerve with people. The paintings are Kahlo’s way of saying: ‘This is how I thought. This is what I lived. Remember me.’”
And, just now, logging on to my own website in preparation for posting, I enter my password and tick that box: “Remember me.” (No matter how many times I tick the box, WordPress never remembers me.)
Profound to prosaic—a thought, a hope, an idea, a thingy: remember.
Utagawa Hiroshige, 1797-1858
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