Science

As I have mentioned, Lily is constantly demanding "stories from when you were a little girl, Mama." At this point, I am sometimes tempted to say, "Well, one time when I was ten I had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup for lunch." Seriously, I'm spent. In my work, I am also always trying to force myself to remember things: situations, conversations, details. All this remembering leads to a feeling that I am dwelling in the past, which depending on my mood is either a pleasant complement or sober contrast to the intense immediacies of my life.

It also means that I am in a near-constant state of elevated remembering. Just now, as I was wondering what to write about, my eye stopped on a collection of stones I keep on my desk: six small ones in the muted colors of the rainbow and one grey smooth one. For some reason, my mind leaped to a scene of me in my high school Cosmology class, taught by a groovy teacher who once touched the sleeve of the vintage cashmere sweater I was wearing and said, "Intense blue. Nice tone." And thinking of this made me remember another sweater, another class, with this same teacher, who also taught me Biology: a blue-and-black checked one that belonged to my friend Erika--this was an era of wearing other people's clothing. I had a terrible cold, and my nose would not stop running, but I was seated in the middle of the room, and I felt embarrassed or awkward about getting up and going to find a Kleenex, so I kept wiping my nose surreptitiously on the sweater's thick, rough woolen sleeve.

And I remember the boy in my class who had decorated his white high top sneakers with magic markers, words and symbols, and the singular feeling of sitting at a desk in front of a blue book and test and knowing before I read a single word that I would not be able to truly answer most of the questions. There was a girl in the class who came to my house once, to sleep over, as part of a day student/boarding student pairing program, and my parents bought us matching heavy shirts in the style worn by hunters that had a brief moment in the mid-eighties and have never returned. I remember standing outside the clothing store at the mall, the upscale mall, and thinking even then that it was strange that my parents had bought us both shirts, and wondering if they felt sorry that her parents had sent her to boarding school.

And just now, writing this, I remember sitting in a stream of sunlight at one of the little lab tables for two in the science room wearing a navy blue jacket I had recently found at my grandparents' house that had belonged to my grandfather. It had an Abercrombie and Fitch label in it, from when the store featured elegant outdoorsy clothes for grown-ups, long before my time, and which I knew my father had once given to my recently deceased grandfather. I loved this jacket, have it still somewhere. It has a hood and a silky lining and big, deep pockets, and I had to roll the sleeves up twice so they would not hang way below my fingertips. I loved it because it felt so true to my then very self-conscious developing sense of style but also because it had been my grandfather's, and I liked the idea of me wearing it too.

Sometimes I feel these floods of memories in an almost upsetting way, even when the memories themselves, as they so often are, are pleasant. I cannot really control them, and it can be overwhelming. I have never been good at clearing my mind. It's funny; I see Lily doing this already, even more accurately than I can. We will be walking down the street and she will say, for example, "Mama? Do you remember that day when it was Henry's birthday, and I was sitting on the floor buckling my shoe, and the phone rang, and it was Henry's mother, and she asked if we could come early to help her set up the food, and we had to get dressed really fast, and you couldn't find the black hairbrush?" This was nearly two years ago, now, and it is not a memory of any particular significance; in fact I can say with some assurance that this moment would never again have occurred to me if not for her recollection, triggered by who knows what, for what purpose I cannot imagine.

Except I kind of can. Storing these memories, of seemingly or actually insignificant moments, the sunlight on the graphite table, the rip in the silk lining of the turned-up sleeve, the glossy brown hair of the boy with the decorated sneakers, the light pressure of the teacher's hand on my arm: in a way, this is what life is, an assemblage of all of these infinitesimal moments, a multi-dimensional composition of all that has happened to us, refracted through time and space and experience. Most of the time I am grateful for my memories, however mundane, and their ability to push past the present and flood it out entirely. I guess, in a way, they are proof.