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.

I Remember When, Except I Don't

Occasionally it has occurred to me that I should take an index card and write on it my five favorite books, movies and songs, so when, on the rare occasions I am asked what they are, I will be able to say something other than the most recent halfway decent book, movie or song I have read, seen or heard. In other words, I have a retrieval problem with this sort of information, and although I know some people's brains work this way--are able to categorize and recall information like this--mine does not.

But as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about my own past, you would think it would be easy for me to recall my own memories. It used to be easier. Lily has become consumed by asking me to "tell me a story about when you were a little girl." She also enjoys asking Ben, my parents, my grandmother and other adults in her life this question, but mostly she asks it of me, and for the first 500 or so times I willingly complied. And then, the well ran dry. I started telling some of the stories again and again: the old chestnuts, her favorites. The time Alison and I locked ourselves in the bathroom when we had a babysitter had a run. The time my doll Bess was left on a train, another. And, for some reason, a desperation number with paltry action: the time we were in my grandparents' swimming pool with my cousins and an unexpected thunderstorm came on all of a sudden, and we had to run out of the pool in the rain. "And there was lightning?" she always asks, and I wish, for the dozenth time that I could fabricate a tree being split in half, and I say, as I always say, "Later. Later there was a little lightning."

I have started to dread the question. She doesn't want the oldies but goodies anymore; she wants new material, is desperate for it. And although I have been on this earth for 38 1/2 years, with a near photographic memory for about 35 of those, I simply cannot pull any more childhood stories out of my hat. What in god's name did I do every single day for the 17 hours I was awake for the first 12 years or so of my life, which is pretty much all she is interested in? We played outside, when it was nice, all day every day. We played inside when it was not. But I have described our regular activities, and the extraordinary ones, so many times now that I should record my voice and hit play, saving my breath for those increasingly rare occasions when a new memory does squeeze its way into my consciousness.

This happened the other night, in fact. Annika stirred; I rolled onto my side and looked over at the digital clock: 3:54. All of a sudden I sat up in bed. The mouse! The mouse on the edge of the wicker trash basket in Martha's Vineyard in the middle of the night holding the wrappers of our secret candy stash in his curled mouse paws! I had never told Lily this story. For a psychotic, sleep-deprived instant I considered waking her to share it. I did not. And actually, when I awoke, clearer heads or at least a clearer version of my own, prevailed, and I waited until bedtime, until the inevitable question, and when she asked it, I smiled, breathed a lung-filling sigh of relief, and began.

I will write more on this subject. I want to talk about my fascination with my parents' and grandparents' childhood memories, and the legacy we leave with the memories we share, and how incomplete it is, and how certain of the stories take hold in the imagination of a child at a particular age for a particular reason (or not) and how this is both like and not like the stories we create of the past from photographs and other artifacts of the older people we love. But this is all for now. Except another quote, that came to me as I started to write this, from a book I have not read in a very long time:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.