Someone I know from the Presbyterian Church stopped me while we were passing the peace a couple of Sundays ago — a hasty ramble in the middle of the service in which you trot up and down the aisles shaking hands and wishing one another the pax Christi — and said, “Bess, how in the world do you remember all those things you write about in your newspaper column? You must have an incredible memory!”
The fact is, as my friend Antonia will attest, I do not have an excellent memory at all. I have a rather poor memory, with great big gaps where there is nothing but crackling television static — gaping omissions, entire years of schooling, so many things people (even those important to me) said, a whole library filled with volumes of books I’ve read carefully, even with strong emotion, only to immediately forget. I only write about the things that remain.
My friend Antonia is the one with the magnificent memory. She remembers it all: What Mr. Teichgraeber — the highfalutin English teacher at our highfalutin boarding school who insisted on being called “Dr. Teichgraeber” — said about a classmate’s lip gloss, on what day of the week, where we were seated among our desks in the round, with our New Wave haircuts and packs of Sobranie cigarettes in our jeans jackets and our fingernails bitten to the quick. I struggle to recall what Dr. Teichgraeber looked like; I think he had brown hair combed to the side and Clark Kent eyeglasses. I do remember one thing about him: the time he corrected me — snapping out a one-word retort, “Wrong!” — when I raised my hand in reply to a question and said that the word “maudlin” came from the name of medieval mental hospitals in England and Ireland, the Magdalen madhouses. (I was right and he was wrong; that’s the only reason I remember this: ego!)
I had completely forgotten that there was another famous and beloved teacher, named Mr. O’Connor, at Concord Academy until I saw him being memorialized rhapsodically on social media by classmates as a dear friend and mentor who (apparently?) not only formed their young minds indelibly but played guitar with his own rock band, which was called (intriguingly) the Universe Narrows. I don’t remember this man and mentor at all. Forcing myself to think hard, I believe Mr. O’Connor taught my Russian history class, the one in which we all took Russian names and I was addressed as “Yelizaveta.”
I’ve forgotten most of high school. What remains is that I once harmed the calcaneus bones of the heels of both feet running in a pair of tight, vintage, hard-plastic go-go boots patterned like Piet Mondrian’s “Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow,” trying not to miss the train back to campus from Boston on a day in the spring of 1983. Or a melancholy but punk-rock moment — three seconds — in front of a jukebox in a luncheonette near Harvard Square on a rainy winter afternoon, the plastic face of the jukebox yellowed with cigarette smoke. Or the couch on which I made out with a boy I’d never met before at a day student’s house party; the boy was a Mod with blond hair and buck teeth who owned a Vespa, and the couch was golden brocade. Bursts and flashes like that.
Memory is a mystery. Why do certain mundane moments linger?
Here’s one: There was a screen door between the front hall of our house in Promised Land that looked out towards the cherry tree in the sandy lawn. One time when I was 2 or 3 years old and spent my boring days home alone with my harried mother, I stood squinting through the mesh grid of the screen at the thin grass of our dry summer lawn and then sat down at the kitchen table, took a pencil, and began to attempt to recreate the geometric grid on paper, to the astonishment and worry of my mother; I was still only scribbling age.
I could tell you all about the Tiger Milk bar — a health-food alternative to chocolate made out of carob, foisted on children in the sad 1970s — I ate standing beside our big, ugly, harvest-gold Frigidaire a couple years later, and its musty-sweet, disappointing taste. Or a certain morning at the Hampton Day School circa 1974 when, left to our own devices because this was a hippie “free school,” we used magnifying glasses to start tiny fires in the railroad ties that served as garden-bed edges outside our open classroom, scorching the wood until smoke rose.
Who knows why these moments are stuck in the gears of time?
It makes more sense that I remember the day of my father’s funeral, when I was 13, and picking out a tiered Indian-cotton-print prairie skirt from my bedroom closet to wear to the Presbyterian Church, knowing I looked a mess, and my mother tugging at my arm to get me to stand when the plain, wood casket was carried into the crowded sanctuary, and how I refused to stand but just sat there in the pew, not looking up, and my friend Jenno a few rows behind, crying forcefully with tears all over her face (which to this day makes me think fondly of my friend Jenno’s good heart).
I really only write about these things that remain — the past — because my life is dull these days, and I have to write something here each week. Other people’s lives are the only topic that has ever really interested me, so I write on the assumption you have such a curiosity, too. Maybe mildly? The Tiger Milk Bar, the buck-toothed Mod on a brocade couch? Only connect, I guess.