My library turns up books I had forgotten or never knew we owned. We own Les Liaisons Dangereuses, French title, English text, Penguin volume. I haven't read it and it doesn't strike me as RDC's usual. But there it is. I have combed the shelves a few times for titles for the upstairs stretch of unread fiction, and one of those books was Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life, which is on the Feminista list, though whether the title novella or three-novella volume as a whole I don't know. Last night I opened it for the first time.
The title page is inscribed: "For Lisa. Mary Gordon."
I have no memory whatsoever of attending a booksigning for Mary Gordon. Her face on the back cover doesn't look familiar (which means nothing). I always peel off the bar codes, so whether I bought this book, published in 1993, from the UConn Co-op or the Tattered Cover I couldn't say. But probably the UConn Co-op. At the Co-op I remember Gretel Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Louis de Brunhoff's son, Bobbie Ann Mason, Douglas Adams, Anne Lauterbach, and Allen Ginsberg. Mary Gordon I do not remember.
I try to tell myself that remembering every event ever isn't necessary. My father just visited Connecticut and one of my sister's plans with him was to go to Block Island, just as he and I did in 1987. He had no memory of that visit. That's another story, but that's the kind of thing I remember. That I want to remember. That I ought to remember. Booksignings, I don't require. But still.
Throughout college my journal was a series of 120-page Joredco notebooks that eventually they stopped making, driving me to merely serviceable or occasional really cool spiralbound books. The last sheet or two of more than one notebook listed Reasons I'm Glad I'm Alive, events that I maybe didn't have time to chart in detail but didn't want to forget, or the date and the event so I could find its detail easily rather than pore through pages of not-as-happy-making filler. It's occurred to me recently that those pages could stand review (recently because I am almost finished with my current paper volume and it'll be time to dig the box out and either quickly cram it in or torment myself by skimming previous volumes). I wonder how many of those events I would remember.
A struggle for me has been how much to cling to my previous tastes and preferences out of loyalty to my former selves or devotion to the idea that I don't have former selves but am an integrated being. If I have forgotten a gathering in SEM's room sophomore year, does that mean it didn't mean anything? It's another thing for me to feel guilty about, that I am trying to learn not to feel guilty about.
Just in case I haven't said it enough yet, Blake is moulting. He leaves little bits of nail clippings and shoelace aglets and plumage in his wake. My navy blue-clad sternum looks like the shoulder of my sixth-grade teacher whose dandruff was legendary. Right now he is chewing on a blowcard when he can't reach around it to my keyboard, but last night he snacked on my Norton Anthology of English Literature, which I had out for John Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," which has fuck-all to do with Absalom, Absalom!