I have been thinking a lot about the strip mall by my house. Strip mall has a terrible ring to it, but in essence, that’s what it was. A CVS Pharmacy, Mario’s Pizzeria, Joann’s, a craft store I bought a lot of yarn from in 2020, a dry cleaners I could never remember the name of, a fruit stand called Potato Field, all waiting for you in a straight line. We didn’t really ever go into Potato Field for much, only for the occasional apples or bananas, sometimes raspberries if I was making a cake and we were in a jam and didn’t want to drive 5 more minutes to Stop and Shop. It was always more expensive, and sometimes worse. I guess Potato Field was my equivalent of the English off-licence, my greengrocer. The men sometimes recognized me and smiled, letting me pay a few cents less when I was short on change.
And the only reason I bring this up is from a walk I took around Peckham recently. I was waiting to meet my friend Andrew for lunch and I needed to stretch my legs, the perils of wooden folding chair that wobbles as my ‘desk chair’ and a desk that’s not quite the right height having started to set in. So I walked. I walked up and down the block surrounding Peckham Rye station, let my eyes wander around stores and vendors and found myself in a big grocery store that sells everything under the sun, think Whole Foods meets Dollar Tree meets Poundland. I don’t remember what it was called, but it smelled just like Potato Field, funky but cold against your nostrils, sharp like the crunch of an apple, but clean. Before I knew it I was 7, staring at that very mountain of apples at the front of the store, wondering if we would get pizza from Mario’s, two doors down, on the way home, now a place that no longer exists (I had to text my mom to be sure).
At times I feel like a sponge. I have always functioned with high regard for my memory, baffling my family members by knowing our Wifi password from 2015, being the go-to person for the the dates we went out to dinner and what we all wore, how we sat and what we ordered. I prided myself on this for a long time, this idea of knowing these facts and details equating to ‘knowing one self’. but I have come to see that memory is a process, and not a thing, a living organism, in a way. When I was a kid I learned to absorb music ‘by heart’ instead of ‘from memory’, a distinction that built confidence in developing a relationship with the thing, the notes, the shape of my bottom lip. Our experience of moving through our lives, navigating the every day, will leave imprints on our lives, with memories flashing through when we least expect it.
When I was 9, I had a teacher called Mrs. Pinelli. She shuffled through the classroom, her flat shoes brushing against the dusty floor, and loved to dance. She was bright and hilarious, chronically losing her glasses on the top of her head and singing Michelle by The Beatles to me nearly every day. When Sidney, my boyfriend, started doing the same shortly after we started dating, I felt her come back to life before my eyes. Mrs Pinelli noticed me not only reading at my desk during lessons, but writing as tiny as humanly possible when doing assignments, trying to fit two sentences into one line, something I later brought back (unsuccessfully) when taking AP US History. I don’t know what compelled me to do this, a sense of efficiency with words on the page, I remember her sitting with me in a state of mild confusion, wondering what to say, and rather than scold me, she asked me, “What words stand out to you, in the book you’re reading?”
What words? I mean, I don’t really recognise that one - and I point.
Have you thought about writing them down, the words you don’t know, or find interesting, and keeping a list for yourself, to come back to?
A list?
This list has come and gone many times over the years, scribbled into the backs of notebooks, written on my phone, abandoned for years at a time. When I would remember I would scold myself for forgetting, for not following through and making the list with rigour, with consistency. I have lived many versions of myself since sitting in Mrs Pinelli’s class, one with terribly dyed blonde-ish hair, one who worked at Old Navy, one who got chased by feral cats with my cousins and brother in Croatia and we ran away screaming, laughing, these moments living clearly painted in my mind. I remember, in great detail, the years of my undergrad, my Masters, reading, writing, playing, eating curly fries at IC, even the days of elementary and middle school, getting in trouble for pretending to surfing on the toilet seats, a kid at lunch eating ketchup with his ice cream. I remember without knowing I chose to remember, the exact moment I discovered blood orange juice at a breakfast in Rome with my Mom, the first time I had Cadbury Fruit and Nut after a boy told me he liked it, the last kickball game we played before my second grade teacher went on maternity leave. Why is that?
‘What am I meant to do with the memory of knowing my friend from primary school’s birthday who I haven’t spoken to in 10 years’ my friend Marcella said before we went to see the staged version of Annie Ernaux’s The Years? It is a valid question - what is voluntary in our minds versus what isn’t, knowing so confidently what I ate for lunch yesterday but also knowing the moment I went for lunch with my mom’s coworker when I was 8 and she had the most ‘Lawn Guyland’ drawl I’ve ever heard until I knew what that was, knowing the arrangement of my friend Sam’s stuffed animals in her room when we were kids, the exact way I would hop between the rooms playing Webkinz on my mom’s computer.
Freud describes nostalgia as ‘a persistent refusal of loss, a repressed yearning for a lost object, which thwarts the mourning processes necessary for health’ but what about the rest, what do we do with the tiny, minuscule, even inconsequential at times memories or parcels of information that no longer live with us in this lifetime? How are we to live if we don’t remember, how are we to remember if we do not live?
What was left for me to realise, in my recent re-memory of the list, is that, rather than a requirement, the answer to something, it is an exercise in curiosity, in seeking what sparks my interest over the course of a day, a week, a stretch of my life, of nodding to the 9 year old girl reading at her desk, who has no idea what’s ahead. While we cannot control what we remember (and don’t) it becomes part of us, and encourages us to look to the present, what we hold, the specialness of the now.
khan's bargains eagerly awaits your next visit!
Awesome ❤️