Walking across the 59th Street Bridge I saw this sign. I laugh when I see signs like this, because I put an exclamation point at the end of them. This simple trick turns an informative sign into a protest. END ROAD WORK!
I think I got this idea from a high school English teacher who asked us what we thought of our recently completed reading assignment: Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Mostly we muttered that it was a great book, but someone complained that it had a boring title.
The English teacher, slightly piqued by such a weenie comment, suggested “Maybe the the editor should have added an exclamation point.” The Mayor of Casterbridge! I remember how everyone laughed at that comment.
Long walks are good for the mind, I think. During that walk over the 59th Street Bridge, from here to Rockefeller Center, I found myself thinking about memory: the things people remember and the sometimes cherry-picked way people construct their reality.
I remembered a summer spent devouring conspiracy theories. I read books claiming Castro killed Kennedy; that no, wait, Lyndon Johnson did it; that Ronald Reagan was Satan. I thought of this recently when talking to someone who sincerely believed the attacks of 9/11/01 were funded by New Jersey real estate developers scheming to increase the value of their properties.
I think that in almost all things people believe what they want to believe. Reality is artificial to begin with, constrained by the limitations of spoken languages and unspoken forms of communication. People believe crazy things, but I do not believe in universal stupidity. I believe in poor communication, lack of understanding, and life’s unique framework as it structures your chosie of what to believe.
What I remembered that day on the 59th Street Bridge was the 9:43 train. I remember that train as my first deliberate attempt to frame my life. The 9:43 was a train that I heard one night in Tampa when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old. Lying in bed trying to get to sleep I heard the lovely, distant sound of a train tooting its horn. I believe the train passed near Nebraska Avenue, a distance of about a mile, a distance across which the sound easily carried.
At 11 or 12 years old, though, one mile was as good as a thousand. The sound of that train was a distant message to me, sent perhaps from a friendly but unwitting train conductor, or as I chose to believe, from a higher source.
I remember one night thinking that the sound of this train, the 9:43, would be a regularly scheduled occurance. Lying in bed the next night I waited for it, and in fact it came right on time. It comforted me, and I looked forward to this train becoming a point of reference for all my days. I imagined myself in later years explaining to people “I remember the 9:43…”
Other nights, staying up too late watching TV, I heard it from the living room, or from the back yard. Not always on time, of course, I knew even then that I chose 9:43 arbitrarily, that being the time at which I first heard it.
I did other things like this. Other things designed to bring points of order to my life, things which I imagined would continue for my entire life.
After dark I sat on a lawn chair in the back yard and talked to God. It was always friendly. “Hi, how ya been?” I’d ask. “Anything new with you?” I don’t think I ever thought of God as a He or a She. To me It was a massive, calm force. God was not from Cotton Mather’s screeds — screeds which made me laugh even at a young age. God never held sinners over flaming pits filled with snakes, nor did God’s presence ever turn to hate. To me God was Love, the center of a calm and situated mind, and that force which is your reckoning.
I imagined these conversation happening every Friday night until forever.
I quit doing this stuff after grade school. The 9:43, I came to realize, stopped coming anywhere near that time. Conversations with God turned into conversations with myself. And therein lies the source of this rambling. Over the last few months I rediscovered and have experienced some of those conversations with myself. A large bag full of cassette tapes, sitting in my closet for a few years now, contained tapes of myself talking. Some of these tapes go as far back as the 4th grade — although those tapes consist mostly of my sister and me goofing off with the tape recorder.
I’m not sure when I started sitting in rooms by myself talking into tape recorders, but in addition to those tapes I found hours and hours of audio letters exchanged among my friends and me. Audio letters, mostly made during and soon after college, containing monologues from the senders.
I made many of these audio letter tapes, but I made even more tapes not meant for others to hear. I still do this once in a while. Lacking anyone else to talk to, not wanting to simply talk into thin air, and forever forwarding the art of accumulation I taped all kinds of ramblings. It was not until I started thinking about it again recently that I connected these tapes to those back yard conversations with God.
I only listened to a few of them. In most of those monologues I am full of shit. I don’t lie but I exaggerate the significance of facts, facts meticulously chosen and praised in an attempt to make my life more promising than it really was. In one of the tapes, recorded a few weeks after September 11, I sound very much like I’m about to slash my wrists.
Since many of the tapes are deteriorating I decided to encode them as digital audio and lock them up somewhere, and I hope that no human ears ever hear this stuff again. I listened only here and there and remember little, except to note that I don’t think I sound the same now as I did 15 years ago.
Remembering these things now — the 9:43, the conversations with God — remembering these attempts to organize the rest of my life around arbitrarily scheduled points in time, I understand why certain things stick in my imagination. Woody Allen (of all people) comes to mind. Why? Because he has played clarinet with his Dixieland Jazz band every week for over 25 years. I saw the show once, when it was at Michael’s on the east side. The show did not impress, but the simple fact that it still happened on schedule all these years on impressed me. I imagined that this amusement, and more importantly the regularly scheduled part, gave Mr. Allen a sense of structure and comfort which let him do his real work.
I will never know why I remember some things, or why they surface in my mind as often as they do. Why do I remember, 3 years ago at Yankee Stadium, the sound made when a plastic bag blew onto the field and the first baseman picked it up and stuck it in his pocket? Why do I remember the sound made when a friend put a bottle on a table as if to punctuate her words? Why do I remember the sound of an automated shortwave broadcast in which a canned voice stated the exact coordinated universal time every minute, and why do I remember the sounds of the seconds pulsing during that broadcast?
Other things lay forgotten. I remember in high school, driving to school in the morning and realizing that a good 5 minutes of that drive had utterly vanished from my memory. It happened frequently, and I bet it still does.
