Chapter Forty-Four: Proust

Chapter Forty-Four

Proust

There’s this old French book, by this guy Proust.  Remembrances of Things Past, I think it’s called.  In it, Proust, paints vivid pictures of his every memory, from childhood on, in painstaking, lavish detail.  He would recall the hour he spent as a child playing in a sunbeam streaming through a window.  How the dust hung there, or rose up, in that magic light.  How the hands of the clock crawled across its face to mark the passage of time, somehow both imperceptibly and obviously.  Something, like that.  I’ve never read it.  My book is the opposite of that one.

But memories were starting to flow.  I was sitting on the sofa in the apartment in Albany (Jill was at work and Jackie was doing transcriptions at her desk in their bedroom).  I was scrolling through Netflix trying to figure out what to watch.  And for some reason I remembered a moment:  I was on the couch at my father’s house in South Jersey, alone, watching Hogan’s Heroes on the big, old television set.  I was eating Doritos and a fried Spam sandwich.  Schultz, as always knew nothing.  Klink was vaguely suspicious.  Hogan’s eyes twinkled.  A crunch and a zesty splash of Nacho cheese flavor exploded on my tongue.  I smelled the familiar smells of my dad’s house. I was safe and comfortable.  A blue jay flew by the window with a call.  The sun glistened on its wings.  The telephone in the kitchen rang with alarm.  Not the new kind of phone ring, this phone was seriously old school…rotary.  I remember being pulled out of my comfortable meal by the phone’s urgency.  And that detail of memory pulled me out of my reverie.  And I was back in Albany, on the couch.






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