it, me Buckeyes.
       11.   No, but plenty of people wish I would. Are you among them?
ALL RIGHT. One time they donât know about. I forgot my area code. I was FedExing poems to the Kenyon Review, and you know? Where the FedEx form asks you for your phone number? I wrote down 122. That didnât look right, so I put 221, then 121. I stared at the numbers a minute, and finally asked the FedEx man, whatâs the area codefor New York City? He gave no contempt with his answer. Oh, yes, I said. Sure. Thanks. I should have remembered it was a palindrome beginning with 2. Yeah, he said. A palindrome.
All right. Two. But that second time was different. Iâm not sure if I forgot something, or if I was remembering something that didnât happen yet, like a dream. I was walking back to the Belnord, on Eighty-sixth between Central Park West and Columbus. Then I stopped, stood still. That much is fact. I donât know why I stopped, but I think I was scared or disoriented, the way one is when seated in a parked car in a parking lot, and the two cars on either side of you start to move backward. You think you are moving forward, but you are stock-still.
Well, thatâs what happened with me and Eighty-sixth Street. The entire boulevard liquefied and began to move toward me, like a whitewater river. As it flowed, it gained steam. I looked for something to grab on to, to keep from being swept away, but nothing presented itselfâonly me and the boulevard river rushing in the direction of the park, and making a godawful whooshing and gurgling noise, as it carried away TV repairmen, doctors, nannies, manicurists, policewomen, people who worked in Starbucks, dogs on leashes, and all the denizens of Eighty-sixth Street, everyone shouting and barking and waving arms in a desperate effort to remain afloat. There followed fire hydrants, trucks, buses, and larger debrisstillâhuge trees and an entire town house, all rushing down the rapids. Withal, I managed to stand my ground, expecting the river to gobble me up too, but it did not. And then it was gone, just like that, and Eighty-sixth Street was back to its original shape. Pedestrians were staring at me as they passed, wondering if I were ill. A beer delivery guy was the only one to stop and ask, Mister? You okay? I said, Maybe.
SEE HERE, BUCKEYES. How sure are you about memory, anyway? Is it always applied to what you remember? For instance, Iâve always suspected that Shakespeare was really Charles Darwin. Or vice versa. I never know how one should put it. Oh, I appreciate that Bacon and Marlowe are assumed to be the chief contenders, since itâs unthinkable that Shakespeare could have been Shakespeare. But, no offense, how obvious can you get. Anyone could name a literary contemporary of Shakespeareâs and call him Shakespeare. Nothing to it. It takes someone with a real nose for crime to figure out that while Darwin was writing The Origin of Species in the nineteenth century, he was also polishing off Hamlet in the seventeenth. At first I merely surmised that only a man like Darwin had the sort of genius Shakespeare had, that is, the galactic imagination to perceive and declare connections among invisible stages of development. Butthen I found an actual clue, a typo in Hamlet . âTo be or not to beâ was intended to read âTo be and not to be.â There you go.
Do you follow? What if memory does not apply to the past, after all, but rather to something that will occur tomorrow or next week, and the past is something we only forget? And that would be grand, âcause most of what we can remember is terrible. Looking back on our lives, we donât stand a ghost of a chance. But looking ahead to our past, why, maâam, youâve won the lottery. For all you know, the things you remember havenât happened yet. Small wonder youâre confused. This is bound to affect your actions and decisions,
       11.   No, but plenty of people wish I would. Are you among them?
ALL RIGHT. One time they donât know about. I forgot my area code. I was FedExing poems to the Kenyon Review, and you know? Where the FedEx form asks you for your phone number? I wrote down 122. That didnât look right, so I put 221, then 121. I stared at the numbers a minute, and finally asked the FedEx man, whatâs the area codefor New York City? He gave no contempt with his answer. Oh, yes, I said. Sure. Thanks. I should have remembered it was a palindrome beginning with 2. Yeah, he said. A palindrome.
All right. Two. But that second time was different. Iâm not sure if I forgot something, or if I was remembering something that didnât happen yet, like a dream. I was walking back to the Belnord, on Eighty-sixth between Central Park West and Columbus. Then I stopped, stood still. That much is fact. I donât know why I stopped, but I think I was scared or disoriented, the way one is when seated in a parked car in a parking lot, and the two cars on either side of you start to move backward. You think you are moving forward, but you are stock-still.
Well, thatâs what happened with me and Eighty-sixth Street. The entire boulevard liquefied and began to move toward me, like a whitewater river. As it flowed, it gained steam. I looked for something to grab on to, to keep from being swept away, but nothing presented itselfâonly me and the boulevard river rushing in the direction of the park, and making a godawful whooshing and gurgling noise, as it carried away TV repairmen, doctors, nannies, manicurists, policewomen, people who worked in Starbucks, dogs on leashes, and all the denizens of Eighty-sixth Street, everyone shouting and barking and waving arms in a desperate effort to remain afloat. There followed fire hydrants, trucks, buses, and larger debrisstillâhuge trees and an entire town house, all rushing down the rapids. Withal, I managed to stand my ground, expecting the river to gobble me up too, but it did not. And then it was gone, just like that, and Eighty-sixth Street was back to its original shape. Pedestrians were staring at me as they passed, wondering if I were ill. A beer delivery guy was the only one to stop and ask, Mister? You okay? I said, Maybe.
SEE HERE, BUCKEYES. How sure are you about memory, anyway? Is it always applied to what you remember? For instance, Iâve always suspected that Shakespeare was really Charles Darwin. Or vice versa. I never know how one should put it. Oh, I appreciate that Bacon and Marlowe are assumed to be the chief contenders, since itâs unthinkable that Shakespeare could have been Shakespeare. But, no offense, how obvious can you get. Anyone could name a literary contemporary of Shakespeareâs and call him Shakespeare. Nothing to it. It takes someone with a real nose for crime to figure out that while Darwin was writing The Origin of Species in the nineteenth century, he was also polishing off Hamlet in the seventeenth. At first I merely surmised that only a man like Darwin had the sort of genius Shakespeare had, that is, the galactic imagination to perceive and declare connections among invisible stages of development. Butthen I found an actual clue, a typo in Hamlet . âTo be or not to beâ was intended to read âTo be and not to be.â There you go.
Do you follow? What if memory does not apply to the past, after all, but rather to something that will occur tomorrow or next week, and the past is something we only forget? And that would be grand, âcause most of what we can remember is terrible. Looking back on our lives, we donât stand a ghost of a chance. But looking ahead to our past, why, maâam, youâve won the lottery. For all you know, the things you remember havenât happened yet. Small wonder youâre confused. This is bound to affect your actions and decisions,
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