well-placed objects (and does it matter to memory?)

I got up early yesterday so I could accompany my friend Stephen to the airport with Melanie. Maybe it was that whole wheat bagel with veggie cream cheese, or maybe I got a good night sleep, or maybe I was desperately needing to re-establish some kind of order to my life (I feel like I've been traveling since before the holidays, even though I've been in Houston for the past week), but whatever the cause, when I got back home, I plunged myself into the project of deep-cleaning the apartment. Dust, sweep, wipe down, scrub, shake out, mini-vac, and organize. Not only that, but I also had enough energy left over to do several loads of laundry and take a trip to Target, Radio Shack, and Southland Hardware to pick up random domestic objects: new trashcan, floor lamp, hamper, radio, and some scrap wood and brackets to make a shelf for the wall in the sun room. Last night, as we watched Robert Bresson's _PickPocket_ (1959), a structuralist French film that seems to be less about theft than it is about doorways and the well-composed insides of apartments, I kept stealing glances around our place, liking its well-placed objects.

The visits of my life-long friend Stephen has an interesting effect on my sense of time and memory. While in his company, time gets re-routed to the deep past in sometimes totally surprising and often difficult ways, a never-ending maze of memories that do not emerge unless this friend is there to trigger them. What amazes me is how much is there, and I wonder how much we do not remember, if we could ever remember it all.

I found a photograph from highschool of Stephen standing in front of a class we took as seniors called A.P. Comparative Government and Politics. In the photograph, Stephen is giving an oral report on the cultural significance of teaching abroad and, as an intentional bad joke, he has written on the black board (which is actually green) "Teaching A Broad." He hunches over a little lectern, his right elbow resting on its top edge and bent so that he can press his hand to his downward-looking forehead. It is a self-conscious gesture of anxiety, as if he is being given a hard time for his sophomoric humor. He is dressed in the Catholic school uniform all the boys were made to wear (black polyester pants, black pleather shoes, your choice dress-shirt and tie), along with a pair of Buddy Holly-looking glasses. The only part missing is the burgundy blazor which we could take off if the teacher was cool enough to allow it. Stephen is not wearing his. The room itself is starkly institutional; we both forgot how sparse the rooms of the school were. In the upper-right hand corner, the black letters "EXIT 2" are stencilled in spray paint high on the cinder block wall. Neither Stephen nor I could remember what "EXIT 2" meant -- if it was some sort of fire emergency exit route, or a way of numbering and classifying the different doors and hallways in the building, and yet we lived under those exit signs for four years.

Interestingly, Stephen, at first, did not remember anything about giving this oral report, but I have long remembered it (the misfiring of the joke, the way we all laughed), and I wonder how much of it has to do with my possession of the photograph. Once he saw the photo, he remembered that he had chosen that topic because one of his favorite aunts had recently taught abroad, and he found her stories about it very interesting. (I am only now, as I write this, remembering that I don't think I gave an oral report for this class like Stephen did; or, if I did, I don't recall what it was about. I remember, instead, that I collaborated with a cool smart girl named Jen Laverty to argue for a radical position in a debate about the tactics of the IRA.) In addition, neither Stephen nor I, at first, could identify the other student caught in the frame of the photograph, a skinny-looking tannish guy with braces, who has twisted in his seat to the back of the classroom, cracking up. Within a few seconds I got it: that's Tom Rinkavage, someone neither of us ever knew very well, but how interesting that I could remember his name, possibly only because I was sitting next to Stephen at the time.

Does it matter to the clarity of these memories that I still consider this class to be one of the best I took in high school? That I remember how attractive the teacher's leftist politics were to me? That the teacher had long, brown hair that he wore in a ponytail and, when he took it out, it was actually an unflattering mullet? Does it make a difference that the man who taught us this class was, in March 1994, found strangled to death in a crawl space in his apartment several years later, and that the man who was arrested soon afterwards confessed, during the trial, to choking him to death during a sexual encounter they arranged for pay after they met at a pornographic bookstore? (See http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:erb2RfySruQJ:query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html%3Fres%3D9D02E4D9143CF932A15750C0A962958260+%22james+semptimphelter%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 for the NYT report.) Does it matter that the case was all over the media, including the GLBT magazine The Advocate, which ran an article titled "Dial SM for Murder," and that friends of this teacher and members of the queer community in South Jersey wrote letters to the editor expressing their outrage at the sensationalization of the tragedy?

This morning, I'm lounging in a quilt in the sun room, drinking coffee and absorbing the sun coming in from the three huge windows. The room is bright, cozy with its red furniture standing out sharply against the quiet white walls and floor. In the weird corner of the room that sticks out for no reason at all, we have our six-foot-tall, skinny, green pencil cactus. This year, Hank purchased some red, glass Christmas ornaments and we hung a dozen of them from its branches. The result is a lovely holiday tree, simply trimmed. It is remarkable in the corner window, especially lit at night by a low-wattage lamp. Michael, our anthropologist friend, gave us the tree before he left town to do fieldwork in Chile. Thank you, Michael! The plant is healthy and looks great! (See Michael's blog here: http://frazer.rice.edu/~kriz/blog/)