Today's Lesson

Today's assignment: Write one "I Remember" poem.

It's so easy even a child can do it. See. (Remember the Castro Convertible commercials that demonstrated the wonder of their sofa-beds with the slogan: It's so easy even a child can do it? I'm surpised they didn't say it's so easy even a woman can do it. Maybe they did.)

Joe Brainard wrote lots of poems. You can read about his and him or you can just forget about that and write.

Julia writes "I Remember" poetry. She writes lots of poetry because she has to. She's in college and takes poetry classes. I didn't know she was writing a book of "I Remember" poems for her end-of-semester assignment. She didn't know I was exploring remembering, starting with "I Remember Melancholy" on my new blog. We did these things on the same day. We're 3,000 miles apart.

I miss Julia. I remember when she was a baby and when she wasn't a baby anymore. I remember walking together, miles and miles of walking over the years. I remember the night we walked from 49th and 10th Avenue past Lincoln Center to 89th Street so I could show her my old apartment, then down to the village to Bleeker to get cupcakes at Magnolia. We watched people in the chess stores playing chess at midnight. Magnolia was closed by the time we got there. We got cupcakes the next day.

I remember when we went to Oakland and decided Mills was not the school for her and when we went back the next year and realized Mills is definitely the school for her. So now she lives in California and is dumping her other majors, both of them, to study creative writing and she blames it on me. I pass the blame on to my mother and my mother's parents. I blame my writing of "I Remember" poetry on her. I tell her there are worse things.