I Remember…

I remember…

“I remember grandma once walked…”
“I remember grandma asked for sweet potato”
“I remember grandma said she loved me too”
“I remember grandma answered me…”

Grandma’s love of reading poems and folk verses is where my own love of studying memory began.

I have someone I look up to: Nelson Dellis, a five-time memory champion who is also a mountaineer, and who runs a non-profit in the United States that raises funds and awareness for Alzheimer’s research through climbs all over the world. He did not start out with an outstanding memory; that came only after he was moved by his own grandmother, who fell ill with Alzheimer’s and died of it.

Watching one of his videos, about “5 memory books you have probably never heard of”, I was struck hard by one of the books: “I Remember” by Joe Brainard. You can start watching from 8:20.

https://youtu.be/Bhl1-vgQ1Nk?si=CrPSEw77VTeuJxbA

And so I began keeping a small notebook to set down my own memories, each one starting with the words

“I remember…”

And shouldn’t each of us have one of our own?

“I Remember” is an experimental memoir by the American artist Joe Brainard, published in 1970. It is a collage of memories, pieced together out of fragments and stray thoughts, each memory beginning with the incantation “I remember”. The book describes Brainard’s childhood in the 1940s and ’50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the ’60s and ’70s in New York City. The simplicity of the form has had a great appeal for writers and teachers alike, and most of the people who use it do not know where it came from.