Sample Chapters.  The Curvature of Time, by Robert Grudin.  All Rights Reserved

The Curvature of Time

Memory as Personal Experience

by Robert Grudin

Copyright © 2021  by Robert Grudin

PART I

IMPACT OF MEMORY Remembering Surprise

Have you ever watched a horse eat an apple?  I myself have never seen such a vivid expression of gusto and joy. Nor is the experience exclusively visual.  Just listening to the thunderous chomp and crush adds a rowdy and transforming  new dimension.   I keep that image in memory, like a kind of locket or sacred artifact, so that I will never will lose touch with that feeling of artless enthusiasm, of unmitigated engagement in life.

Another example of symbolic memory portrays my own encounter with another rounded fruit.  Twenty years ago, when I first took possession of our Hawaiian house, I walked in the garden and discovered a tiny orchard of citrus.  I looked for something in season, and soon came upon a large ripe tangerine that hung within arm’s reach.  I grabbed it and pulled, but it wouldn’t come off until I outright yanked it.  Yank I did, and when at last the fruit pulled free of its stem, my airspace exploded into a cloud of tangy seductive zest that was, more than any poem or drama I had read, a harbinger of life itself.

Why did both of these memories speak so intimately to me?  Memories of smell and taste speak directly to what’s inner and primordial – after all, smell and taste are a newborn’s first sensations, long before sight and hearing have been calibrated.  In a  page or two I will add to this list by referencing the brash taste and feel of fresh figs.

Other memories resist exclusion.  When I turned three years old, my parents gave me a party, inviting two of my future elementary school classmates and a grownup couple named O’Rourke.  Their present for me came in a hatbox-sized parcel, and when I pulled off the lid, three jumbo paper pompoms jumped out and rolled across the floor.  That was the O’Rourke present – the mere surprise of it -- and I would keep it permanently.  Especially after I learned, years later, that on that very day, in a country halfway around the world, my future wife was born.

Joy.  Life.  Surprise.  These are words for the feelings suggested by these memories.  But the memories just cited themselves, for me, pack the vitality to evoke the feelings rather than just signify them.  More than mere references to the past, such memories can become priceless pieces of mental equipment, gateways to youthful emotions with which, as we age, we are in danger of losing touch.  It was a feeling of this sort – or the desire to convey such a feeling –  that must have moved Ernest Hemingway when he wrote in a letter,“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”  The writer’s deliberately bungled metaphor suggests a profound transgression against academic psychology.  It suggests that memory can be more than a museum-like storehouse of experience, that memory, like a ghost that takes on vividly present form, mass, and character, can be experience in and of itself.  Memory can be the toolbox of invention.  It can be imagination’s paintbrush.  But it can also be a backlight glare that casts our shadows pitch black into the future.   It can not only replay times past but gently bend time towards us, redeem it before our eyes.

The pages that follow are based on these premises.

Fouschki’s Garden: Memory as Passion

Over the weeks preceding my college graduation, a predictably frequent subject of campus conversation were summer plans.  Graduation summer was special for us – a celebratory holiday in which we could spread our wings, relishing our academic success, the end of boyhood, and above all our freedom.  My own plan, which on reconsideration must have had more boyhood in it than I could then admit, involved a motorcycle tour through Europe, ending up with a sea voyage to a Greek island.  One friend, a sophomore named Dick Rand, graciously suggested that he would try to get his dad, the well-known travel writer Christopher Rand, to give me a few tips about the land of Homer.  Sure enough, when the elder Rand next visited campus, he gave me some time.  He was good enough to specify what particular island (Mykonos) I should first visit, and named Vienoula Kousathanas, “the best-known weaver in all Greece,” as my best contact.

I followed Rand’s instructions.  Five months later, on a morning when a relentless sun glorified the whitewashed buildings of Mykonos Village, I sat immobile in the brightly-appointed display room of Vienoula’s shop.  Seated facing me, occasionally glancing up as though to make sure I was still there, sat the famous weaver herself, an imposing presence, deep in thought.  This wordless seance was brought on by a simple question.  Fresh off the boat, I had found the shop, introduced myself, and asked her whether she knew of a place nearby where I could spend the next month or so.  In excellent English, she replied, “No, not offhand, but give me a moment to think,” and motioned me to a seat.  Time began expanding.  Twice over the next half hour Vienoula looked up at me and announced that she could think of nowhere, and twice I obediently rose to leave.  But each time she sternly commanded me to stay because she wasn’t done thinking yet.  Finally she straightened up in her chair, and with the barest hint of a smile suggested that I might try Fouschki’s Garden, a tiny farm with a room and a bed.  No plumbing, except for a pump under the fig tree.  But where could I ...?  “Use the pasture in back.  But watch out for the bull!”

Why do all the details of that morning survive in memory so distinctly after 56  years?  That morning, with its brilliant sun, its spotless village and its exotic events, would become the apogee of an unforgettable summer and, more than this, open up a new chapter in life itself.  I knew that something  major had clicked onto place within an hour, when I sat on my front step at  Fouschki's Garden, eating a seductively fresh fig, and the realization of a new life was burned even deeper into memory the next morning.  I had woken from a deep sleep to find the tiny, bent, figure of a man, resembling a man less than a gnarled, sawed-off branch of mesquite, standing at  the foot of my bed.  Without batting an eyelash he gestured towards the room behind him and asked "Good?" ("Kalo?").  "Kalo!  Kalo!" I thundered back, and the misshapen face burst into a radiant smile.

  For the next month, under the shade of Fouschki’s fig tree, I learned the simple life.  The neighbor ladies, who came to do their laundry at the pump, sometimes left me local treats.  The bull never approached me but, down at the then pristine beach at Plati Yialos, I was gored by a sea urchin.   The doctor who removed the painful spine was Vienoula’s daughter Anouso, a lovely young lady who was as artful a mind-gamester as her mother and reminiscent of the patron saint of all Greek weavers, Odysseus’ wife Penelope.  That week I’d been feebly romancing a British girl, and Anouso must have partaken of some village gossip, for as she probed my toe with her needle, she dramatically repeated, “Did the British girl hurt you this much?” “Did the British girl hurt you this much?” 

Who was the figure who entered and left my room so mysteriously?  Fouschi himself, I might have presumed.  But sitting in my sunny garden after my first morning on Mykonos, I  was  too blown away by the strange charm of the island to play detective.  And as the days tripped by, I let the matter slip into  memory as an unsolved mystery.  Maybe I thought it was better that way – because the anonymity of the intruder made the memory more striking.  Which leads us to a second question: what can the detailed memory of life-changing events like my 1960 arrival on Mykonos teach us about life?   One possible answer:  by suggesting the ways in which we have constructed ourselves over time, such memories can help us win our way into a kind of self-knowledge.

Memory as Theater Key

Sometimes a simple memory can become more than a mere concatenation of personal data and become the symbolic key to a whole theater of past life.  I stand in a big old redwood shed, on a ranch tucked away deep in a Mendocino forest.  Thanks to the cordiality of the owners, my family has vacationed in nearby houses on the same ranch every summer for the past twenty years.  My gaze wanders, refreshing my memory as to the shed’s familiar contents: an old kayak for travel on the lake, old fishing rods, worn-out tennis racquets, children’s life vests, the assorted detritus of summer.  I have no need of any of this equipment, but rather visit the shed each year in order to add to what you might call a time tunnel: an avenue of place and feeling that runs from the present back into the relatively distant past.

Memory as Present Chaos and Future Symmetry

I am in a memory.  Quite alone, I stand in tall grass before a close-knit grove of young redwood trees, all of them about thirty feet tall.  I’m acting as sentry for a crew that’s using a nineteen-ton cat and an inch-thick metal cable to haul another tractor of simiIar size out of a ravine.  They’ve chosen the grove of redwoods as anchor.  It’s a mid-August early afternoon, with heat already nudging 100 degrees, and I stand near the redwoods so as to catch a small amount of shade.  This proves to be a bad mistake.  There ‘s a sudden roar of diesel noise, and the cable snaps tight, cutting through the entire stand like a knife through tepid butter.  As the grove falls directly towards me, I turn and flee.  

`I trudge back down the hill and rejoin my fellow crew members, who number only two.  One is Johnny, whose family owns the big spread, and the other is Rick, who manages the lakeside ranch.  Having failed to dislodge the stranded cat, Johnny has been left with two undesirable alternatives: either quit for the day or appeal to Kenny, his older brother, who is both down with the flu and known countywide for his ferocious temper.  Although I heavily favor Alternative #1, my opinion has not been solicited.  Johnny climbs into his pickup and makes tracks for the ranch house.  After a few minutes the  pickup returns, and Kenny emerges, still in his bathrobe, snorting, wheezing, leaking snot, and cursing everything around him.  He orders Johnny and Rick to anchor their cat on a massive oak that stands near the fallen grove, and then proceeds to coax the big machine this way and that until its treads are aligned with the treads of the tractor below.  Once he hooks up with the other cat and starts to pull, both machines move easily.  His alignment has been the magic trick that made both cats do as they were told.

The only other memory I have from that day is that, when the job was done and we took a sweaty breather, Rick opened a blue plastic cooler in the back of his pickup and extracted  four cans of glacially cool Lipton Tea.  It was the most refreshing drink I’ve ever had.

This memory took on a life of its own.  But first it had to spend about a quarter-century in suspended animation.  It didn’t spring back to life until I found myself and my venerable 4x4 stuck in the mud at Jaws Beach on the island of Maui.  I aligned the front wheels with the rear wheels and escaped from the muddy Jaws, vowing not to return again.   But the memory of Kenny’s towing job wouldn’t release me.  His trick of alignment became a metaphor that applied to problem-solving in general.  I learned to consider professional problems, indeed  life’s problems in general, less as threats (though at times they were) than as invitations to compete in the game of life.   One only had to learn the rules, rules that ultimately revealed reason itself to be no more or less than an alignment between awareness and experience, a symmetry of inner with outer.  More on this in Part XI. below.

Official Accounts

One of the essential features of a fortunate childhood is a generous supply of aunts and uncles.  Of these I had six, and their visits from New York and Newark added a cushion of hugs and laughter to our family life in suburban New Jersey.  Of these my three uncles in particular shaped my early memories, because the two older ones, Mac and Terry, served as officers in World War II, while the youngest, Marty, went to New York Giants baseball games.  Uncle Mac spent the war years deciphering enemy codes for the Navy, from which he emerged into a highly lucrative, though slightly mysterious, Manhattan trade.  Radiating humor and affluence (which he advertised by buying a new Cadillac ragtop every year), he and Aunt Helen visited us often.  Equally frequent were appearances by the slightly younger Uncle Terry and Aunt Eloise.  Terry, whose Bing Crosby-ish calm had been unimpaired by a tour of duty as bombardier over Europe, brought back a short movie of the French countryside that he’d shot through his open bomb bay.  More memorably, he brought me a small metal box of K-rations, of which I at age 7 partook eagerly, though with nasty results.

But it was my youngest uncle, Marty, who provided my most indelible memory.  In my middle teens, when I was old enough to take the train from Red Bank to New York, he and I would occasionally meet in Bryant Park and ride the subway up to a huge oblong stadium called the Polo Grounds.  This had been the home of New York Giants baseball for years, though they sometimes would share it with their more celebrated intracity rivals, the Yankees.  How Marty had become a Giants fan remains a mystery.  He’d been born and raised next door to the Brooklyn Navy Yards, in a culture whose loyalty to the Dodgers verged on occult piety.  But a Giants fan he was, and passed this bizarre loyalty on to me.  During the 1950's, Giants fans had an objective reason to enthuse about their team.  That reason was a center fielder named Willie Mays, the only baseball player whom I've ever heard called the GOAT -- greatest of all time.  The team that faced the Giants that afternoon, the St. Louis Cardinals, had its own Hercules, Stan Musial.  Like Mays, Stan the Man was a phenomenon.  When he retired in 1963, he held or shared 17 major league batting records.  On this bright afternoon, a decade earlier, he was at his prime.

From our position in the bleachers behind third base, I had an excellent view of Musial's left-handed batting stance.  Unlike most batters, who planted their legs well apart, Musial held his close together, ready to kick out forward and carry more of his full weight into the swing.  Unlike most hitters, whose swings carried slightly upward to propel the ball out of the infield, he swung horizontally, to meet the pitch on its course and maximize his impact.  But on one at-bat that fine day, he would vary this strategy dramatically.  His musically-coordinated full-body swing met the pitch smoothly and squarely, launching the ball towards the center field clubhouse like a rocket into space.  I looked on in dazzlement.  The ball was still rising at 400 feet and would not begin its descent until at least 440.  In any other ballpark it would have been a home run, but center field at the Polo Grounds (though never conclusively measured) was estimated at up to 475.' Musial's drive was probably the longest at the Polo Grounds for years, but when it landed, it nested peacefully in Willie Mays's glove.  Mays, who had no equal in readiness, reflexes and speed afoot, had risen to the occasion and completed the most perfect and iconic athletic play I've ever seen.

I like to think that, in the world of the 21st century, the highest virtue is professionalism, a virtue that includes not only prolonged technical excellence but also courage and courtesy.  Whenever I call to mind that highest virtue, I think of Musial and Mays.