Seward's Folly Bookstore

---

Back in the 1970s / 1980s, there was a little bookstore on the corner of Transit Street and Brook Street in Providence, called “Seward’s Folly.” It was run by an older couple, Schuyler Seward and his wife Peterkin.

It was a small musty wonderland of a bookstore, and the Sewards were always very kind to me. I went there whenever I could. I wanted a book by Will Cuppy the 1930s / 1940s humorist, and they managed to find it for me, and after that they knew me as “Cuppy,” because who in the 1980s remembered Will Cuppy?

Schuyler had a beard and mustache as I do now, and was very wry and very smart, and one online source claims that he was a speechwriter for the Truman Administration. Peterkin was small and walked with difficulty, but had a wonderful smile. They had two dogs when I knew them: a huge poodle and a huge bulldog – both elderly and tired – who had to be taken upstairs (where the Sewards lived) and showered with cool water from time to time in the summertime, so that they wouldn’t overheat.

The Sewards were lovable people, and very memorable.

I wonder how many people remember them now?

And who will remember me when I’m gone?

This is the very last bit of Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”:

“But soon we shall die . . . and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” 

Do you get that? We don’t last forever, but we will leave something behind.

The Sewards left me a wonderful legacy – a memory of two intelligent kind friendly people. I hope, when my time comes, that I will leave behind some tiny fraction of the kindly legacy the Sewards bequeathed me.

(Postscript: while researching this blog, I discovered that Peterkin died only a few months  ago – on July 30, 2013 – not far away, in Rumford, Rhode Island. Schuyler evidently predeceased her, though I couldn’t find his obituary. They are survived by their daughter Abbi.)

---

Our first memories

---

Our first memories are often fractured and obscure. I myself have a dim (but vivid) memory of lying over my mother’s shoulder and being rocked. I was looking toward the kitchen, in which one yellowish light was burning. She was rocking too fast, and it bothered me.

Is it a real memory? I think so. I can’t imagine how I would have made it up.

Here’s a little story about Jean Piaget.

Piaget was one of the first and best developmental psychologists. He had a vivid memory of having been kidnapped when very young:

 “I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Élysées, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. When I was about fifteen my parents received a letter from my former nurse saying that she had been converted to the Salvation Army. She wanted to confess past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given on this occasion. She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of the story, which my parents believed, and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory.”

Does this make you wonder about your early memories?

It makes me wonder about mine.

And maybe it makes me wonder about how accurate our memories are in general.

---

Memory loss

---

I used to have a spectacular memory. I remembered everything: names, dates, facts, what I’d read, and on which page I’d read it.

This made me a little hard to live with. I was always reminding people that they were wrong about this and that (mostly unimportant details).

I never forgot grudges. I never forgot slights.

Now, with age, my memory is dulling. Proper nouns are going most quickly of all, for some reason: names, places, and such.

But other things are going too.

And this is not perhaps such a bad thing.

I regret that I don’t have lightning recall as I used to. For one thing, this ruins my chances to ever be a game-show champion. I’ve been trying out for Jeopardy! for years, and they keep bringing me in for screen tests, and – you know? – one of these days they’ll put me on the show, and I’ll be babbling and drooling in the corner because I can’t remember the name “Miley Cyrus” or “Thomas Edison.”

Oh dear.

But here’s the bright side: I don’t remember the slights and the grudges anymore either. I was recounting some of the more extraordinary office affairs and scandals the other day – and there have been some beauties! – and I couldn’t remember the name of one of the people involved. Which is probably a good thing: the whole scandal happened in 1994 or so, and I think one of the participants has since passed away.

I haven’t forgotten most of the happy things. I remember good times, and cheerful occasions. I remembered a funny story about two people in the office having a relationship, and they were cute and funny, and I remembered both their names, and everything about them, twenty years later. They were nice.

So I’m going tapioca in the brain, but maybe in a good way.

What was your name again?

---

The reception after the memorial

---

I went to a memorial service a few months ago, for a person I’d known pretty well for over twenty years.  It was solemn, mostly, though there were a few moments of levity.


Then there was a reception afterward.


It’s nice to see people you haven’t seen for a while; the mood is always lighter at these things, and people always seem to be laughing.  It’s probably just relief after the sobriety of the service.


But now and then you get this soaring sense of vertigo: you know who would have really enjoyed this?  The deceased.  She really would have liked this.


And then you wonder what kind of reception you’ll get when your time comes.  And then you think about people laughing and eating, and beginning the long road toward forgetting you.


Now how do you feel?


Creepy, that’s how. 


I made my excuses and left.


Rest in peace, dear heart.  You have my love.  I’ll keep your birthday on my calendar.  Your family will remember you, and your friends, and I am proud to call myself one of your friends.  


And we will all miss you.

---

The persistence of memory, or . . . what was I talking about?

 

I came home from the health club the other night and said brightly to Partner, “I wrote a whole blog entry in my head when I was on the treadmill just now.”

 

He came back, just as brightly, with: “How are you going to print it out?”

 

Isn’t that cute?

 

His sarcasm aside, I do have a pretty good memory, and I keep a lot of stuff in my head.  Over the past few years, however, I have been losing it, in every sense of the word.  My memory for proper names has especially suffered.  Partly I’m sure it’s because of advancing age.  Partly, however, I think I’m losing my power of concentration.

 

It happens all the time, in lots of different situation: while watching TV, while reading, while at the movies, while in meetings.  I’m able to concentrate for a few minutes, but then I begin to lose the thread of the conversation, and then I begin to wonder what else is going on.  I have a perpetual sense that there might be something better, or more interesting, or at least less dull, somewhere else. 

 

I am thinking about this because of an article in today’s Times about kids using e-readers and digital media to read books and access information online.  A large number of kids say they’ve used e-media to read books; a majority, however, still like to read regular old hard-copy books.

 

Some parents are skeptical of this finding.  They believe that e-media are, in a word, too easy.  They are afraid that these media will reduce their children’s appetite for traditional reading and erode their ability to concentrate.

 

Remember what I was talking about before?

 

Every innovation in the world of media has come with the same warning label: THIS NEW THING WILL DESTROY YOUR MIND.  Written books made memorization – learning by heart – less necessary.  Calculators kept us from learning our multiplication tables.  Computers make it unnecessary to think about anything, ever, at any time.  (It’s been posited that the invention of writing was not necessarily looked upon as a good thing.  Certainly it was kept away from the masses for a long time; reading and writing were specialized skills.)

 

I did a little unscientific survey today.  First I asked a co-worker in her early twenties if she remembered learning things in school like multiplication tables, spelling-word lists, etc.  Yes, she said, although she was a little fuzzy on the multiplication tables; she absolutely remembered memorizing lists of spelling words, though.

 

I then put the question to the Brain Trust, which is a group of co-workers around my own age, all of whom are mighty opinionated.  Without exception, they all had vivid memories of learning math and spelling by rote, often accompanied by images of nuns with sticks in their hands.

 

The whole Brain Trust agreed that math skills are on the decline.  We shared stories about cashiers who don’t quite understand why you’re giving them $2.02 when the total is actually $1.52, and other stories about kids who thought there were twenty-five minutes in a quarter of an hour.

 

Question: is this real?  And, if so, did calculators and computers do it?

 

I’m not sure.  I do know, however, that my laptop is not only a very useful gadget for writing this blog and keeping track of my finances; it’s also a message portal, an email conduit, a virtual telephone using Skype, and a handheld gaming device.  How long can I really maintain my concentration on any one task, given that so many other wonderful time-wasting options are available?

 

I have lovely memories from years ago of settling back for hours at a time with a book and reading without interruption.  I haven’t done that in a very long time.

 

Maybe concentration and memorization are overrated.  When I took biology classes in college, the professor made all of the exams open-book, because, she said, “Life is open book.”  I can tell you that it didn’t make the exams much easier.  (I also have nightmarish visions of a doctor performing open-heart surgery with a textbook open in front of him, trying to figure out which artery is which.)

 

But, for whatever reason, I am definitely losing my memory, and my concentration. 

 

And I used to be so proud of them both.

 

(Do go back and look at the Times article, though.  There’s some interesting stuff in it.  For one thing, 39% of the kids in the survey said that information they found on the Internet was “always correct.”

 

What’s the big deal about that?  I know I always believe everything I see on the Internet.

 

Doesn’t everyone?)

 

 

---