What I Remember Most

When I wake up in the middle of the night, as I do nearly every night, my brain falls into a loop of obsessive worrying. About what? About WHATEVER. It’s a habit, left over from my working days, when I actually had lots to worry about and never could sleep for more than five or six hours a night.

You wouldn’t want to be visiting my brain at 3:30 in the morning. Usually I have to turn on the radio at a very low volume, so I can focus on the terrible global news, which distracts me from my personal nonsense and lets me fall back to sleep.

It’s no fun! So I’m trying to train my brain to obsess, instead, on pleasant memories. Writing this piece is part of the training.

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I remember watching the Three Stooges with my grandmother after getting home from elementary school. She probably hated their antics, but she loved sitting on the couch between my brother and me.

I remember arriving at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in the foggy dawn, after a nighttime ship voyage, and hearing the clanging of a dockside bell.

I remember signing a contract for a book I’d not yet finished writing. Yay!

I remember touching her unbelievably soft skin beneath her fur jacket, and the sweet scent of both.

I remember watching Jimi Hendrix play in front of a wall of amplifiers — in the Hunter College auditorium.

I remember that mysterious afternoon when I just couldn’t miss a shot on the basketball court.

I remember feeling 100 percent exhausted — and hungry!! — upon reaching the floor of the Grand Canyon.

I remember lying on my pink carpet with my two babies and my big dog as the sun poured in through the window.

I remember typing “May 31, 1981 Brooklyn” after three years of writing and rewriting my novel BESSIE.

I remember discovering Willem de Kooning’s paintings, how I wanted to throw off my clothes and dance from canvas to canvas.

I remember talking in whispers among the Pacific Coast redwood trees.

I remember hearing “She Loves You” on the radio for the first time from the back seat of my parents’ car — and then, seven years later, hearing “The End” on Abbey Road and feeling just so proud of all of us.