A Random List of Memories: Fleeting and Beautiful

"Fleeting Memories," is a web book by Park Slope poet Michael Ruby with many pictures about forgetting and remembering and parenting in the period around 9/11.

It is featured on the website of acclaimed Brooklyn publisher Ugly Duckling Presse: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/

Here is Michael Ruby from the introduction: "This is a collection of memories that popped into my mind over a period of seven years at work, as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, across the street from the World Trade Center. As far as I can tell, the memories came from nowhere, with no relation to the mostly political articles I was editing about the Republican takeover of Congress, the government shutdown, Monica Lewinsky, the Starr Report, the downfall of Newt Gingrich, impeachment, Florida or Bush v. Gore. Many of the memories are glimpses of places, a street corner and nothing more, as if a major function of the mind were this continuous global positioning, this continuous murmuring, ''Right now, I'm at the corner of 10th Ave. and 64th St.'' The places are distributed fairly evenly over the course of my life, with a somewhat disturbing precedence given to the streets around my childhood home at 251 Montrose Ave. in South Orange, N.J."

There are more than two thousand memories here—listed and numbered. The book is a slide show with old photography and memorabelia. I like that each memory is expressed in one sentence. Ruby spent years writing down these one sentence recollections,  images, moments in time.

It's very moving, very interesting, very addictive. I look for people and places I know. It evokes memories in me. They are random, unchronological, of large importance and small. Here are just a few:

228.  Stopping at a pizzeria with Louisa and the baby Charlotte in Staten Island in '94
329.  The face of Journal editor Ron Smith anytime from '86 until he died of AIDS in '94
505.  The Kentile building in Brooklyn's Gowanus on a dreary day during my New York walks
687.  Playing stickball with Carl Adamo on the blacktop at Marshall School in 7th grade