Memory's Odd Triggers

Even as I close in on those final laps of the current teaching term, January’s courses demand immediate attention: book orders to place, courseware web sites to resurrect from past terms. I opened up the ‘announcements’ section of my History and Theory of Media course website, copied over from three years ago, a series of relentlessly chipper invitations to my students to participate in the broader life of the university and the community: come to this talk! Hey, what a neat art exhibit! Register with the alumni association! Did you read this newspaper article?

Ready to start fresh in January, I deleted these Fall 2005 announcements from start to last—and something caught my eye. Somewhere in between this art exhibit where I gave a talk on urban utopianism and that department-sponsored visitor-lecture in new media performance art, I discovered my pregnancy and everything changed.

Suddenly, it’s mid-September, 2005, and I’m tired and uncomfortable in my fancy heels, having just completed my talk to a generally good reception. I’m relieved and sipping a red wine. I haven’t eaten supper, and neither has Pynchon, so we beeline for the ubiquitous art-event cheese tray. But the pickles are too close to the cheese, which looks distressingly wilted and sweaty, and the cold cuts are purple-pink and suddenly I absolutely need to 20 feet away from it, muttering gross gross pickle-cheese-purple, urgh. We put this down to my vegetarian sensibilities. I sipped and shuddered and felt yucky.

Suddenly, it’s late September, 2005, a couple of days after a positive pregnancy test that confirmed the more likely cause of my nausea. After the talk, in which the speaker ran for 40 minutes on a treadmill while talking about death and postmodernism, I warily approached two colleagues who had proposed to put forth a major funding application with me. I bowed out, reluctantly confiding in them that I was pregnant, didn’t want to commit to a new project for the new year which would fall during my maternity leave. One of them looked me deep in the eye and knocked the stuffing out of me: “Well, you must be really early? You know, these things often don’t really last, so don’t worry about not being able to do the grant. You just might, you know?” I wanted to cry, to punch her, to wrap my belly in protective bubble wrap and retreat from the world, so desperately attached had I become to Baby Embryo in the short days between gross-pickle and treadmill-talk.

I forgot all about this until today, routine digital housekeeping, blindsided by the force of the mundane, memory’s odd triggers, realizing how really momentous things spring from the simplest premises.