Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember, "Say Goodnight, Dick." --"Goodnight, Dick."

I remember that was the first I ever heard of Burbank, a name that made me laugh and still does.

posted by william 10:39 PM

. . .

I remember being very impressed by the serrated teeth on the first real saw I ever looked at. Cartoon saws looked like large knives. But when the Herings bought their house in Stormville I first saw real-life versions of cartoon items, like wheelbarrows, fireplaces, and cinderblocks. I remember thinking that all those little blades were really clever.

This thought was part of the more generalized relation to the world I was learning about then: the kind of nodding assent I gave to the way things worked. (I mean things made by humans.) I assented with pleasure, and some pride in the transparency of my understanding, to the way others had thought these things through and put them together. Chickenwire on the school windows so we wouldn't fall out. Stamped texture on the aluminum alloy floors so we wouldn't slip. It was all so marvelous.

posted by william 9:44 AM

. . .

I remember that you're supposed to get under a doorway in an earthquake. Hugh and I liked this knowledge. Suddenly (for a little while) doorways looked like impressive serene guardian spirits, somehow patricianly superior to the building that would crash down around them while we stood under their patient protection.

posted by william 8:43 AM

. . .

I remember that you used to signal that you wanted to get off at the next stop by pulling on the cord that was draped along the two sides of the bus, under the ads, in lovely catenary curves from eyelet to eyelet. When you pulled the cord a bell rang, and the driver would let you out at the next stop. No "Stop Requested" sign went up, so if you weren't paying attention you wouldn't know that someone had already rung, and sometimes the driver would be vexed by six or seven signals. And of course the kids liked signaling and ringing over and over again -- irritating the driver if he (always he) thought we were doing it intentionally, which we weren't always. Bus drivers in New York (I think this is still true) were unusually committed to countering antisocial behavior of any sort on the bus. Train conductors too. My father taught me great respect for them, and he was right.

posted by william 12:05 AM

. . .

I remember that I hurt my leg a little once -- I think I banged it into a piece of furniture. Hugh had injured his leg or his knee (he had fragile knees we'd find out later) and was limping, and then I hurt my leg and started limping too. At dinner I was limping my way to the kitchen to get something or clear something, and my father told me to stop. So I did stop -- in fact I wasn't in any pain at all, whatever had happened was over -- I stopped or thought I did, but he got angry and told me to stop immediately. I tried to walk normally but he got angrier and angrier, and I didn't know what to do. The next day everything was fine though, but it was odd to feel that I just didn't remember how to walk, or maybe just couldn't even walk gracefully under pressure (like the boy in Kleist's story who notices his unselfconscious resemblance to the Spinario sculpture in a mirror, and then can never repeat the gesture that brought out the resemblance.)

posted by william 12:52 PM

. . .

I remember that you could read after you handed in your test. You weren't allowed to leave till the class was over, but the classroom was completely quiet (people were taking the test) and it was just a perfect time to read. In high school of course we could leave when we were done, and that was something of a loss.

posted by william 12:41 AM

. . .

I remember the fascination with which I watched the horse in front of me, during group riding lessons, swat at horse flies with its tail. It did it in synch with its plodding. The flies landed on its rump in the same lazy rhythm. It was all standard and pleasantly phlegmatic. It was just a way of rattling through the environs, like sitting on a rocking chair on a back porch, but the porch was just unhurried life itself on a summer's day.

posted by william 12:57 PM

. . .

I remember my mother telling me -- we were looking at a rowboat or maybe getting into it on Lake Carmel, near Stormville -- that things would float if they had air in them. This was a fascinating piece of knowledge -- I loved the fact that she knew it; but, but then she knew everything; and I loved the fact that it was true. (Later she would tell me about Archimedes's "Eureka" and how objects displace their own weight -- floating objects, but I don't think she quite knew that; she also told me about Pi but thought Pi really was 22/7).

I also remember her telling me, at the dining room table, how "water always seeks its own level," a wonderful and lucid precept that had for me the force of revelation. What was revelatory about it was the combination of description and fact. It was something I knew intuitively, but not that strictly or perfectly. And now I did. But I was also awed by the clarity of the formulation. It was possible to say these things perfectly! My mother and water were two similar and perfect intelligences -- why, it turned out that water could seek, had intention and agency, just like my mother -- each of them in absolute tune with the other, which is to say, with how things are.

posted by william 10:22 AM

. . .

I remember the surprising smell and feel of my Superman costume. First of all that the cape tied around the throat, and didn't spring, in a sort of authoritative unfurling, from its epaulets, as it did on TV, then that the logo had the stiff and foreign feel that it did, not simply a printed part of the fabric design. I didn't really like that, except that at school I liked being able to feel it under my shirt - liked its inflexible presence, which wouldn't have been true of an undershirt. It made the S more visible though, through the fabric of my button-down, against which it pressed, which was a problem, and I'd fasten my coat before I said good-bye to my parents. I remember also having to hitch up my buttoned collar so that the top piping of the costume couldn't be seen over my shirt, since my parents absolutely wouldn't have let me wear it to school.

posted by william 11:33 AM

. . .

I remember seeing "Loitering prohibited" signs and not quite knowing what they meant. I knew that loitering was more or less like littering. But there was something else that it meant too. It was odd to have a prohibition without a temptation: I couldn't have loitered, as far as I knew, if I'd wanted to. I couldn't picture any action whose name I didn't know that someone might want to forbid. I thought of loitering therefore as some teenage transgression -- some power of teenagers which had to be curbed; and the fact that they had this capacity and that the adults knew what this capacity was and could address them on the matter was another cause for me to celebrate a secret competence on which those two estates agreed, acknowledging each other's pertinent understanding. (I myself was pleased to know what the word "prohibited" meant -- a shared teenage and grown-up way to say "forbidden," but one I already understood.)

posted by william 5:47 PM

. . .

I remember driving across country the summer we got back from Israel. It was a long summer, a long road trip: To Lee Riley's (not her real name, but still the name I grew up calling her--nickname plus former married name) on Riverside (between 100-103?) in NYC (at least that's what I remember from when I used to walk by that building, which went co-op eventually, in my Barnard days), to Aunt Ernie and Uncle Bob's (both dead now) in DC, where we also must have visited Maynard (again, not his real name) and Lynne and Jessie and Sara, to my maternal grandparents' ugly condo in Jacksonville (this was the first time I remember visiting the condo after they sold the big house on the river), to their time-share on Captiva Island with all my cousins, to Clarenz and Daphna Hall's house in Little Rock, Arkansas (where I learned to dive off a diving board and Yoss and I were introduced to cable cartoons and Monopoly), to Arizona (where I remember the petrified forest and the Grand Canyon and the geode we got my brother, but where did we stop in between? If we visited people, I don't remember it) to Las Vegas (where I think we stayed at CIRCUS CIRCUS) to my father's mother's house in Santa Barbara (where my other cousins met us and we watched the Olympics, which were in LA that year, and where we fasted for Tisha B'Av). While we were there, I told my mother I would never eat another tunafish sandwich in my life, and I didn't for about ten years. Kosher tuna must have been easy to find on the road, but I couldn't force any more tuna salad down, as good as my mom's was. Then we began the trip back.

I don't remember the stops we made on the way back, except for Iowa City, Iowa, where we hung out with friends of my folks from their grad school days: some woman we stayed with--but what was her name? She gave me a beautiful antique black wool-felt hat, and I gave her the book The Last Unicorn, which I had just tearfully finished, for a boy she tutored in reading. And Donald Genie (how do you spell his last name? Also, I think other people called him Martin, but as that was my father's name, we called him Donald. He, too, is dead now), who had been a my father's dear friend, collaborator, and teacher at the University of Iowa. What my brother has told me he remembers from that stop (a strong memory for me, too) is our stopping at a farm, a "collective" my parents had bought in to for small money in those days, 20 years before, where we got and drank raw milk. As I think about it, I recall that on the way home, we stopped also in Toronto, with the Peleds, friends from the year before in Israel. I lost a doll there, my Baby Feel-So-Real.

I spent most of the days in the car reading. At every stop, people would give me books, whatever they had handy, so I read crazy stuff like the second volume (but not the first) of a novel called The Tontine. It's sad: I read so much (remember my dad nagging me to look out the window), but I only remember three books by name. The third is Helen Keller's The Story of My Life. Which is what made me write this post. I read that book, and, for the rest of the trip, my mother and I would sign into each other's palms. She would reach her back through the narrow space between her seat and the door (this could not have been comfortable), and I would reach forward, and we would slowly sign letters back and forth into each other's hands. I think of it now, such a patient indulgence.

posted by Roselyn 8:52 AM

. . .

I remember biking past 331 Sumner Street in Norwood. It was yellow then, the porch was screened in, and the front of the house was obscured by large evergreen shrubs. So much for the pathetic fallacy: It seemed dark. It seemed shrouded. It didn't want you to look, and if you did look you still couldn't see anything. The air around it was still, thick, heavy. We knew that a Nazi lived there. I remember sometimes feeling that malevolence watched me as I went by the house--and wondered if, just as I knew that a Nazi lived in the house, he knew that Jews were riding bikes outside. I remember that eventually he was arrested, after what seemed like years (how could we all know he was a Nazi and the government fail to notice?), and that the house was sold.

The house is different now--no longer shrouded in shrubs, the front porch is open to the road, the screens removed; it's been painted blue with white trim and seems to breathe differently, or perhaps I breathe differently when I drive past.

posted by Roselyn 10:56 AM

. . .

I remember a series of Nestle's milk chocolate that had pictures of individual animals on wrapper, and a matching sticker inside.

posted by sravana 2:53 AM

. . .

I remember Geiger counters, from Superman, and I think also The Time Tunnel. They seemed very cool -- the way they clicked and the needle jumped. Then as a junior in an NSF high school summer program we actually used them. It was like the entry into the fantasy world of TV. But I could measure my approach towards adulthood by the fact that I could also see them as reasonably routine. Like (years earlier) routinely plugging things in, an activity once strictly and glamorously forbidden (I idiotically also held some radioactive material up to my throat the day we were introduced to Geiger counters, clowning around. I was immortal then. I'm pretty sure the radiation was insignificant.)

posted by william 9:50 AM

. . .

I remember that my uptown grandparents used to put sugar into their cups before adding the coffee. When she served coffee at my grandfather's bridge games I remember her as asking people if they wanted sugar before pouring the coffee. She'd put the sugar in first, then give them their cups and pour the coffee in over it while they held them. My father always added sugar to the coffee, and I've never seen anyone do it my grandmother's way since, but I was reminded of this by a moment in Peter Rushforth's novel Pinkerton's Sister (set in 1903) where someone puts in the sugar first.

posted by william 9:31 PM

. . .

I remember oil rags. Whenever we filled up they'd check the oil, pulling out the dip-stick and wiping it down. The ritual was so interesting to me: remove, wipe, reinsert, remove, examine. We never got oil that I remember. I didn't know why they did it this way, or in fact what they were doing. But I do remember that they'd whip the rag out to wipe the dipstick down, and I thought there was something special about those rags. They had for me the enigmatic and wonderful status of Tools for the performance of activities we would never do or know how to do. Soldering irons weren't a patch on them. They were implements of a mystery.

posted by william 6:52 AM

. . .

I remember how cool the 35 mm film canisters were. They used to be metal with screw on tops, the same battleship gray as the plastic ones now (maybe slightly lighter), but their tops were also gray, not today's (or yesterday's) black. They would get dented too -- a neat fact about them that I only treasured once the plastic ones replaced them. Of course kids kept their stashes in them too; but I think I started thinking they were really cool when I stopped associating them with stashes. They were beautifully utilitarian and so a badge of expertise. Camera expertise was the only genuine expertise we could have at the time -- the only thing we could do that adults did too, and did seriously, as serious utilitarian jobs, and that the best of us could do much better than most adults could. We didn't drop our film into Instamatics! The cannisters stood for all that. They stood for the way we could know what they meant.

posted by william 11:47 PM

. . .

I remember that I started this blog six years ago yesterday! But yesterday I forgot.

posted by william 8:07 PM

. . .

I remember Chess Life and Review. When I joined FIDE, or was it the U.S. Chess Federation?, they sent it to me as part of my membership. My name was listed in it, in small type, at the end of the year, with my rating! I remember keeping the various issues on the shelf in my bookcase, above the castle that was the central display piece there. Slim and flimsy paper, crammed with chess games and ads for tournaments everywhere. I went to one or two, based on the ads. I also went down to the Manhattan chess club a couple of times, which was on the same block as Eclair's and the dojo where I used to go for karate, on seventy-second street. I never found the famous Marshall, though -- the Manhattan was my substitute for it.

Yesterday in a bookstore I found a bound volume of Chess Life and Review from one of those years. I looked myself up and there I was -- my name and rating staring up at me with more of an adult serenity than I possess even now. But I didn't plunk down the $16.00 they wanted for it.

I remember too that the schemester John Gross had a plan for raising our ratings in high school. If you beat someone more than thirty points higher than you were, you got bonus points -- it wasn't a zero-sum game. So we could report a series of wins for him, until he was a hundred points higher than I was, then a series of wins for me which would bring me up faster than he went down. Then I could leapfrog ahead of him until I was a hundred points higher than he, and so on. We never did this, but it seemed inelegant of FIDE that it was a possibility, though I vaguely thought he should get some points just for being clever enough to figure this out.

posted by william 8:00 PM

. . .

I remember my father taking me to see the statue of Alma Mater at Columbia. I'd been on the campus before, with my mother, since she worked for one of her law professors there after she graduated, Willis Reese. I don't know where she was the evening he took me there -- maybe in the hospital having my sister, but I don't think so -- I don't think that was on my mind and it would have been. My mother's name is Alma, so he told me that "mater" meant mother, and that it was a statue in her honor -- my mother Alma. (This is why I don't think that she was in the hospital having my sister -- that didn't enter into my conception of her being a mother as he evoked it. I think in fact it was before she was born, before I was six. Maybe when she was away in Washington, before we drove down?)

posted by william 1:18 PM

. . .

I remember one time my Florida grandparents were visiting us in Sharon. I think it was the summer after we moved. They must have been taking a walk down the loop. Pleasant Street isn't a dead end, but it may as well be one, since there is no thru-traffic, just a loop at the bottom as it turns into DeHart and then back into Pleasant. Anyway, I was so used to it being a quiet road and so excited about how I could ride my bike without holding on to the handlebars that even though I didn't normally go in the street, I rode along with them. I was so busy showing off how well I rode hands-free, I didn't listen for traffic. When a car came along behind me, I was riding right in the middle of the road, and my grandfather let me have it--screamed that that was the dumbest thing he'd ever seen, and didn't I know how to ride a bike! I was frightened and shamed, and I went back to the house, crestfallen, crying. I remember sitting on my father's lap as he explained that granddaddy got mad because he was scared something might happen to me, and he had shouted at me (as unlikely as this seems) because he loves me.

I remembered this when going through my desk today (a mess ever since our move to Maple Ave), and, nearly five years after his death, I found an envelope with his deliberate scrawl on it. I left it where it was. I can't put it away.

posted by Roselyn 2:40 PM

. . .

I remember Caravel candy bars. Do they still have them? They were the first candy bars I had because of seeing them on commercials. I think Hugh recommended them too. I didn't like the fact that I couldn't pronounce the name (or reliably spell it -- and the cursive caramel-colored writing didn't make it any easier, as with the Montrol Expos logo), but I eventually tried one and it was delicious -- much better than I would ever have expected from the commercials. In this way they contrasted with Mounds (which do still exist). Mounds looked great in the commercials, but were just tasteless chocolate over repulsive coconut.

posted by william 5:42 PM

. . .

I remember getting gum stuck to my shoes. It was really yucchy and hard to get off in a non-disgusting way. Why doesn't this happen to me anymore? Is it that I wear different kinds of shoes now? That I'm more careful where I step? That I don't walk around junior high all day?

posted by william 10:09 AM

. . .

I remember some hybrid illustrated coloring books that involved a scroll that you spun under a clear and flimsy clear plastic window. You colored on the window, so that you could erase it when you scrolled up another page. It was really interesting as a piece of cheapo technology, but nothing about the content was interesting and it didn't work anyhow. Now my main sense of it is that it jammed and bunched up in the cylindrical canisters where the rollers were and unspooled and went crooked. I think it was more a conveyer belt than a scroll -- that is it went around again to the beginning. But I may be confusing two similar toys, since I also remember that feeling of forcing it when you scrolled it out to the end, and the glue coming undone from the roller.

posted by william 10:56 AM

. . .

I remember a snow day when my mother took us to sled on Pettee's hill. So many kids were there, swooping down that hill. A hill the shape of a normal distribution curve: such a long sharp way down, with a slow evening out to flat right there at the end. I couldn't believe it. How was this place set aside for sledding, for kids, and how did everyone know about it? Was this permanent or only on snow days? What was this hill for in summer? We sledded and sledded, flying down and trudging back up. It was so fun, I don't remember if I got snow in my boots. Then she pulled us up the hill of the end of Pleasant street, walking right up the middle of the road. Though there were almost no cars on the road, I felt scared and strange--so exposed in the middle of the road and so low to the ground, invisible and craning to see what was coming. The snow was so thick on the roads that there were deep ruts where tires had tried to move. It was hard going, walking, but a dream on a sled.

The two favorite things I loved best about childhood were: 1. The instantaneous alliances that play made possible with kids whose names you didn't even know. [When do adults make such alliances? Is this what one night stands are really about?] 2. The feeling of total belovedness brought on by unexpected permission and by hot cocoa.

posted by Roselyn 9:50 AM

. . .

I remember how fascinated I was by the whirlpool of water going down the drain in the bathtub. I'd sit watching it all drain out. I connected the beaded chain of the plug to its image in the water once the plug was pulled, the dancing downwards pointed elongation.

I remember this experience was disturbing and even frightening when I was very young. The way opening the drain could dimple the top of the water several inches above it. The dancing dervish seemed to me like a malevolent spirit which just showed up as the water left -- which therefore could show up at will. The water seemed innocent to me, harried by the whirlpool dervish. Finally it would all be gone, but with a loud draining sound that seemed a slightly monitory echo.

Often my mother would swoop me out of the tub before I had to experience much of the whirlpool, and her counterpull into a towel and love would completely compensate for the anxiety caused by the draining water. She had power even over that.

(I remember that at my uptown grandparents, though, the water drained even faster, the whirlpool was even more pronounced, and I really didn't like taking baths there.)

posted by william 11:17 AM

. . .

I remember how happy I was when I got Tommy. It was expensive, a double album. I had heard, on the radio I think, "Tommy" itself, but many of the songs were revelations. "Got a feeling twenty-one is gonna be a good year." And I'd had no idea -- hard to believe now -- about "Pinball Wizard." I think Hugh had a copy first, but of course none of us had seen Tommy and we put it together from the songs. Hugh as usual seemed to have expert knowledge. But there were all these songs that I discovered entirely on my own, just from listening. I remember that I put the records on my father's stereo, in the living room where the piano that I didn't practice that night was. What a treat to listen to Tommy instead of practicing.

posted by william 11:53 PM

. . .

I remember asking for a horse for my sixth birthday and really meaning it. I didn't bother asking my parents; I asked Cherie and Everett, who had lived downstairs from us in our two-family in Cambridge when I was very little.

Perhaps because of my middle name, Cherie taught me to sing, "Alice, where are you going? Upstairs to take a bath. Alice with legs like toothpicks, and a neck like a giraffe. Alice stepped in the bathtub; Alice pulled out the plug. Oh my goodness, oh my soul, there goes Alice down the hole!" Though I remember singing it with her, and though I remember associating it with her and knowing she taught it to me, I can't remember the first time. She must have taught me that song in the pre-history of my mind, at a time before I can remember my memories. Everett told me (repeatedly, I'm sure) my favorite fairy tale, which was The Frog Prince, and resulted in my thinking of him as the Frog. They gave me an immeasurably beautiful ring set with a delicate pink oval gem that sometimes looked purple in the light. I promptly lost it, but would find it again among my things from time to time, always with immeasurable joy; it was a thing I coveted although it belonged to me.

They also catalyzed my family's introduction into Jewish practice, and I remember making Challah with my mother and Cherie in Cherie's kitchen (my only memory of that downstairs flat). I remember their involvement in my parents' wedding (the Jewish wedding, when I was about 4, after my father converted)--did my mother alter Cherie's wedding dress? I remember something to do with Pesach, but again I don't know what. Still, my feelings about Pesach come partly from associating them with Pesach, an air of Cherie and Everett, so there must have been a Seder together at some point. Eventually they moved out of the downstairs apartment, but I stayed connected with them: Sometimes I slept over at their new house in Brookline, or was taken for a trip--bowling, or the zoo, or something similar. I knew their phone number by heart, would call and chat with them from time to time.

I knew that they loved me, so I asked them, really, seriously, sincerely, for a horse. That was what I wanted. And on my birthday my parents brought a pinata to school (the first birthday in first grade), and sometime that day someone gave me the lovely (I say now, with adult eyes), sock-headed stick horse from Everett and Cherie. Oh the insult: How could they have misunderstood me so badly? And why would they give me something so ugly, a caricature, with yarn hair for a mane?

posted by Roselyn 3:21 PM

. . .

I remember splatting Norman Mailer with a jelly donut, the result of a high-spirited accident, when I was visiting colleges and he was giving a talk. This was closing one loop in my life, since I remember my father's big fat copy of The Naked and the Dead sitting on the shelf at eye-level across from me when I sat on his recliner in his study to read.

posted by william 11:16 PM

. . .

I remember getting my first zip-up coat. My earlier winter coats used buttons. My mother knew -- again with that adult savoir faire that was so impressive to me -- and remarked to my father that the zipper on this coat was very different from the zippers I was used to (on my space-suits), since you had to bring both sides together and then zip up. The zipper wasn't already attached at the bottom. I couldn't even conceive of such a thing. But she knew all about it, and even knew how to zip up my coat, which she'd do for me until I learned how myself.

(I remember also being amazed, probably before this, that zippers worked. I think Hugh tried to take the apart to see how they worked. My attitude was -- and still is -- that if you dismantled it enough to see how it worked you'd never be able to get it to work again.)

posted by william 11:36 PM

. . .

I remember how black it was in Sharon when we would get up in the morning to go to school. We got up at 6:00 to get to the bus for 7:00. I remember that it made no difference if you opened the shades or kept them closed: the only light was yellow, incandescent. The dark made the house feel colder. I never set out my clothes the night before. I remember in second grade, after we moved to Shaorn, I had a pair of school shoes, for once, that I liked: navy blue ballet flats with a bow at the top. I think Leah Schachter had similar shoes, and I loved her and loved to have anything in common with her.

I remember bad days in first grade: the day my crayons melted, being last to finish the red workbook, the day I got chicken pox, the last-minute struggle to find the right kind of black, ruled notebook. But second grade feels more obscure; The quality of the light in these memories is off, a green-tinted glare on everything. For Hebrew, we had that Israeli teacher, Shoshana Cohen, who made us copy long poems in script off the board. For English, we had Ms. Simansky, who had beautiful red curly hair and freckles and a soft lovely voice [the color of the memories changes here: she is in the light, always in daylight, in the sunlight standing in the doorway to her classroom, standing between the shadowy corridor and her big windows to the yard], and who was altogether what you would want a teacher to be: beautiful, kind, upright--she could speak gently to lions and dissuade them from roaring. She made us work in groups on contractions: haven't, isn't, couldn't, won't. I didn't like the group: two boys and two girls. Massa was the other girl, but I don't remember who the boys were. She read _Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing_ to us, and Elisheva, who wore her long dark hair in a ponytail tied at the nape of her neck and pinned it up on her head, neat and straight as a stripe, drew such a good likeness of the real cover on her book report that we all agreed she was our artist. I had a crush on Dani Stein in those days, and I remember looking at the months of the year train, posted across the top of a wall, with our birthdays on them; I remember, but I could be wrong, that Dani's was in April.

Ms. Simanski made us learn verses by heart, but I never learned anything by heart willingly--not then and not in third grade when we had to learn the times tables by heart and I didn't, wouldn't, learned it only piecemeal, over time, learning each number through use, figuring them out one at a time. I probably had the nine times tables by the time I was in 5th grade. I could probably fill in the boxes in that grid (1-9 along the top, 1-9 along the side) in seven minutes now, but I couldn't do it then, and I suppose I only know the twelve times tables now because I've had to do a lot of measuring in inches over the years. The parts of the day in which other kids learned these things were invisible to me. Or I couldn't bring myself to care.

Anyway, the only poem I remember learning that year, second grade, was by Robert Louis Stevenson: The rain is raining all around / It falls on field and tree / The rain is raining on umbrellas/ here and fish at sea. I'm not sure, come to think of it, where the line break is between ll. 3-4. I learned that one because Leah Schachter and I sat together on the bus on the way home from school and we practiced it, and we sang a bunch of affecting songs from Annie (Maybe far away, and maybe real nearby . . . ), and then I made up a tune for the Stevenson poem, and we sang that the rest of the way home.

posted by Roselyn 2:12 PM

. . .