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 brushing my hair in a very slowly moving vehicle in Cairo. The traffic there was mythical, cars and trucks and buses rolling forward bumper to bumper. I remember watching men climb off buses while they were moving. People helped them get down. I don't remember what kind of vehicle we were in, only that I was sitting in a big window, and that I saw people on the roads watching me brush my hair, but I did not stop doing it. I guess it was a bus. We were certainly on a tour bus when we went to Giza and the Valley of the Kings. By a few days into the tour, I remember having seen a lot of tombs, a lot of mummies, and so feeling nonplussed by the ones with Roman faces--they were latecomers, anyway. I remember seeing so much gold, and so much turquoise, and so much alabaster, that that was what the world seemed made of. There were many things I hadn't known about days before that I now took for granted, could recognize without trying. I didn't care for scarabs. I did like the repeating imagery of lotus and papyrus. I remember that at some point in those five days, looking at the crazy-amazing tomb-paintings felt normal, just what one did. Now I can only recall the vision from one: a starry sky, possibly from Queen Nefertiti's tomb. I remember that Luxor was huge and sunny, and that we ran around in the Temple, and we were driven in an open horse-drawn carriage, an allusion, for me, to Pharaoh's drowned chariot.

posted by Rosasharn 11:41 PM
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I remember that my parents let me keep a salamander I caught in the woods. It was beautiful: coolly, smoothly tangerine all over, its belly slightly pale, and spotted black down its back. We brought it home in a jar filled with moist soil and leaves, and they bought me a turtle bowl to keep it in. I don't know what they fed it. It was tiny and delicate, its diamond-shaped head elegant. It lived with us for four or five months, and then it died: I found it stiff, dull, and desiccated in its bowl one morning, and at first I did not understand.

posted by Rosasharn 4:02 PM
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I remember watching the Monkees. They lived at the top of a house, with outdoors wooden stairs. I remember the corny, camp fun of playing them on the juke-box at Chicken on the Run (the pizza place), a year or two before the corny, camp fun of playing "A Boy Named Sue" there.

posted by William 9:57 AM
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I remember that whenever we needed a car, I'd walk with my father down to the Avis Rent-a-Car ("We try harder") on 77th St (I think) and Broadway. I liked that they tried harder, that they were the underdogs, always number 2, though according to one ad campaign number one and a half. One day they seem to have crossed the street: their office was now on the west side of Broadway, though that might have been temporary. At any rate it was here, on the west side of the street, that they were giving out buttons which just had the word (in Helvetica) "Henpecked?" I had no idea what it meant, couldn't parse it at all, though it seemed very funny, somehow. I articulated the last e as I tried to make sense of it. My father explained what it meant, but not what its morphemes were, so I didn't realize it was "hen" and "pecked." Of course I think of that scene, and that button, reading Byron now ("O you lords of ladies intellectual, / Do you not seen how they have henpecked you all?" - quoting from memory, in accordance with the rules I've given myself in this blog).

posted by William 8:56 PM
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I remember learning from some fun-fact compendium, maybe to give a comic book redeeming social value, maybe at the bottom of a Bazooka Joe cartoon slip, that the ancient Greeks had batteries. This seemed very cool, opening up a world of possibilities, as I imagined their D-sized cylinders (standard battery size in those days, D-size and the strange, asymmetrical, alien 9-volt batteries for my transistor radio) powering what had to be similar technology, because what else would the batteries be used for? I was relatively sure that they would find, in the rubble of Troy, bright plastic battery-powered cars and lights and things like that. I felt closer to the people of Troy and ancient Greece when I learned they had batteries: they now seemed cultures like ours, cultures that even back then produced the goods that our wonderful toy stores were full of. I imagined them in modern caps and wool coats playing with their battery-powered toys on sidewalks of their walled cities.

posted by William 8:37 AM
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I remember that we kept rubberbands on the doorknob to the kitchen closet, which was so thick with them that their resistance to the torque they produced threatened to pull the shank off the spindle every time I twisted it to get something from the closet.

posted by William 8:09 AM
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I remember posting my first entry here, or indeed in any blog, ten years ago today. In another room, full of light. Perec wanted his je me souviens to be public memories, things that everyone the same age would remember. Brainard's, which were his inspiration, had a lot more private memories, and I went with Brainard. But I started out with the public memories: the light blue shirts you had to wear to appear on black and white TV (we learned this when our class went to see a taping or To Tell the Truth).

I remember that the rule I gave myself, and more or less followed, was to confine my posts to memories before graduating high school. More or less followed: I posted my 9/11 memories about taking the subway downtown and stomping around the World Trade Center with my friends when we were in junior high, but I also posted about Windows on the World, which I went to in grad school, up the eerily efficient silent elevators that brought us to the clouds. This entry would be an exception to the rule too, I suppose, unless I concluded it with an earlier memory. Soit! Here's one of my earliest.

I remember being with my parents and my mother's parents in a park, with some friends of their generation. I didn't quite get that my mother's parents were my grandparents. I had grandparents already, my father's parents. I knew and was close to my mother's parents, I just didn't know that they had a relation to me beyond the general relation that people with accents of their generation always had with me: refugees like my family, it would transpire. Somehow I learned that day that they were my grandparents: I have a vague sense that the other older people there parted, but my grandparents were still there. My mother must have explained to me that they were just as much my grandparents as my paternal ones. But my father's parents had names! Omama, Otata. (Mama and Tata to my father.) So they decided on what we would call my mother's parents: Granny and Grampa. Once they had those childish names, they fit right into place. I couldn't have been more than two or so, since no one had yet noticed that there weren't names for them in my world. But I vividly remember that odd act of christening (if that's the right word for a Jewish child), when we decided what they'd be called. It was strange, that moment, becoming aware of the fact that they were part of the family, not just some others but people closely related to me, particularly important to me. I looked at them again, felt them, saw them, somehow changing into people who were supposed to be as familiar to me as my parents and my other grandparents.

posted by William 5:02 PM
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I remember reading and loving the phrase "warmth-loving creatures" in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

posted by William 9:48 AM
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I remember the following middle-school social-world discoveries: If I don't trust you, you certainly can't trust me. That was step one. Step two was recognizing that if I know you trust me, I can trust you. Step three was determining that if I were to go ahead and trust you, you could trust me, and if you did, my trust in you would be justified. It wasn't as simple as that, but thinking it through that way gave me courage.

posted by Rosasharn 4:21 PM
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I remember when I realized I wasn't passionate about birds and ornithology; I just loved it as an intellectual exercise -- matching pictures in extensive atlases to names, memorizing intricate and delightful taxonomies and Latin nomenclature, the trivia, and of course, the pride in my relatively esoteric knowledge. Birds were nice, but not as nice as knowing a lot about them.

posted by sravana 2:03 AM
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I remember being impressed by the well-defined and effective brown borders at the edge of my sunny-side-up fried egg, and how I vaguely wondered how that was done: it made the egg seem like a manufactured product.

posted by William 7:47 AM
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I remember how cool it was when my father confirmed my grandfather's trick, that to convert decimals into percents all you had to do was move the decimal point over two digits to the right. It seemed such a sophisticated European bit of knowledge and technique.

posted by William 5:41 PM
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I remember doing GoJu Ryu Karate. I remember how I loved my Sensei. I loved to do exactly as she did: count as she did, walk as she did, fall as she did, emulate her rhythm and form in the katas, turn my knee out as she did, breathe as she did, speak with her intonation when I instructed newcomers, make my body do as her body did.

posted by Rosasharn 12:30 PM
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I remember we never had Christmas, though our next door neighbors did, and I was a litte jealous. One year they came home with a white synthetic tree, which my father disapproved of. I remember that since he was my father I accepted his expertise about a holiday he didn't celebrate.

posted by William 8:30 AM
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I remember walking up Dartmouth Street, from the T, past the BPL, alongside the mall. What I remember is that it was a beautiful day, piercingly beautiful, and I was alone, probably walking to the train at Back Bay. My heart felt sharply full, and I remember deciding that I would remember that moment.

posted by Rosasharn 2:08 PM
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I remember riding the tricycle in the basement and discovering the three-point-turn.

posted by Rosasharn 12:21 AM
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I remember seeing Free To Be You and Me and The Jungle Book with Chris and Nina. It's possible this was a double feature, but it's also possible they were separate occasions.

posted by Rosasharn 12:11 AM
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I remember Luke around age five. We were upstairs in the bedroom he shared with Liana, his older sister, and he was putting on his pajamas. Since we were age-mates, across-the-street neighbors, and hippie children; since we each had a sibling of the opposite sex; and, most importantly, since we considered ourselves married, it was ok for him to be naked. Liana had put me in the room, but I did not feel ashamed—I felt proprietary. Luke wasn't looking for me to be there, and his back was to me as he changed clothes. Reflected in his armoire mirror I could see his tan chest, which I knew well—he often ran around shirtless in our street.

posted by Rosasharn 9:19 PM
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I remember feeling bored. It's such true wisdom that one never feels bored anymore.

posted by sravana 12:07 AM
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I remember that I was in the New Yorker bookstore the morning before the first Frazier-Ali fight. I was so glad that Ali was able to fight again, after his principled refusal to go to Vietnam and the grief he took for it. I loved Ali. And I was sure that Frazier, a humorless tank, would beat him. In the bookstore that morning, where people were getting their copy of the Daily News, with a banner headline about the fight that night, I heard two crusty old people talking: one said, "Who do you think will win?" and the other, holding a paper cup of coffee, said, "I want Frazier but I'm afraid Ali will beat him." I couldn't believe that anyone real, anyone I was in the personal presence of, could be rooting for Frazier. I recognized the white right silent majority in this guy, and lost some Confucian respect for my elders. But I was also happy that my own pessimism about Ali's winning wasn't shared: this guy was pessimistic about Frazier. Still, I wasn't surprised when Frazier won, but it did seem unfair to me that Ali missed all that time as world champion.

Later, when he beat Frazier twice it didn't quite make up for the ignominious loss, though I was happy. And later still, I remember a photo of Frazier with a lot of bling leading a funk band he'd put together after retirement. I liked that about him, but still loved Ali more.

posted by William 9:28 AM
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I remember going to the racetrack early in the mornings with my father, to watch the training. My father had no particular connection with horses or gambling. I wasn't that interested in horses myself (not yet).

It impressed me that my father knew this was a thing one could do, and that he knew we could eat breakfast in the commissary with the trainers and jockeys. (Though maybe jockeys rode only during races; I wouldn't have been able to pick them out by their size, since they were all grown-ups.) The breakfast was much more interesting to me than the racetrack. People knew each other, and they knew that they did not know us, and my father had known that they wouldn't mind.

We may have done this only once. It seemed like something we had always done and always would do.

posted by Carceraglio 8:35 PM
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I remember Twiggy. Some friends -- Marc Bilgray or maybe Michael Hoban or Peter Rogers -- mentioned her, mentioned the name. They were knowing. I didn't know what manner of thing Twiggy was; I think my first approximation was (naturally) a tree: some famous or symbolic tree or tree toy or something. But soon she was just Twiggy. I think I might have seen a photo of her and come to realize that.

posted by William 9:17 PM
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I remember TV images of people with their heads hung low in green fields, or standing in front of pickup trucks, or next to silos, or in ditches, and I remember a sick, despairing feeling every time I heard the words, "Another family farm" on the nightly news.

posted by Rosasharn 1:07 PM
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I remember shutting down in ninth grade. After February vacation, I stopped going to school. Well, almost: I went in on Thursdays, most weeks. Things at school had become terrible, but they did not get better when I stopped showing up. No one from the school called, that I know of. I stayed in bed, or in my room, not well enough to face my class, not sick enough to need any attention.

posted by Rosasharn 1:34 PM
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I remember that the girls in the grade ahead played an elaborate pretend game during every recess, every single day. It was the perfect game--a story that went on and on, where each person played her role perfectly, with autonomy, yet adhering to the generally agreed-upon outline of "what happened." I watched them every single day, apart, silent. It looked so fun. I was so shy, though, that even when they invited me to join, which eventually one of the nice ones (Emily, was that you? Or you, Ayelet?) did, I could not bring myself to accept my heart's desire.

posted by Rosasharn 9:21 PM
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I remember that my great grandmother, Babette, always had sucking candies in a special bowl in her sitting room.

posted by Rosasharn 8:02 PM
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I remember doing yard work. I hated it. I hated raking--or maybe I remember raking most, since there was so much raking to do. I remember the boiling screaming fury I felt at my parents for making me, and how my rage would drive me at the work. And I remember how, even worse, once I'd finished the section or the task, despite my determination to stay angry, I did feel proud.

posted by Rosasharn 6:50 PM
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I remember "pucker power." The line repeated several times, and ending on a lower note than it started -- a little sourly, like what it was describing. It was I think a sour candy or gum, something to freshen your breath: "hour after hour: Pucker Power!" I remember the puckered mouths of the actors on the commercials.

posted by William 8:29 AM
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I remember what everyone remembers: how blue the sky was on September 11. I remember what everyone remembers: a screen that showed a plane hitting a tower, a screen showing a tower falling. I remember what everyone remembers: two kinds of bewildered confusion—one from before we understood that the plane hit on purpose, and another after. I remember what everyone remembers: the sense that this had happened to me and that this grief belonged to each and all of us, and that everything was now different. But I also remember distrusting that last feeling—how could this be true, any more than it is always true—especially if we had to discuss at length whether to cancel Shakespeare class that afternoon. I remember feeling hinge-less and very afraid, and I remember that the movements of my fetus, my daughter-to-be, soothed and rocked me to sleep.

posted by Rosasharn 9:15 AM
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I remember Windows on the World, and the speed of the express elevators up there, how you had to swallow to keep your ears from popping, and how lovely the view was at night.

posted by William 12:20 AM
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I remember when the big noisy "push-button-to-cross" boxes appeared on traffic light polea. They were very slow and noisy, and made me miss the slim elegance they displaced from the fluted lovely vertical columns. They seemed confused, like big dumb friendly animals. They'd pause to consider what you'd wanted (to cross!) for it seemed like forever, clicking and clucking. Then finally, as though shaking off some last vestige of a deep ursine nap, they'd make a sound like a metal cube turning over, and the light would change.

posted by William 1:51 PM
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I remember posting this entry about "the hurricane" (Donna, I believe) over nine years ago:

I remember the hurricane that came through New York when I was about six. My parents had been married the day before the hurricane of 1954, which was, I am told, a doozy, and my mother worried about hurricanes when they came through New York. She told me all about them -- this was the first time I'd heard the word -- and I stayed home waiting for it to come. I remember how dark it was, and looking out of my window onto 90th street (this is when we lived on the 2nd floor, in apartment 2-G) when it came through. I saw only one man on the street (though I was surprised to see any, because she'd warned me that people could be blown away), struggling East against the wind, holding his hat tight on to his head. It was clear that this weather was a serious anomaly, and yet somehow not as serious as I'd thought it was going to be. As with the total eclipse a while later (see earlier entry) it turned out that this major experience of the dangerously exoctic was less major than I'd been led to believe. I remember these things more because of my anticipation of them than because of the actual experience. But the actual experience was, in retrospect, quite important too: it somehow confirmed a sense of safety even in an interesting world. My room was my room, even as I wondered where that man had to go in that weather; my father was my father, even as I looked up into the blinding eclipse, which wasn't so blinding after all. The things that mattered stayed the same: at least that's what I felt (without having to think it) then.

posted by William 12:51 AM
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