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 the firecracker hampers seemed to always have one unfamiliar item.

I remember that we put six candles on the balcony, and six on the gate. The one year we had diyas, we ran out of oil.

I remember that no one ever ate the Diwali sweets.

I remember getting old newspapers out for crackers, and reading them instead.

I remember not liking the name for twinkling stars. Till I could read, I knew them by a Telugu name... which I can't recall now. But it implied, more appropriately, something much brighter than twinkling stars.

I remember where we discarded our sparklers till next morning's cleaning-up. One time, somebody (the watchman?) rooted them vertically into the soil. So in the morning: a neatly laid out plantation of burnt sparklers among the vines. And I think it had rained over the night, so vine and cracker were freshly rising up from the fertile, irrigated ground. It must have been evocative enough at the time that I got into a yearly ritual of planting them and then plucking them out in the morning.

posted by sravana 6:23 PM
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I remember that we decided who served first by calling rough or smooth. This explained an interesting feature of tennis rackets back then, which I had already noticed, a nylon thread looped around the strings of the racket near the base of the strung elliptical part. Rough meant the side of the racket which only had loops from the nylon line, and smooth the side which had most of the line. First we spun the racket on the clay, but later it was cooler to spin it in the air while the other person called, and then grab it out of the sky.

posted by william 10:09 PM
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I remember that some time near the beginning of fifth grade, I think, a new girl came to our class for a few days. She was Rumanian (as we spelled it then), and spoke no English. I knew that Rumanian was one of the Romance languages -- the surprising one -- and I offered to interpret for her and to help her out, thinking my rudimentary Italian would be of some use. I remember that it wasn't, and that she wanted to help me help her but couldn't. We got somewhere comparing notes about numbers, but that was it. Then she didn't come back.

posted by william 10:19 PM
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I remember when my dog Jaeger stood up in the morning, or got up from a nap, he shook his body all over, a rapid shuddering that started with his head and ended with his hindquarters. Because of his jowls and his somewhat loose skin, the shaking made a sound like a flock of pigeons taking flight. Or sometimes he would get up from a nap and not shake but stagger, drunk with sleep, to another, presumably still more comfortable spot. He would move unsteadily from the couch to my bed or his, or from a bed to the couch, seemingly without ever having woken up, and then he’d drop heavily, sighing. I loved that in him: that he would heave himself up from one bed to find another, softer bed.

posted by Carceraglio 3:40 AM
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I remember when my cousin Igo came to visit from Sao Paulo. He was seventeen, but I don't know how old I was. Eight? My downtown grandmother talked about him a lot, or maybe she was talking him up to me. His arrival was long-awaited and quite thrilling. I was surprised at how much acne he had; she didn't talk about him as a person with acne. (Maybe I was ten or eleven, which is when my best friend Hugh was persecuted with acne, enough so that he went to see doctors about it; he got boils that had to be lanced. It didn't detract from his charisma one bit, though. It was just another fact about him.)

Igo took me sledding, down the big hill between 89th and 91st. We sat together and ran under one of the trees on the right that you always swerved towards to avoid slamming into the playground fence. (I loved sledding into that little copse, a word I learned in seventh grade I think when I was first taking Latin, and we learned sylvia.) You would go as far as you could into the deeper, warmer, snow, presided over by the dark warmth-gathering trees.) I was sitting in front of Igo and he steered us (it may have been his first time on a sled) under a branch which whipped me over the eye and drew blood. He felt terrible and fearful going back upstairs (I don't know if this was the first time he had met my mother), but she was fine about it, and I was too, though I remember a bandage.

Ah, no, I couldn't have been over eight, since this was in the old apartment, 2-G (I remember Igo explaining things to my mother in the hallway), and we moved to 7-F when I was eight. So I noticed acne already at eight.

I remember also how they explained to me that it was summer in Sao Paulo when winter in New York, and vice versa. (They showed me on my axis-tilted globe, but I think this was before Igo's visit, or maybe well-after, when they repeated the lesson. I don't know when I got the globe, but I remember mu shock when playing, probably with Hugh, we caved part of it in, and it turned out to be made of very sturdy cardboard. This entrance we breached to the underworld, I think near Iceland, is part of my general memory of it now.) But I remember that Igo told me that even in the winter, he never had to wear more than a sweater there, like the one he was wearing (inside) as he told me this.

posted by william 4:44 PM
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I remember the heavy, glass bottle that we had in our refridgerator for water. Once I had a very high fever and was dying of thirst. My grandmother couldn't hear me calling for help in the middle of the night (our parents were in Europe and granny was staying with us).
The fantasy of drinking delicious, ice-cold, NYC water enticed me to make the trek from my bedroom to the kitchen. With 103 fever this was quite a travail - I had to hold on the the doorposts at every room and fling myself a few steps onwards. When I arrived at the refridgerator, an old Fridgedaire with a metal handle that you had to forcibly pull out , I had to muster all my remaining strength to open the door. I took one look at the bottle on the top shelf and knew that I would never have the strength to lift it down.
I gave up and fainted on the kitchen floor. When I revived it was a huge ordeal to make it back to bed, where I lay delirius and thirsty until morning.

posted by caroline 3:42 AM
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I remember my mother telling me how to comfort myself after a nightmare. (Whisper Sri Anjaneya Swami over and over again till the fear went.) I was always surprised it worked. Praying was different -- you spoke to God, articulated your fears, negotiated your desires. The comfort from prayer, I vaguely understood, was from this kind of introspection, deliberate, admitting. But I didn't care for chants, for bhajans, for invocations at temples -- anything that was pre-constructed and impersonal. So I resisted this trick, this mindless call to faith, for a while, till a particularly bad dream, when I reluctantly repeated the name to myself, and reluctantly fell into calmer sleep.

posted by sravana 11:07 PM
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I remember a map of the Americas my mother and I looked at in a book when I was five or six, which showed footsteps coming down from the Bering Straits through Alaska, down North and Central America to the tip of South America. They traced migration from Asia. I remember my mother explaining this to me. They had that cartoon character look of straight-faced unbewildered purpose that is so bewildering to us real people. Who walked that far? Why?

My mother explained it to me, but the footsteps were just so big and so clear on where they were going -- they knew the Americas the way cartoon characters know their own strange regions and geographies, the way they know where they're going while we have to find out by watching them.

I was interested in South America because my second cousin and great uncle lived in Brazil, evocative place. And the footsteps showed people just walking there.

posted by william 9:31 AM
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I remember that they'd close off 89th between West End and Riverside, I believe, with a sign embedded in concrete closing the street off school afternoons. I'd seen the sign many times before I read it and realized that the street was closed, and it was closed for us so that we could play in the street, as we weren't, I thought, ever supposed to -- though we did all the time: stoop ball, which only sometimes required you to run into the street, and stickball, where cars were bases. So here were the authorities actually abetting us. I liked that sign: it maintained its unsmiling, grown-up aplomb (after all, it was directed to adult drivers, and not to us) but it was put there for our benefit. One time they hadn't moved it into the street, and we tried to, and it turned out its concrete base on was really heavy.

posted by william 8:57 AM
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I remember the surprise I felt at hearing the voices on the first animated Peanuts cartoons I saw. I was looking forward to them -- some Halloween or Christmas special. I loved Peanuts. I had a Linus doll from when I was very small -- where is it now? -- with him wearing a red shirt and holding his blanket and sucking his thumb. But I read Peanuts later, and didn't put the doll and the comic strip together for a long time, since by then the doll was an invisible part of the everyday background of stuff in our rooms. Probably I watched that first animation before I noticed the doll again. And it was the voices that surprised me -- kids' voices (or probably someone like Hetty Galen's voice). Of course the animated characters would have to have kids' voices, but I imagined them as I heard them in my head, which is to say speaking in the completely muted, unbreathed, subvocalized sound of the inner ear or still more inner mind, the sound you hear in thought pitched just higher than the almost inaudible torrent of blood in your ears, the sound just beyond the sonic range of sound, so that it becomes pure reading. I think that was the first time that I realized the sound or silence of reading was different from anything you perceived in the world. This may have been the beginning of my sense of the world as strangely, unpleasantly normal.

posted by william 9:37 PM
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John Hutnyk remembers:

I remember the windows of Myers department store which used to be a big draw in December - this is in Melbourne long long ago - I wonder if they are still there now. Then I remember that the "Sportsgirl" fashion chain did that huge window display with a picture of Mao Zedong with the caption 'Women Hold Up Half The Sky' - a twisted way to quote the cultural revolution. Mainly though, it's stores with trinkets and junk that appeal to me most - or the one I looked in yesterday, through a broken up board over the window, that let me see through to the detritus of a store long out of use. Bunged up shopping trolleys and layers of dust...

posted by william 6:42 AM
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I remember that the exciting thing about Diplomacy was the promise it made of pure childish delight in a game with discursive intellectual seriousness. It was the first real game I played where one played at being an adult. Not only an adult, but the kind adult that the news was about -- the political news, not the sports pages. All those ten minute moves of conferring and strategizing, just to move a ship somewhere. And of course we never, ever finished a game -- has anyone? -- which was appropriate too, since it turns out that life is the discovery that all paths towards what you thought adulthood might be are closed. But perhaps one day I will finish a game, and then I really will be an adult.

posted by william 9:38 AM
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I remember the photos of Creedmore in the Times. To a ten year old -- or whatever I was -- they didn't look so bad. But I didn't know then what photos really were or what bad really was.

posted by william 5:31 PM
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I remember that they could always tell if we'd sat on their bed. We could never smooth it down enough.

posted by william 1:15 AM
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I remember that Steve Dorsey was two years ahead of me at school (in the same class as Jim Gleick). He was in Searchers, which I did as well, in eleventh grade. I remember that he was Tommy Dorsey's grandson, or maybe son. Lausanne Merrill, also in our class, was Robert Merrill's daughter. He gave the high school graduation speech. Two types of music.

posted by william 3:51 PM
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