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 servant's buzzer - a flat button under the dining-room table and rug. The idea was that the hostess would discretely push on it with her foot signaling to the maid to come and clear the table. The only thing was, mom could never find the thing with her foot, so after dancing around with her leg under the table she would eventually give up and dive down to locate it...

posted by caroline 6:15 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my imaginary cousin Zvezdana (Stella, roughly). I did not invent her. She was invented by my maternal uncles, all of whom were childless and one of whom, Uncle Miko, was not even married before WWII. An elaborate story was concocted about Zvezdana. She was supposed to be the daughter of my Uncle Mento and his wife Rahela, who lived in Belgrade. Zvezdana was a paragon of beauty, intelligence and virtue. She was a close friend of King Peter, who was a little younger than we, and she was a frequent visitor to the royal palace. I never for a moment believed the story - I was a precocious seven-eight year old - but I tried to catch my uncles in a lie. Every time I asked why Zvezdana never accompanied her parents when they came to visit my grandparents in Travnik, I was told my cousin had important engagements back in Belgrade involving royalty.

My father hated this game. He was particularly sensitive to cruelty of any kind and he worried that I would feel inadequate in comparison with my cousin.

The game came to an end when we were together again at my grandparents' house ( I think that was the very last time we were all gathered there before war broke out). My uncles were cradling in their arms a bundle meant to look like a child in swaddling clothes with a melon for a head on which a face had been drawn and on top of which a cap had been placed. I took a look at "Zvezdana" and swatted the melon, which fell to the ground and broke.

posted by alma 6:48 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember our school van was stopped by a bunch of rioters after the Ayodhya Babri Masjid destruction. (I think there was a bandh that day, but it wasn't declared till later in the morning.) It was close to the local mosque... we shouldn't have taken that route in the first place. There was only one Muslim girl among us. I was surprised that she was as scared as everyone else. I don't know if I thought that the crowd would know her religion and not hurt her, or if somehow, I saw her as belonging to the attackers' side, and it was them against us, and it was hence unexpected that she was sharing our fear.

posted by sravana 12:27 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember what might be my first datable memory, my father running around the apartment carrying me on his shoulders; the memory modulates from a tail-end of delight to terror as he threatens to dump me in the washing machine. I start screaming, and my mother realizes before my father that I am really afraid and stops him. He's surprised. She comforts me. I feel obscure (but obvious) guilt to this day.

posted by william 12:19 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the noon siren, which I posted about a little three years ago. You could hear it everywhere, and to me it seemed to be coming from the East, always Parkwards from wherever I was on ninetieth street. (I remember always hearing it on 90th and West End.) It was somehow the sound of the unity of the city. I had (and have) no idea where the sound was coming from: there were no klaxons anywhere that I could see, nor did I think to look for them. It was just part of what filled the air in New York at noon, everywhere, indiscriminately, part of the sense of general, calm, all-embracing security and method and purpose and benign convenience. I miss the noon sirens.

posted by william 11:41 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember how I liked chewing on the laces of my mitt, standing in the outfield, bored. I think I got the posture from Freddie Cooper. The laces were leathery, salty from sweat, but maybe brackish is the better word, as though most of the intense taste you'd expect from leather and sweat and mud had somehow leached out of them, and you had to get them saturated with saliva to feel that they were real in the mouth. But this was sort of like a highly attenuated, reasonable, acceptable version of what it might be like to chew on your own shoe laces. I remember that the taste was insipid enough that texture and resistance probably played the biggest role in the oral pleasure of chewing on the laces.

posted by william 4:36 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that a boy lived in the apartment across the courtyard from us and he had a swing in his doorway and we would watch from our kitchen window as he swung out of his room and back in again. He had blond, curly hair and symbolized a "real" family that did things like put swings up in apartments for their kids (I had another friend whose brother had a loft-bed with a fire pole you could slide down!!).

Once my grandmother had been out west and bought me a suede fringed Indian dress, beaded headband with feather, beaded necklace etc. I sat and peacefully ate my Fruit-Loops adornded in my new garb when I noticed the curly-headed boy spying on me across the canyon of the courtyard with a cowboy hat and pistol aimed at me! Yet another proof of his superiority.
I ran out of the kitchen, upset -- how long had he been watching?

posted by caroline 3:48 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that my father kept copies of the Times with significant (banner) headlines in a big drawer in the middle of one of the cabinets we had; later when he got my mother new book shelves they went into a big box in the closet. When they were more easily accessible I used to like reading them. He had the assassination of JFK, I think the moon-landing, although that might be wrong since we were in Italy at the time, and various other signal events. I don't think anything about the Cuban missile crisis. And he had the newspapers from the days we were born. I think the headline on the day I was born was that Eisenhower was reelected and that the Suez crisis was going full tilt, with Anthony Eden either blustering or withdrawing under U.S. pressure. I was born in a Wednesday.

posted by william 4:14 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that both my grandmothers sewed. But my downtown grandmother used a Singer sewing machine (which I would always associate Isaac Bashevis Singer with) at our house, with two pedals. I never understood how it worked. She had a sewing kit which stayed at our house too, large and oval, metal with red flowers, not roses I think, on a field of black. My uptown grandmother had a smaller sewing kit, metal and square, turquoise green and textured. My downtown grandmother used pins with colorful plastic heads: I still associate pins like that with her. I can almost hear her voice when I see them.

posted by william 12:45 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my mother explaining porcupines to me. Very impressive. I think there was a picture of one in the book we were reading. For some reason I liked them -- maybe the tenderness of her explanation. (Not unlike her explanation of the heffalump. "A...Heffalump!" she used to say.) Porcupines were timid and fearful, and that was their one protection. She didn't claim that they could dart their quills, which misinformation might have made all the difference.

posted by william 8:46 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember November is the most disagreeable month... That's why I was born in it.
('Little Women'... quote-from-memory, probably inaccurate).

posted by sravana 6:36 PM
. . . 0 comments