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 Lucy wanted to make Chicken Cacciatore on some episode. First I'd heard of it. She made the whole thing sound very funny. I don't know that I've ever actually eaten it.

posted by william 8:43 AM
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I remember my father's inflexible rule, "No singing at the table!" I internalized it as a perfectly natural rule of manners. But why should singing at the table seem so shocking?

posted by william 8:58 AM
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I remember the galloping gourmet. I came upon him, bored, looking for some TV to watch when I didn't have school, at just the earliest age when I might start appreciating camp. I probably learned to appreciate it from him. He was, in my aesthetic response to what become camp, probably the successor figure to the always pained, always hilarious Paul Lind on Hollywood Squares. I remember that Paul Lind died in a fire.

posted by william 7:02 AM
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I also complicated "a stitch in time saves nine". Nine WHAT? I had read the book "A Wrinkle in Time" so a stitch in time was nothing less than rocket science. What would a stich in time save? Nine lives? Nine dollars?

posted by caroline 3:32 AM
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I remember trying to fathom the meaning of the road- sign "Bridge may ice before road". I never could figure out which use of "before" was implied - time or space? In my mind, "before" in this context meant "in front of". Would the road right in front of the bridge ice up first - because the bridge would allow it to (The brigde may (is allowed to) ice the oncoming road..)? So complicated! I still always need to read the sign twice in order to unravel its philosophical knot and make the menal effort of reducing it to it's intended meaning.
Another hard nut to crack was "Up an' at 'em" .
Which I supposed was "Up and atom" or "Up and Adam", both equally puzzling.

posted by caroline 6:16 AM
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I remember thinking 'touch wood' meant character (or personality). I think the first few times I heard it, it happened to be my mother talking about someone -- 'Touch wood, she seems all right.' She didn't touch wood while saying it, and I had no idea about the superstition either. Lacking the background knowledge, I must have taken the new phrase as a word standing for the supposed qualifier. Somewhat opposite was the way I interpreted 'all said and done' -- a phrase both my parents used a lot. Since it never seemed to add any content to the sentence, I didn't bother to think about its meaning. Like touchwood, it became a single word (although I must have parsed and understood what it meant).

posted by sravana 12:44 PM
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I remember learning the idiom "take the plunge." I had a habit of getting into terrible trouble at school, and being told to tell my parents, but not doing so, so that twice they found out I was in trouble by going to parent-teacher conferences, and hearing from the teachers. One of those teachers, the next day, was surprised and disappointed with me that I hadn't told them. (Later on I once left a note describing what I'd been caught doing, and made a faint-hearted attempt to run away from home, that lasted about an hour.)

Once I was sternly and implacably instructed (I'm not sure by whom) that I had to tell them the trouble I was in (I don't know what it was), and told that if I didn't tell them, and the school had to, I would be in even more trouble. I think either I was in trouble a lot, or I tended to do the most outrageous things right before parent-teacher conferences. So at dinner I tried to make a virtue of necessity by showing my parents that I was now an honest person willing to discuss trouble that I'd gotten into, without being forced to do it. I told them what it was (reconstructing it now, I think it might have had to do with my cutting Bar Mitzvah lessons), but not that I had been required to tell them. They were angry but slightly impressed with me too, and my mother explained to my father that I'd decided to take the plunge and tell them. I was afraid that the next day, when they spoke to my teachers, they'd find out I had been required to do so, but they didn't, so I got a little credit for confessing before I was questioned. I remember that previous night, sitting at the dinner table in trouble, but finding "take the plunge" interesting enough that thinking about it was a way to take mental shelter from my parents' anger.

posted by william 8:52 AM
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I remember the way I learned certain idioms through the outside world's presumption that I already knew them. In particular I remember that in fifth grade, I think, we were reading some article, maybe in Hi-Lites or even Reader's Digest, in which the explanation of the idiom "pulling your leg" was given. I don't remember the explanation, but I do remember that the article said something like, Pulling someone's leg means fooling someone a joke, or telling them a tall tale (another idiom I remember learning in seventh grade), because.... But it was the first part of the sentence that was the important news to me.

I remember there was a primitive, energetic, school-age drawing of a leg, in cowboy boot I think, being pulled by two arms.

This kind of learning contributed to or confirmed my sense of the world being a place that I had to dope out, and that I didn't want to expose my innermost secrets to, since the world obviously thought I was different from what I was -- more American, more Christian, more like kids on TV. It contributed to and confirmed my general secretiveness.

posted by william 1:45 PM
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I remember Jean Charles de Menezes

Remember the police execution of a London commuter.

Sunday 22nd January 2006 1 p.m.

Stockwell Tube Station, London

Commemoration of the 6 month anniversary of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menzes

On 22nd July 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by police at Stockwell tube station. He was shot 8 times, 7 times in the head. Following his death, the police misled Jean Charles' family and the public about his death.

Six months later, his family still await with the truth around the circumstances of his death. We invite you all to show solidarity with the family of Jean Charles' by joining us at Stockwell tube station to lay flowers and remember Jean Charles.

posted by Trinketization 3:08 AM
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I remember the first time Batman aired, 40 years ago tonight. I cannot believe I haven't posted about this before. We -- Hugh and I -- were really looking forward to it. It was going to be on on a Wednesday night, and I was allowed half an hour of TV during the school week (for the whole week), and Batman was half an hour long. So that was what I planned to spend my half hour on. The first episode was with Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. We watched it on the little TV on the radiator in the dining room. (Next day Hugh and I sang the theme song - Nananananana....Batman! Some kids had watched in color, but I didn't see Batman in color till we got a color TV several years later.)

I didn't know Frank Gorshin before that (but Marc Bilgray knew who he was, and might have said the day before the show aired that he would be in it). He was a wonderful villain, and the show was exciting and just about perfect.

And then it got to be 8, and the show turned out to be a cliff-hanger. Batman and Robin were trapped by the Riddler, in his suit covered with question-marks. We had to tune in the next night, "Same bat time! Same bat channel!" But I'd agreed with my mother only to watch the Wednesday show, not the Thursday, and she kept me to that agreement. In fact the next night she was working late -- but not late enough! She came home just before 7:30. So I never got to see part 2 of the first show. I saw a lot of the other episodes, whole, because of reruns, and so on. But I still don't know how it ended, or how the dynamic duo defeated lithe, charismatic, Satanically interesting Frank Gorshin.

posted by william 8:18 PM
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I remember visiting a temple in Northern Thailand once and at a stall inside the temple grounds, selling coke from specially 'donated' coke frigidaires, I spoke to a Coke executive who was on holiday and he related the then company ambition to get Chinese Cola consumption levels up to the level of Australian consumption of a litre per person a year. This would then yield more profit than American consumption, which was an 8 Oz bottle per person per day (late 1980s) . I am not sure what is the scarier statistic, the one about American consumption, or that the exec said that Coke's only competition in China was water.

posted by Trinketization 10:29 PM
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I remember being puzzled by Bombay Dyeing, reading it as Bombay Dying. Why would a textile company, advertising itself with pictures of women smiling and ecstatic about their colorful saris, name itself so morbidly? This might have been around the time of the Bombay blasts. Or simply because I didn't know the word 'dye' at the time.

posted by sravana 6:35 AM
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I remember I tried opening the window of the playhouse (see below) once and jabbed the heel of my hand against the pane to punch it open. The pane broke and I was mortified that I had Broken a Window - something that mischeivous kids like Dennis the Menace did on TV and adults yelled at them for. I was sure that it would mean falling out of grace with the Sterns. I bled a little and ran home, mostly because I was afraid Jerry Stern would be mad at me about the window.

A little while later Lynda got me and said that her father was concerned about my hand and didn't care at all about the window. I was amazed at and thoroughly touched by this order of preferences. I hadn't fallen out of grace - I had come a step closer to it.

posted by caroline 3:13 AM
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I remember the Sterns' playhouse. It was officially Lynda's, but Geoffrey, my best friend (as Lynda was my younger sister's) put the most work into it, and filled it with cushions, giving it a Persian feel. It was outside their house, across a little grass alley. I remember that somehow I brought the Hoges over one day, and we all sat around and listened to Aftermath, which I think belonged to the Hoges, but maybe not since Geoffrey himself was particularly fond of "Mother's Little Helper." I remember thinking this meant the Stones were anti-drug.

posted by william 11:38 AM
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I remember a slight cut I got on my wrist. Somehow I had just learned, maybe from reading the Perry Mason mysteries I loved, that you could kill yourself by cutting your wrists. I was worried and asked my fifth grade teacher, Miss Brenner, about it. I think this was in some science classroom we had gone to instead of our usual room. She looked at it and told me I was fine. I was still worried and I remember that she was very reassuring. She told me that her brother had once been bitten by a squirrel he was feeding -- or maybe just scratched -- and that he was very anxious about rabies. But their parents told him he didn't have to be, and when he insisted on going to a doctor, the doctor confirmed it. I was surprised that she had a brother, that she went to the park with him, that she had parents who took them to the park -- and also that she was being so nice to me. That may have been the first time I realized that a teacher -- or any figure of civic authority -- was truly human. (Another human teacher turned out to be Eric Benditson's mother, Jane. But I only became aware of her as a teacher later on.)

posted by william 4:15 PM
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