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 pleasure of putting the paper cigar band from my uptown grandfather's cigars on my finger, like a ring. I remember that at first it was loose, but as I got bigger it got tighter and tighter, until eventually I had to be careful lest the strain pull the glued overlapping ends apart. I liked the feel of slipping the band on my finger.

posted by william 11:37 PM
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I remember when my sisters & I were teenagers, my older sister and I thought our younger sister, B, quite conventional. (Unlike ourselves; we had thoroughly conformed to the "stoner" culture of high school and were therefore rebellious.) We were in on something she was not.

As an adult, these distinctions did not hold. B turned out to have the quickest wit of all three of us, especially in conversation. When B and our mother came to visit my older sister and me in Seattle, we were riding a city bus one day, and we passed a store that specialized in caviar. "It sells only caviar!" my mother said, ready to be awed by the big city. "Oh, no, I'm sure they sell other things," B demurred. "Toast points, for example."

posted by Carceraglio 8:31 PM
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I remember another song from one of my story-telling records: "Toby the tortoise and Max the hare / Met one day at the country fair." Toby of course beats "Max Rabbit." I remember the perky melody. I knew the story before I got the record, so essentially the setting, names, and rhymes that the song gave it functioned more or less like the melody, as ornament, and I realize, now that it was interesting to discover that things as basic as names or places could turn out just to be ornament.

posted by william 10:37 AM
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I remember that today is my sister's birthday, and that I posted about her birth here. I remember further that on that Passover meal at my uptown grandparents' my mother was sitting to my right, and that she pushed away the matzoh ball soup, on the fancy lace my grandmother had spread over the dining room table, and said she had to go. I remember findinv it noteworthy how quickly -- not hastily but quickly -- she and my father left to walk to the hospital. That was the night of April 18, and she was born the next day. Happy birthday Caroline!

posted by william 7:36 AM
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I remember the Sterns had to "sell" their Windham house for Passover. They sold it and later bought it back for a dollar. Geoffrey explained that they were purging the chometz, and of course it was obvious to me that they weren't really selling the house. But I did somehow imagine that they were selling the chometz -- boxes of flour and mixes I imagined crowding their kitchen shelves -- and that somehow this all belonged to the guy they were selling it to, with the house more like a conveyance, moving not through time but through exchange (like that giant rock used as immobile money on a South Sea island), from the Sterns to their friend and back again, delivering the chometz to him. What would he do with all this chometz in an empty kitchen? Well, he was as notional, to me, as the imaginary chometz was, so it all made sense.

posted by william 10:13 PM
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I remember the first time I ate middle-eastern food--falafel, hummous and babaganosh. I was 14 years old and a friend took us to a hole-in-the-wall on Broadway on 81st or thereabouts.

posted by caroline 4:42 AM
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I remember the beginnings of my obsession with Samuel Beckett. I read and loved Endgame and Waiting for Godot some time in high school, and bought and read his Proust essay at the Gotham Book Mart my senior year (before I’d ever heard of Proust—I figured, if Beckett wrote that, Proust must be pretty important). Then sat in on Ricks’ Beckett class my first semester of college, which was an amazing experience. Once he wept after showing Eh Joe and then he dismissed class. The following fall, I blew off school for a week to go to a Beckett conference in Dublin where they put on all the plays and showed all the films. When a professor I’d just met asked me to send a postcard, I thought, wow, my circle of fellow Beckett readers is expending. I remember getting Guy Davenport to talk about his afternoon with Beckett, at Les Deux Magots, and how Beckett was treated as a regular and not a celebrity.

Oddly, as I wrote the above, my mom came over with a copy of today’s Times and pointed out the two pieces on Beckett. I don’t remember her knowing of my obsession. (Oh wait: I do… I took her to see some Beckett plays, including Footfalls and Krapp’s Last Tape, in college.)

posted by jennylewin 2:53 PM
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I remember that today is Beckett's birthday -- he was born Good Friday the thirteenth, a hundred years ago. Today I learned of a letter he wrote to Samuel Putnam, Hilary's father, a connection I remember writing about four years ago. I remember that I got interested in Beckett after reading a review of The Lost Ones, which had just come out. Or rather that was the tipping point of interest, since what got me interested to begin with was Jim Gleick's yearbook quote, which I remember with complete confidence: "But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be, I think, with other eyes, and not only that, but the within, all those inner caverns where thought and feeling dance their Sabbath." The fact that Mako Stuart had a picture of Beckett as his yearbook photo also helped tipped me, since Beckett was so charismatic in photos.

I didn't know it was Beckett, but my father recognized him in Mako's photo, which I found very impressive. One long weekend when I had an infected ingrown toenail, and wasn't allowed to go on the Searchers four day hike which I'd been so looking forward to (and which Mako was on), I lay in my mother's bed, I guess since it was more comfortable, or maybe they were away, and read Beckett -- both The Lost Ones and Endgame since I was so into chess -- and fully fell in love with him.

As loves go, it's lasted; and been intense without being very difficult.

I remember getting the trilogy out of the library not long after, and writing about the trouble I got into when I failed to return it. I wonder if that was the first time I knew the word "trilogy"? Or did I already know it from Tolkein? I remember that the library copy was hardcover, even though it had only been published in paperback. I realized later the library had at it rebound, with the paperback cover laminated on to the hard boards. There was a dead roach compressed against the back, which I avoided but never removed, out of sheer denial. If I didn't remove it, some part of me was thinking, it was because it must not have been a roach. Eventually, in college (I'd claimed I had returned the book, but I never did), I seem to remember cleaning it off.

Reading it I was able to solve the somewhat nagging puzzle about Jim Gleick's yearbook quote, the fact that it was ungrammatical. So for my yearbook, two years later, I put in the whole quotation, with the sentence-completing predicate (as well as a line from Finnegans Wake, ending "Hee hee hee hee Mr Funn, you're going to be fined again"). I quote it again, as I remember it:

From there he must have seen it all, the sea, these hills, their serried ranges crowding to the skyline. But all are not divined, even from that great height, and often where he saw he crest or peak there must have been two crests, two peaks, riven by a valley. But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be, I think, with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all those inner caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all that two quite differently disposed.

I am so glad to remember this.

I think the passage continues: "He looks old, and it is a sorry sight to see him left alone now, after so many days, so many nights, so many comings and goings." My mother was sure there was an obscene, épater-les-bourgeousie pun in comings. But she didn't read Beckett, and got him wrong.

posted by william 8:48 AM
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I remember thinking that the French word for yes was spelled we (and Andrew Sadler's joke asking you to say "Yes yes" in French, after which he would say, "Oooh!"), until I read oui in a Jack London story (White Fang?) with a French Canadian in it. I remember sounding out the strange word and being thrilled when I realized what it was. I looked forward to every instance of it in the book. I'd figured something really important out. The book was now for me the gateway into a vast reality, the real world of other languages and other places that had lain outside my purview, restricted still more by novel-reading, until that sudden illumination.

posted by william 11:48 PM
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I remember watching motes in the sunlight. It was of course easier to do this if you were lying on the rug, so that you both felt the dust in your throat (from the rug), and saw it in the light. I remember liking the motes, but being surprised that the world was so dusty. I was glad it was though: it made it obvious that there wasn't the big difference my elders were always trying to impress on me between being clean and being dirty. I remember later, being bored at P.S. 166, especially during assembly, but watching the motes in the sunlight that peaked through the heavy drawn curtains sometimes.

Later still I gave a guessing game speech in sixth grade, where you think of something, describe it periphrastically and try to stump the class while answering yes or no questions. I thought of dust. Yes, it was on other planets. No one got it. When I revealed the answer, Mr. Richards shook his head in disappointment that they hadn't gotten it. He had, immediately, because the only thing we know is on other planets, all other planets, was dust. I was very impressed with him, and retain this as an interesting fact still, and impressed with myself for falteringly but correctly saying yes when they asked whether there was dust on other planets, even on the moon.

posted by william 5:59 PM
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I remember that in the Markowitz's apartment, below ours, they had their bedroom where we had our den. It was odd that the same painted glass double doors could lead to so different a domestic space down there. It was like a parallel universe. A queen sized bed where a stuffed chair and a desk should have been. Mr. Markowitz was a judge. I sometimes saw him smoking his cigar, although when I think it was usually out, because I never smelled it when I saw him. But I could sometimes smell it -- much stronger and more pungent than my uptown grandfather's -- when I sat in my father's den reading. I remember reading the first sixty pages of Mrs. Dalloway in his chair one evening after school and finding it amazing. (I still do.)

posted by william 12:00 AM
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I remember, too, the walk around the walls of Dubrovnik. For some reason my mother didn't come. I think we were staying in Opatija then, in the Hotel Argentina? It was all so vaguely international! I don't know whether my sister came, but she wouldn't have been older than 5. But we walked around with that other father and his son (with the blisters), and I loved walking on the ramparts, and was excited as it became more and more obvious that the walls would go all the way around! I was afraid that this would be another disappointing reality. So I was old enough to know that realities disappointed. (But I couldn't have been older than ten.) Because of this I wasn't that saddened by the fact that we had to climb the stairs to the ground to cross the streets that broke the walls, before climbing up again. We couldn't do it all on the ramparts. But by then 98% for me was easily good enough.

posted by william 9:23 PM
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I remember the first blister I noticed. Other kids had them, I was vaguely aware -- I think the first kid I knew had blisters was the boy we walked around the walls of Dubrovnik with. I remember that he had two on his hands, and I was both interested and somewhat perturbed by them -- especially because his father kept making him leave them alone. The first one I noticed on myself was at my uptown grandmother's house. It was on my thumb. I have no idea how I got it, and don't think I had any idea then. I remember noticing it before going to bed on her dining room couch: I was sleeping over but my parents were still there at some holiday celebration, in the living room where I usually slept when I spent the night there, and I went to bed before they left. The blister hurt a lot, and I was surprised when I popped it that it contained water, not blood. I was also surprised, and pleased, that it hurt less then, and I didn't tell anyone about it. I was a little nervous about this, but it turned out to be fine.

posted by william 9:08 AM
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I remember the first and only time that I ever hitchhiked. It was raining and I was with my dad and he'd gotten a flat tire near the dairy and sought a ride home (which was 2-3 miles away). I was young enough not to question his decision but old enough to know that this was a bad idea; it was something he had cautioned us against. Everything happened so fast: he lit a cigarette, and, within seconds, someone picked us up. What surprised me, and impressed me, was his confident air, as if (could it be?) he had done this before.

posted by jennylewin 2:54 PM
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