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 how much I liked calling my mother at worked. I also called my father at work but he was in the office far less often than she was. I knew her direct number and then when she changed offices I knew her secretary, who almost always put me through. It was reliably exhilarating to be able to reach her in a space I knew from having been there several times as hers, but not home. (I remember its being slightly eerie to see her on the phone in her office -- as though I was on the wrong side of the connection.) It wasn't home, but wherever my mother was, her voice was home to me; and so being able to talk to her in her office was like a promise of her presence, always available even when far away. It was like the happiness of talking to her through the bathroom door when I was little: home was on both sides.

posted by william 11:20 PM
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I remember jellybean-counting contests. Were there that many of them? What were they all about? When submitting my name and guess and phone number, I envisioned myself at home, weeks or months later, receiving the call that told me that I'd won. Then, after leaving the store or restaurant or wherever, I'd forget all about it.

posted by jennylewin 9:26 PM
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I remember wondering, when I first got a toy gun, what the sighting tab at the end of the barrel was for. Hugh explained that guns recoiled, and that the tab allowed you to compensate for the fact that the barrel would rise when you fired. I remember being surprised to learn about the recoil, since in the TV shows and movies I watched they were just like magic wands, almost: you aimed and the other person either dodged out of the way or went down. I wonder now whether he was right that the tab wass to compensate for the recoil, rather than just a way to judge more accurately where the barrel was pointing.

posted by william 10:47 PM
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I remember how surprising "When I'm 64" was the Seargant Pepper album. I think we first heard it on Long Island; it was new to me, but if we heard it on Long Island it wouldn't have been entirely new I don't think. Two of my grandparents wouldn't have been sixty-four yet, and two would have. So to me it seemed a grandparental age, which it is in the song too. And yet the Beatles seemed sufficiently adult that it was reasonable for them to anticipate being 64, although unreasonable for them to anticipate being anything like my grandparents' age. (I didn't then distinguish between them song by song, and so didn't know this was Paul's song.)

In high school one of the year book quotes was from Mick Jagger about morality, I think, that it was invented by old men, men afraid of dying and therefore bugged about religion. Now he's pushing 64 too, but he seems reasonably true to his younger self. So I guess does Paul. But neither seem quite true to my younger self, that is to what I imagined they were then.

posted by william 5:42 PM
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I remember that some people said "Gesundheit" when you sneezed, which we never did. I think I may first have heard "Gesundheit" from the Hoges or the Schubins. This was one of those early introductions to markers for other practices, other familial cultures. Then in sixth grade or so I met kids -- Ronnie Rogers, I think, first -- who told time using "of" rather than "to." Ronnie was one of those kids who had a watch (as well as a Cross pen), and once I asked him the time and he said "a quarter of one." I adopted that formulation, which seemed somehow statelier and more old-fashioned than my father's more dynamic "quarter to," the abbreviation he'd always use since we'd know roughly what time it was, what hour we were near. "Quarter to" had the modern dynamism of Pepsi and the Pontiac he once owned (or maybe once rented). So I guess through sixth grade, anyhow, and probably later, I hadn't yet begun thinking of my parents as retrograde. That may have come with long hair, which for me begun with Ronnie's cooler twin Peter, whose hair was the first boy's that I knew to go beyond a Beatles mop. He was also, I think, the first kid I knew to wear desert boots instead of the Hush Puppies that were as far as the school really wanted kids to go.

posted by william 9:53 AM
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I remember when my hair was long enough that I could chew on it. Barely. It was always a struggle with my mother about when I had to have a haircut. I was one of the shorter-haired kids. But if I pulled it straight down over my forhead, down past my eyebrows, plumb down past my nose, I could first just touch it with the tip of my tongue, and then occasionally, if I could delay the trip to barber long enough, actually chew it, although this took some jaw-stretching articulations of my teeth. My hair never got to be long enough that it was as satisfying as chewing on the laces of my mitt. But it felt like a symbolic achievement to be able to get it to my mouth.

posted by william 1:23 AM
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I remember that Judith Crist lived across the street from us. She was reviewing for Cue, which the Hoges got and which I first saw there, and then she started reviewing for New York, and then she turned out to live at 180 Riverside.

posted by william 7:51 PM
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I remember that I learned the phrase "on purpose" from Tommy Hoge. I guess it was something they said a lot in their house, that for some reason we didn't say in ours. I remember it first as an accusation, not a defense. It's one of those phrases that Austin should have analyzed: always in the negative in the first person ("I didn't do it on purpose"), usually not negated in second or third person ("You did that on purpose!"). I think Tommy accused me of doing something on purpose, and I associate learning the phrase both with his bunkbed (shared with Ken) and with their father's den, where we would hang out. I remember that I was struck (as with shirk) that the word struck me as incongruous and funny, because I already knew the word porpoise.

My mother loved porpoises, and made me love them. Since after Flipper I tend to prefer using the word dolphin, as sounding more streamlined, I always associate the word with her, and her porpoise-like kindness and love. So it was odd to have that word flung at me in distorted accusation, odd to hear it come out of Tommy's mouth. (I think this same oddness still distantly haunts me when I read in Paradise Lost how God placed Adam and Eve in Eden "with purpose to assay" if Satan can pervert them and make them fall. How unlike my mother!)

posted by william 9:52 AM
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I remember that when I was having trouble memorizing the spelling of Manhattan in third or fourth grade my father encouraged me to figure out some mnemonic, and I came up with "The man under a hat had a tan" (which of course doesn't quite make sense).

posted by william 9:55 PM
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John Crowley remembers:

I suppose journals should be all about the day as it passes, but my days are not mostly worth cataloguing -- the new toilet seat put in today -- the weather dreadful, cold and rain -- etc. -- so my mind travels back. One hot sunny afternoon, one of few lately, I was at the University nearby and I remembered summer at college, not my own college days but summers at Notre Dame, near where I lived in high school, and where my father was the doctor at the student infirmary. I had an old Schwinn English and in the summers (I think I'm remembering best the summer after sophomore year in high school) I would bike over to the college in the late morning and stay most of the afternoon. Most of that time I spent in the library, looking through old books and albums of theater history and stage design from the 20s and 30s (I didn't have a clear conception of how old they were). Gordon Craig. Max Reinhardt. Norman Bel Geddes. Then I would eat lunch at the Student Union, and drink Cokes in the dim under parts of that place, cool there though I doubt it was air-conditioned. I wanted to be a stage designer myself -- or rather that's where for the most part Iocated this intense inward visionary feeling and urge. It was my land, as others located theirs in poetry or the movies (which I loved too, both). Anyway that somnolent campus (UMass) was a Proustian ticket to that older one (ND) and the interior of the person I then was.

posted by william 2:45 PM
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I remember "And your sunshine of love keeps me warm ? my relative rescue." A treacly pop song, but all I remember is this repeated chorus.

posted by william 6:31 AM
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I remember that I pronounced hundred as hunderd, which is how Tommy and Ken pronounced it too. (Also it turns out how Tennyson did, as you can hear in the recording of his reading of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," where he rhymes it with "thundered" and "blundered.") I seem to think I learned the word from them, and I know that I was surprised that there was terminology for higher orders of magnitude, which I learned much later. I thought that the hundreds were as high as anyone bothered to go.

I think my mother told me about infinity, later; and I remember my father's Encyclopedia's proof that there were an infinite number of numbers: assume y is the largest number. Consider y+1. Y+1 is greater than y. Therefore there is no largest number, and the numbers go on infinitely. This was gratifyingly, stunningly easy, compared to all the other math stuff I looked up with their sigmas and double-integration signs.

Learning how hundred was spelled was as surprising as learning that idea didn't end with an r. But this seemed a little stranger about a number since the Magoo-like numeral 100 was already very familiar to me. I was a little puzzled by the relation of a hunderd to one hundred, though.

posted by william 9:44 AM
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I remember that dad used to hold me upside down with my feet around his neck and I was his necktie.

He'd also play King Kong with us and carry us over his shoulder jumping around and screeching, then throw us down on the bed. Scary and fun!

posted by caroline 1:25 PM
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I remember that we would sometimes practice with the two kids who were two-stripe green belts. (We were all thirteen or so). They talked mainly to each other, in low voices, clearly of things beyond my comprehension. Sometimes we'd be instructed by the brown-belt, who was a soldier, a marine I think, and big. He was really good and really nice. They listened to him carefully, too. I now realize the fact that I could tell he was really good is what distinguished him from our sensei, who was far more subtle. I remember vividly watching the sensei drill the green belts. They were just advancing and retreating, but one of them was weeping with the effort. I couldn't see why -- these were just the same drills we did, and were no effort at all -- which made it impress me all the more. Both the kids broke boards during some open house demonstration day at the dojo, and I think the other one of them broke a brick. That was more obviously impressive.

posted by william 7:35 AM
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