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 stately the curtains at my uptown grandparents' house were, especially in the dining room. They were gauze, and fairly sheer, but somehow substantial anyhow. They never moved, except perhaps with a kind of unhurried, transcendent competence to the motion of the breeze that came through there. Their motion emphasized the stillness of the room they were in -- no one rushing through, not much happening, daylight and shadows in the unlit room. They were part of the furnishing of the room, dark like it, and light like the daylight in the window. It felt safe there, as though time weren't passing, as though my grandparents' old age were a permanent state, what they'd settled into for good now, and what I could rely on.

posted by william 10:32 PM
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I remember seeing my father walking through the apartment one day with his hands clasped behind his back. This was the first time I'd ever noticed this way of walking, which I asked him about. It seemed really interesting and unintuitive, and I tried it for a while. Thinking about it now I realize that I never walk like that. But he certainly did, and not just when he was thinking.

posted by william 8:54 AM
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I recently found an old dial-type telephone and installed it in one of our jacks. Dialing is heavier on the index finger than I remembered it to be but the pleasant clicking of the dial as it winds back is worth the effort.
My 8-year-old had never dialed a phone before and didn't know how to do it. This was one of my first encounters with an extinct technique so familiar to me but completely obsolete for her.

posted by caroline 10:00 AM
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I remember that when my uptown grandfather got a new car, the back seat, on which I always lay full length often on my stomach, had a hole in it near the edge and the seatback. I think, now, it was burned by a cigarette, and this makes me think my grandfather might have gotten a used car. It's the second car of his I remember (and not the Granada I eventually took my driving test in). The weave of the seat seemed older than that in his earlier car, more like the straw seats on the old IND lines (which I've mentioned before) than like the seats on the faster IRT. I thought of tighter weave as more modern, and the dilapidation of the hole seemed to confirm this. I used to stick my finger through it, feeling the sharp nylon edges and the plasticized padding below.

posted by william 12:05 AM
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I remember the pop-up buttons when you took the phone off the hook. I remember the first time I noticed them. I wasn't allowed to play with the phone at all, but either by playing with it, or by watching my parents, I saw those buttons, which I hated. It was like looking upon the phone in its nakedness.

They were supposed to be hidden. I was interested, when I was allowed to play with them, that they both went down when you pushed one of them. Also that you could press them below the level of their recesses. They still seemed strange to me, though -- vaguely malevolent in the paired but inscrutable way they came up when you lifted the phone. I remember them as beige and somewhat translucent, maybe more translucent if the phone was black.

I remember sometimes trying to make the phone look hung-up, by curling the cord under the bracket for the receiver so that if anyone -- a teacher say -- called it would be busy.

I remember -- once I was ok with the desk phones and their two buttons -- being a little bit unhappy with the Hoges' kitchen phone, wall-mounted, with the receiver hanging from a genuine metal hook, which it pulled down. That seemed to me like a Captain Hook hook, compared to the more elegant aesthetics of the desk phone. The desk phone, off the hook, looked like a self-effacing amputee; the wall phone like one with a particularly prominent prosthesis.

posted by william 9:35 AM
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I remember the first time I ever tasted a bagel. I was in my first year of law school and my classmate, Barbara Aronstein (who later under the name Barbara Aronstein Black became dean of Columbia Law School), invited me to spend a weekend at her family's summer house in Monroe, NY. We were having brunch and I was offered a bagel with cream cheese. I did not know what it was, but when I tasted it I thought it was ambrosia. I think bagels are one of the great contributions of Russian Jews to civilization.

posted by alma 9:41 AM
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I remember crossing our backyard to play basketball with Michael Clurman on his driveway, one Saturday morning. (He was great at foul shots.) As I crossed over I could hear the smack of the ball on the pavement as he slammed the ball down in his dribbling, waiting for me. I was far enough away that the sound and the sight were perfectly out of sync, the ball hitting silently, and the bang only coming as it reached his hand again. We'd just learned about the speed of sound, and I loved this confirmation of it. The only other time I've seen so perfect an illustration was watching someone hammering from half a street away, so that I heard the bang of the hammer when it was at its zenith. I think I liked the way the distance from the activity to me mirrored the distance the ball or hammer traveled, so that the sound I heard was like the displacement onto a much elongated horizontal axis of the vertical movement that produced it. (I can also concentrate on a similar but less obvious effect if I'm seated far from the stage at a concert, and especially in Family Circle at the Met, but then I'm not listening to the music.)

posted by william 11:38 AM
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I remember feeling something stronger than surprise, though not quite shock, when my parents' present for me after a trip they made to Britain was a tartan kilt. A skirt! What were they thinking? The intensely interesting fact that I learned at the same time -- that in Scotland men wore kilts -- wasn't interesting enough to make me want to wear it (it didn't quite come to the level of my Lederhosen), but was enough to make me think of the present as intriguing rather than awful. Later I saw Sean Connery in a kilt. One of the women writes her room number in lipstick on his thigh. When he goes he drops his kilt and she cries (we only see him waist-waist up, from behind) "It's true!" My parents explained the no-underwear lore.

posted by william 12:45 AM
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