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 confusing the First Lady and Wonder Woman. I couldn't keep the names straight--Rosalind Carter and Lynda Carter. And since I didn't know how to spell their names or my own, Roselyn, only knew that My Name was That Name and that I had dark hair, red lips and a Wonder Woman leotard (underoos?), I wasn't certain if I were meant to be the First Lady or Wonder Woman, or both. What might these affinities signify?

posted by Rosasharn 12:05 PM
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I remember when Mom, Billy and I went to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey - a huge endeavor since Daddy wasn't with us for some reason. I don't remember how we got there, if we drove - something Mommy didn't do too often. I think we drove. I was only about 5 years old. But, to our dismay, the amusement park was CLOSED! We were completely crestfallen, and I remember sitting in the parking lot on a railroad tie (is that what they are called? The heavy wooden slats that the rails lie on?).

I remember the commercial: "Palisades Amusement Park, swings all day till after dark,....Ride the coaster get cool in the waves in the pool, you'll have fun! So come on over."

We never went back and eventually it closed down.
So, all I have from the promise of accepting the commercial's invitation is the memory of the splinter.

posted by caroline 4:51 AM
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I remember Yossi falling down the stairs at Locke Street. They were wooden stairs, the stairs from the second floor landing, the stairs that took you from the living floor of our apartment down to the outside. Somehow they were of a different quality than the steps to the upstairs (the sleeping floor, where the bedrooms are)--darker, scarier. Probably we weren't allowed to go down them ourselves, since they led to the front door. The stairs to the third floor were safe and fine, had a landing of their own and ugly green-patterned wallpaper that I once improved with some crayon--though I was not encouraged in that pursuit. But the dogs would tumble down those lower steps every day when the mail came, roaring and barking hysterically at the postman. You would never have thought them so old, such old dogs, 10 and 14 or so, the way that they barked, passionately, with gusto, with purpose. I remember Yossi falling down those stairs right onto his face, remember feeling terrified about it--when he stood up his face was all bloody and my mother was clearly frightened. He'd fallen right onto his face, never blocked his fall with his hands. It's the first of three memories of his falling on his face, right onto his mouth, bloodying himself because his body couldn't seem to get that that's what hands are for: to protect your face.

posted by Rosasharn 11:23 AM
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I remember, also, that you had to be really careful not to get your Hush-Puppies wet. A drop of water would ruin them. I remember sometimes getting some drops on them and trying to spread and massage them into the whole surface of the suede with the sole of my other shoe -- a feeble shift which never really worked, and was always vexatious.

posted by william 8:16 AM
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I remember my parents' umbrellas in the hallway outside our door, where they would leave them open to dry out when it was raining. This was another sign of their competence -- a sign of their competence because the umbrellas with their air of self-possession, the serene reasonableness they projected in just being open, on the floor, inside, leaning inscrutably on their own ribs, not protecting anyone, seemed just like my parents themselves, knowing more about what was appropriate than I could have guessed. They clustered around the door; sometimes my grandparents' umbrellas were there too, and they would present a tableau like the kind of all-adult conversation that they would all sometimes have when they came over. Umbrellas were like coffee and showers to me, something part of adult life to which I was not yet initiated. I had to wear galoshes (especially with desert boots!) and a raincoat. So the umbrellas clustered together, studiously presenting their backs to me, seemed very mysteriously knowing in their adult opacity, and that opacity was their very nature, designed as they were to block and deflect. (I think for this reason I was always shocked by broken, wind-capsized umbrellas when I saw them on the street.)

posted by william 7:09 AM
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I remember that when Mrs. Eben came on the intercom to tell us that the President had been shot, the light were already out in the classroom. It was almost 3, and I was coloring my Thanksgiving feather in the dim natural light. We were sitting in our coats in rows at the tables in the part of the room facing the classroom door. The other part of the room had the blackboard, and I remember this part as a kind of holding or transitional area. And so I suppose it proved to be, that day when I was just 7.

posted by william 8:35 PM
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I remember wearing smocks for art. You put them on backwards and they were dirty! "Smock" also meant for me a girl's shirt, so it was all triply backwards. I remember having this puzzling feeling first putting on a smock at an easel in Kindergarten. It made me feel so big.

posted by william 5:09 PM
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I remember the Jethro Tull song "Wondering aloud." Also that you cannot petition the Lord with prayer.

posted by william 9:22 AM
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I remember flying seagull kites on the Mall in Washington D.C. We were down visiting the Herdrichs, as we did over February vacation for many years, and for some reason we met up with Aunt Roz, my grandmother's younger sister. I imagine she was in D.C. because Uncle Arthur must have been at the Department of Energy for one reason or another, but maybe she was in town visiting her other sister, Aunt Ernie, who lived nearby in Virginia. It was a sunny day and not cold, and someone, probably Aunt Roz, bought us the kites from the man selling them there, one for each of us (no sharing!), and we stayed and flew kites in the middle of the city for a long time. We squinted painfully to watch the white paper birds flap in the too-bright sky and felt powerful holding the string, holding the wind, tied to a bird. The memory is of extended, empty, powerfully fun time, time like the big empty Mall. We stayed and flew kites until we began to feel cold in the late day. I also remember Yoss chasing pigeons all over D.C. that visit, stalking them by adopting their walk, bobbing his head back and forward, disconcerting them with his imitation or his little boy interest. Each one he followed tolerated him until he got about 3 feet away and then flew off.

posted by Rosasharn 11:50 AM
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I remember the only time I flew kites during the festival (in Hyderabad, when once we overstayed the winter). I cut about half a dozen kites. I felt a smug sense of victory -- for one thing, it was fascinating how sharp the string could be, and for another, I guessed that most of the other kite flyers were boys, and probably more experienced than I was. But I also felt a little guilty, like I was doing something slyly cruel. Everytime I brought one down, I felt for the owner -- the movements of a kite being trapped are so desperate and sorry. And I probably personified the kite itself, in its struggling. Of course, my kite was eventually cut too, but I didn't care much, mostly because I was tired and was waiting to stop.

posted by sravana 12:50 AM
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I remember writing in my graph-paper Composition book journal "Sixteen today," with a kind of wistfulness, on my sixteenth birthday (November 7th). I was wistful about Belinda. It was a few weeks after this day which of course didn't pan out. By now she was going with the close-on-the-attendance-sheet Bill F, and not me. I remember seeing my cousin Zlata that day. She'd just started at my school, a year or two back. I was sitting in the common area, at the top of the stairs with my journal open, writing the "Sixteen today" entry. She had a nice smile, and was just about to be part of her own group there and not need me to be nice to her any more. I registered how pretty she was, but I was more interested in being saturated with hopeful melancholy about Belinda. I think I got the tone with which I meant to infuse "sixteen today" out of Death of the Heart, which we read in a class that I took partly because a lot of Belinda's group was in it: "So I am with them, in London." (I mention this in the same entry.) It was a good tone for the writer I wanted to be writing the journals of.

posted by william 7:26 AM
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I remember that one day my parents and some friends of theirs (with kids) decided to take the Circle Line around Manhattan. It went up to West Point, which I thought was hours away (since it was "upstate.") We didn't really see much there, though -- nothing I remember. Maybe the Tappan Zee bridge, but I'm not so sure. As we came around and back to where we had started, we could see that my mother had a sunburn. We checked ourselves too; I had a minor one. I was more interested in how it felt than in the pain, which was minimal. The peeling was fascinating too. I think my mother's bothered her more than mine did. It was certainly more dramatic.

posted by william 2:36 PM
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I remember watching Aliens at my Florida grandparents' first house on Little Torch Key when I was 12. They had cable, and whichever channel it was repeated Aliens several times, so that I remember seeing it in one evening sitting with my whole family, and then I remember catching a few minutes of it here and there when my brother or I turned on the TV to see if anything good was on while everyone else napped.

Then as now, I was a coward about visual media, so I'm sure I wanted to leave the room more than once, and I'm sure my father teased me about it. I remember sitting through much of it, though, watching the team be killed off one after another, but steeling myself to it by promising myself that the movie would spare the woman and the child, and maybe even one of the men. If I refused to care about any other characters, I would be ok. I understood that they would have to live because they stood for a family, without which it wouldn't be a happy ending.

I thought about this memory when I heard the news of the car bomb that exploded outside a bride's house in Baghdad yesterday, destroying so many lives. I thought about this when I heard myself wonder, did the bride and groom survive? I realized that if this were a movie, the deaths of her uncles, aunts, and cousins, their families' and friends' children would not matter to me. I would be satisfied with only the main characters' survival.

posted by Rosasharn 11:43 AM
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