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 that I forgot to notice that it's recently been over five years since I started posting these. Where does the time go? Where does the past? I feel as though I've gone dug through background memories to deeper more surprising ones, but then through those as well to a stratum less rich, or less affectively rich, than what I was thinking about two or three years ago. These strata aren't chronological but psychological, the layers of context for my own sense of Lockean "personal identity." Do they return me at length to the present then? Stay tuned.

posted by william 6:50 AM
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I remember my parents had an Amana hot-plate/tray that they used mainly to keep the coffee in its Chemex carafe warm. They may have had several.

posted by william 11:33 AM
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I remember the amazing doll house my parents got my sister. I worked hard helping to put it together. The reason I remember it vividly is that one day my parents threatened her with dismantling it if she didn't behave. My father went off to bathe, and my sister started acting up again. I felt -- moralistic creep of an older brother that I was -- that I should make good on "our" adult threat. I started taking it apart. My father came into the room. He thought that I was fixing it for her, and smiled approval. But when I explained what I was doing (I think she was in tears and he thought I was helping her) he blew up. He threw my things on the ground, asking what I would think if he started breaking them. Unfortunately one of them broke the wall of my sister's doll house. I did manage to put it together again, though, so that it was pretty good. I think that the doll house we had on display later, with lots of cunning little furniture -- and curtains! -- was a different one. But I don't remember where it came from.

posted by william 3:31 PM
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I remember the Gulf War. I remember our heder atum. We made our sealed room in Yossi's bedroom, a smallish one with only a single window to seal up; I remember a lot of duct tape was involved. I remember decorating the outside of my gasmask box. I covered it with newspaper clippings, pictures, headlines and protected them with clear packing tape.

I only clearly recall three times in a heder atum. The first was with my family, and I suppose I remember it because I was writing about it at the time, probably a letter to my best friend, Elisheva, but possibly in my journal, so I noticed things, like how uncomfortably tight and heavy the gasmask felt, and how stiffly frightened my parents seemed, and how thirsty we all were, and how unwilling we were to take off the masks to take a drink. The other two times must have been Friday nights: the fuzzier memory is of a siren interrupting dinner at the Werthans, and all of us trundling from the Shabbat table into Moshe and Libby's heder atum, the room I thought of as the library but which was really Moshe's office. I vaguely remember this, but I distrust the memory: could I have made it up? It seems likely that something like this would have happened--that year, we shared a meal with Moshe and Libby just about every Shabbat, war or no war. The clearer memory must have taken place shortly after candlelighting. Lonny was out davening, I guess, and I was downstairs with Tammy and their children. I remember understanding that there was no way, short of cruelty, to keep the baby, Neriya, inside the protective cot for any length of time. And there was no way to carry it with you, so if you took him anyplace, you couldn't really protect him in case of a chemical attack.

At the beginning, there was something exciting about the drama--what I could write to my friends in the States!--but after a few weeks, it wore me down. The question, 'how much danger are we really in?' was impossible to answer. The missiles didn't seem to be doing much damage, but you never knew what could happen the NEXT time. Knowing that there was no way to protect Neri, my beloved Neri, didn't make me want to think very hard about the possibilities.

I remember Moshe, our sweet, generous, and gentlemanly neighbor describing a dream in which he killed Saddam Hussein.

I remember rooting for Norman Schwarzkopf and Bush senior.

I remember refusing to translate the news for my father, though I was fluent in Hebrew and he was not, and though he asked me repeatedly. I remember refusing to watch (or listen to) the news at all.

After the initial shutdown, I remember going back to school. It seemed like nobody else's father was at home. Almost everyone had been called up for reserve duty. I remember the real tension on the faces of the girls whose dads were up North, tension reflected on the teacher's grave faces. And I remember that the war ended around Purim time, and that even after we were given the all clear, it took me several days and a serious talk with my father to be able to leave the house without my gasmask.

For the rest of the year, every time the daily train whistled its return from Tel Aviv, I heard a siren.

posted by Rosasharn 6:44 PM
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I remember (from the pictures in The Little Engine that Could?) that trains had cow-catchers. Did they really? I mean is that what they were called? I think I saw them on cartoons also -- the grilled wedges on the front of the engine to plow things out of the way. At the time I thought they were kind. The cow would just be carried along instead of being slammed into, until the engineer could slow the train down and it could amble off into neighboring fields. When I first saw a real train, with my downtown grandmother, I was surprised and disappointed that the strange, gigantic, sleek diesel engine didn't have one.

posted by william 7:05 AM
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I remember coveting those of my mother's paintings that were in my grandparents' (and other relatives'?) houses. I felt they were the nicer ones, and the places they were hung didn't deserve them as much as we did. I remember finding a couple of watercolours of horses hidden in a closet at my grandparents', and being puzzled that my mother was dissatisfied with them because they seemed beautiful to me. I took to secretly drawing crayon horses for some time. I remember, too, finding a large stack of my parents' wedding invitations and using the blank sides to draw on -- I liked the thickness and the compact, postcard-ish shape.

posted by sravana 2:55 AM
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I remember reading a passage in my Latin book about the geese who saved Rome. Anseri, as I recall. (The passage must have been from Livy.) My mother did the assignment with me, and she knew all about it. Because she did, I remember feeling that I had assimilated a discrete nugget of cultural knowledge.

posted by william 10:26 PM
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I remember other things around lie-detectors. Hugh C was interested in them (from Dragnet?) and said you could tell whether someone was lying by touching their hands to see if they got cold and clammy. But I think I knew about the technology before (I learned about voiceprints, I remember, on Mission Impossible or maybe I saw a show on them and then they showed up on Mission Impossible).

When I first found out about them, I thought you could find out whether God existed by using a lie detector. (Since Hugh was the first atheist I knew, he must have been connected to this plan too.) You could hook someone up and then ask them whether God existed. If they said no and they were lying, he did, just as if they said yes and the detector registered that they weren't lying, he did. I thought it was a truth detector, alas.

posted by william 11:44 PM
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I remember how much I used to love collecting the plastic toothpicks in the shape of swords -- sabers they were, though I didn't know it then. They came in different colors, and I think I got them with drinks, not hors d'oeuvres, so I could only get a few at a time. What were they doing in drinks, though? Maybe they came with the Sangria at La Fonda Del Sol? It's pretty hazy.

posted by william 1:26 PM
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