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 wondering what was underneath my nails, or rather having a vague sense of hollowness there. At different times I had different ideas. I had a vague thought that the hollowness was just the standard hollowness of the inside of my body, with my nails being less obviously airtight then the rest of my integuement; and then again I also thought my nails belonged to a kind of Lego assemblage. They were the part of me that seemed manufactured, made of plastic. So I associated them with things that snapped into place, and I thought there was a kind of corresponding plastic-like structure beneath them, the structure of the inside of my fingertips.

posted by william 5:49 PM
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I remember that Jackie, my Catholic friend, came from Texas and had a mother from Cuba. Her dad worked for President George H.W., and her family was very pretty and rich. I had my first slumber party at her house; it was her birthday and she invited all the girls from our grade. Her Cuban grandparents sent her a pair of porcelain Romeo and Juliet dolls, which she opened while we were there, although they were quickly taken away by her mother so that we wouldn't remove them from their boxes. Jackie told us these dolls cost four hundred dollars, and I associated them, and her huge, plush-carpeted house, with Texas and Cuba, revering the two places for several years thereafter. Jackie looked like a deer and was adored by everyone, although after she moved away the boys in our grade would marvel over how she managed to be a slut at the age of seven.

We had a wonderful first-grade teacher who gave us all the confidence to write even though none of us could spell. We spent several hours each week writing stories independently on lined, green sheets of paper shaped like horizontal rectangles. My father visited the class one afternoon with his recording equipment and taped each of us reading our stories aloud, then made copies of the tape for the entire class. Most of the girls' stories were about dogs and cats and nearly all of the boys' were about sports. Jackie's story was about a dog, a cat, a mouse, and a sandwich, and she read it in a breathy, sibilant whisper with no pauses between words. I thought this voice was so cute that I appropriated it and used it for several years while reading things aloud. I also appropriated her adorable grammatical tic of using the incorrect form of "to be" for plural nouns ( those girls is; we is), a habit that still occasionally plagues me in speech today. By the time the elections rolled around and we were in the fourth grade, I was obsessed with Clinton winning and thought "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was an extremely catchy song. But I reassured myself that even if Bush won, I would still be happy, because then Jackie wouldn't have to move away.

posted by Caitlin 11:56 PM
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I remember when I learned I wasn't Catholic. I was on the playground with my friends Maggie and Jackie, and they were talking about their preparations for their First Holy Communions. I asked what a First Holy Communion was, and they laughed, assuming that I had to know, and when they realized that I truly didn't, they became a little confused. They assured me that every girl had a First Communion and that I would be having one very soon because first grade was the year when you had one. That night, I asked my mother why I didn't yet know about this rite of passage awaiting me somewhere in the very near future, and she, who had been raised Catholic, laughed and explained what a First Holy Communion was. There is only one part of this explanation that I remember, or which was actually clear to me at the time: The past Christmas, she had given me a box of dress-up clothes that she collected at the Salvation Army, and she told me now that the white dress my friends and I always used as the wedding dress was really a First Communion dress. I thought about how Jackie had come over and pretended that dress was a wedding dress, and wondered if she had known then that it was really a First Communion dress and that she was going to get to wear a similar one for a real ceremony.

It seemed that Maggie and Jackie also consulted their mothers, for the next day at school, they were more accepting of the fact that I was not going to have a First Communion. The problem was that they both wanted to invite me to their First Communions because I was their best friend, but they told me that only Catholic people were allowed to go. (I believe now that their initial disbelief ensued from their assumption that I, as their best friend, had to be Catholic, rather than their belief that every girl in the world had a First Holy Communion, and that they just chose to express this in the universal manner at which young girls are so adept.) Eventually, the thing became so confused that Maggie's mother actually called my mother to invite me to Maggie's First Communion, and my mother made up some excuse about why I couldn't go even though I didn't have anything to do on that day and actually could have gone. It was okay with me that she lied about this because I regretted very much that I wasn't going to have a First Communion, and knew that going to Maggie's would make me want to have one even more which would make me even sadder. I pictured it as a warmly lit ceremony, sacred and delicate as the sugar shell of my diorama Easter egg, comprised of dozens of beautiful, beaming, first-grade brides.

posted by Caitlin 11:47 PM
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I remember coming inside one summer afternoon to find a dead bee resting in a patch of sunlight on the carpet. I had just recently learned, from a warning from my babysitter Ramonita (Nita), that bees could sting. This warning, however, referred to living bees, the ones that drifted lazily in and out of the shadow of our porch, and this bee was a dead bee, which meant that it could not sting, because being dead meant that you could no longer do anything. I squatted over the dead bee for a little while, contemplating this, and to prove it to myself, bent one knee forward and knelt all my weight onto the bee. I realized instantly that the pain that followed was a sting, and began to cry, not because of any inordinate amount of pain, but because of the shock in finding the equation I had just worked out to be wrong. Nita rushed into the room, saw the dead bee on the carpet and took me upstairs to the bathroom where she grazed my skin with her long, pink fingernails searching for the stinger, which was not left inside, then cleaned the pink patch of skin with a wad of toilet paper soaked in rubbing alcohol. She spoke very soothingly to me and I knew that she thought the bee had stung me before it died. I was scared to ask her about what actually happened, because it seemed to me that I should have known dead bees could sting and she would be mad at me for getting stung on purpose.

posted by Caitlin 11:43 PM
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I remember a couple of lines from poetry in my high school literary magazine, from students a year or two ahead of me. If I'm not mistaken, Steve Fenichel had a rapidly accelerating protest-against-the-times poem which ended with the striking grim propulsive couplet:

And mannikins applying Nair.
The hollow men are everywhere.

(I knew the reference to Eliot from Mr. McCormick's English class.)

And Jim Gleick had a wistfully nostalgic line about "A past that's high as a house."

I might be reversing who wrote what, though.

posted by william 12:27 PM
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I remember how interesting the word apparently is. One of those adult adverbs, like incidentally, that brought a more subtle judgment to bear on the assertion it qualified than I was capable of at the time. It meant that something looked a certain way, but that the person using the word wasn't convinced. I think my father used it more than my mother, but as soon as I say that I think my mother used it more than my father. I associate it with their conversations about work at our dining room table -- where I also heard the word affidavit a lot (a word whose meaning was much less clear to me).

posted by william 11:13 AM
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I remember seeing Wanda June and then Kurt Vonnegut talking to the audience after. I liked his novels, but was never a play person. Seeing him in real life was interesting, but not as interesting as reading him. He claimed to be "frightfully funny" which is why the younger generation and counterculture liked him. I didn't realize he was funny, in high school. I can't remember if he made the claim that night or on TV.

posted by william 12:17 AM
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I remember my downtown grandparents' kitchen table, where they would eat when they weren't having company. I'd eat with them there too, often before spending the night on the couch. I always faced the window when I ate, and my grandfather faced me: behind him was the sink and fridge. It was sitting there that they taught me to play Tatch. And also, probably earlier, that they taught me to eat spaghetti without getting any on my chin. That is they taught me to roll it up on the fork and put it in my mouth, and then dab at my chin in case any sauce got there. I would ask them, "Dirty? dirty?", a memory reinforced because it was part of my grandmother's lore: she loved to remember that scene. I believe that I used to sit on the step-ladder from which I fell off once and "didn't even cry." Then we'd move it back to the little table against the facing wall, where they had a toaster and I think a radio.

I remember that I had favorite foods associated with my grandmothers. My downtown grandmother would ask what I wanted and I always answered, "Spaghetti á la Bologense." I always asked for filet mignon from my uptown grandmother, which she always claimed to give me, but which was really skirt steak or something similar. Once in a restaurant I ordered spaghetti á la Bologense, and it was much meatier than what I expected -- no good at all! And once in a restaurant I ordered filet mignon, and got a tourando of steak that was good, but not what I wanted. I don't know how I got the idea of eating filet mignon -- probably from something I read, maybe James Bond. I also liked my downtown grandmother's chevapchichi (as I thought the plural was spelled), which were really finger-shaped fried hamburgers with lots of chopped onion in them; in Yugoslavia they turned out to be raw. I did like eating my mother's raw hamburger meat when I was in high school. Now I'll never quite know what my adult taste would be, but I doubt it would ever compare to the pleasures of having my granmothers cook me just what I wanted.

posted by william 9:41 AM
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I remember being very puzzled that the little hand stood for hours, which were so much longer than minutes. Why should the big hand stand for the shorter time and the little for the longer? And then my father and his father had watches with second hands, which were longer still (I noticed later, maybe years later).

(Why? Maybe because when you're little time moves like the hour hand, and when you're big it moves like the minute hand, and when your life is very long it moves like the second hand. Helas.)

posted by william 8:30 AM
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I remember Tom Jones singing, "It's not unusual that I'm feeling kind of blue." But it seems that I'm misremembering. I think I reconstructed the line when I couldn't get the annoying song out of my head. It wouldn't be a bad line. I remember seeing Tom Jones on my uptown grandmother's TV. She just had it on to some live variety show. He looked absurd, a low-rent Elvis who (like a cartoon parody) affected my sense of Elvis himself when I started watching Elvis movies. (And of course it affected, less fatally since Fielding is so overwhelmingly vital, my sense of the novel; just as the inevitably paired Engelbert Humperdinck affected my sense of the composer.) On the show, where Tom Jones performed live, some fan threw him her panties, and he swung them around as he sang. I realize now this must have been scripted. It was silly without seeming particularly interesting in any way at all, including its silliness.

posted by william 7:44 AM
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I remember the car horns of my childhood (mainly of my uptown grandfather's car) -- a metal ring (chrome I guess -- one of the chrome features on a car) around the inside (or most of it) of the steering wheel, a concentric circle maybe half an inch closer to the center. You could press it with your thumb while you were driving, or bang it with the heel of your hand, I think. I liked the nervous elegance of it. I now associate it with my grandfather -- the fact that it was ridged and focussed and slim and so somehow knowing, like his intelligence; but as round as round could be, since it was circular, and therefore also relaxed and pleasant and warm, by a kind of kindly choice.

posted by william 9:22 AM
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I remember the Sterns scrubbing their house of hometz (?) one April. Geoffrey told me that his father had sold their house in Windham for Passover for a dollar to a neighbor, and then would buy it back after Passover. I liked the idea of the actual dollar that would buy and sell the house. For some reason the dollar he sold it for seemed more real to me than the dollar he would buy it back with -- there was a certain relaxed ease with which the dollar represented the legal fiction. I'd heard before (I think) of things being bought and sold for a dollar for legal purposes. But here the dollar was making possible a religious duty that preceded the U.S. by centuries, and yet it was doing it with nonchalant grace. I had a visual image of its pale green harmonizing with the slightly bluer greenish tint of their kitchen.

posted by william 10:26 PM
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I remember Erev Pesach in the Old City. The amazing thing was that you didn’t have to do this crazy house-turn-over, where you put away all your regular dishes and cutlery and pots and pans and got out all the Pesach dishery, the way we did in America, dragging box after box down from the attic. In the Old City, we put our glass dinnerware & drinking glasses, and our metal pots and pans, and all the cutlery into the plastic baskets we used to carry fruit and veg home from the shuk (usually Mahane Yehuda) and carried them to a courtyard where bearded men and sidelocked boys had huge vats of hot water going over big fires at a furiously hot rolling boil. It was a beautiful day, sunny, and the streets were wet from the water of people's mopping and scrubbing. Everyone, the whole neighborhood, brought dishes and utensils, and we kashered them there, quicksmart, in those vats. It took mere seconds. Nothing like those hours and days of up and down, packing and unpacking. I remember the boys in their arba kanfot, running up and down, calling, helping people carry, curly payos flying behind them. I felt their energy and freedom. We waited a minute until our things were kosher, and then we took them back home and put them away in their own clean and newly lined cupboards and drawers.

posted by Rosasharn 4:02 PM
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