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 another thing that made the willow behind our house in Stormville different, but also helped define a group of grave older trees on the property: it would rain and we would have to stay inside; but then the sun would come out and when the grass dried, which it always did pretty quickly in the summer heat, we could go play. But the big trees with their brooding cavernous interiors would still be dripping, or would let a lot of water down in a gust of wind, as though they couldn't or wouldn't take part in the nimble change in weather. They were like my grandparents and their friends, old and dark people unaffected by the bright summer: tall and knowing and imperturbable

posted by william 11:00 AM
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I remember that the barber shop counter in front of the mirror you were facing had drawers and that the barbers used these drawers incessantly. Drawers! They were small, much smaller than our kitchen drawers, more like the drawers on my toy furniture. But the barber would open the drawer, take out a comb or a napkin or scissors, close the drawer, clip the scissors overhead in a way that my mother absolutely forbade at home because she thought it would make them dull, do something rapid, put the scissors or the comb back in the drawer and close it, open another drawer and take something else out and close the drawer, open it again to return something, over and over again. I always thought of drawers as places you put things away, put the away for a while because you no longer needed them right now. If you're just putting something down inside it for a second you leave the drawer open. But the barbers had infinite patience with the repetitions: opening and closing and opening and closing. They treated the drawers like shelves or surfaces, except they kept closing them, as though they were done for now. But the haircuts went on forever and they were never done.

posted by william 5:25 PM
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I remember a big mauve denim dress with large, round pockets, a high neck, and wide shoulder straps that my mother wore one Friday night when I was very small. I remember it because at the time I supposed she might be pregnant again--I associated that dress with her being pregnant--so I must have remembered her wearing it when she was pregnant with my brother, who is 20 months younger. But I was wrong. It wasn't the only time I wished there might be a third, but there never was.

posted by Rosasharn 5:40 PM
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I remember my delighted surprise when I learned (from Mr. Grotsky?) that Coke was made from Kola nuts. And I remember my further delight when the Kola nut commercial came on, with that serenely self-confident, fantastically fit older man taking a lilting pleasure that I shared completely in explaining them to the TV audience. I liked the fact that I already knew about them, so that I was partnered with him, unlike everyone else who didn't already know this interesting information.

posted by william 4:52 PM
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I remember wistfully watching planes flying high overhead.  I thought they were going to Europe, going to a new life.  They were so high that they had to be going far away, and if they were going far away they were going for a long time.  So height meant distance meant permanence.  I was jealous.  I never considered what a long time might be, but if I'd been asked I think I would have imagined six or eight weeks: summer vacation.  Back then six or eight weeks elsewhere meant a new life, meant not having to think about coming back, meant going off to become a different person.  There they were, glinting and free, the smallest part of the immensity of the sky, flying east into darkness, and an almost immediate new day, as the sun went down in our prosaic west.

posted by william 11:38 PM
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I remember that if you touch the ping-pong table you lose the point.

posted by william 9:50 AM
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