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 the first time I got adult-style pants: zippered fly, and they opened at the waist and buttoned at the top. What I had no idea about was the little metal clasp that held the top together even when the button was undone. This piece of hardware was like a sleek secret from adult life, not the lives of adults so much as the lives of adult trousers. This is how they were. Adults knew this. My father's plastic collar inserts were another version of the way clothing approached adults and expected them to behave. But I knew about those from the start, saw them in his little change dish with tokens and occasional cufflinks. The metal clasp was something else again, and seemed youthful and athletic: it was the kind of think you'd expect in kids' clothes but wasn't. It had a self-confidence to it, as though an extra bit of fastening for incompetent kids turned out to be a glinting standard feature of the adult world. It worked, it wasn't desparate addition but the very way things worked. It knew what it was doing, that clasp. It was so much more modern than buttons, which kept coming off. I couldn't even figure out how it was attached to the fabric. But I didn't have to. I could repose confidence in its previously unsuspected functioning.

posted by william 3:44 PM
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I remember this post from over five years ago, in which I remembered a New Yorker story that our English teacher (in eighth grade, I thought, correctly) read aloud about a mad punster and the puns he sets up, including one that leads to the headline "Pére Squegg in Hound Role." I thought about it a lot. Well, tonight, using the New Yorker's digital archives on line, I found the story! "Turtletaub and the Foul Distemper." By Roger Angell! Whom I wouldn't really pay any attention to until college. But he'd written that story. Which appeared in the May 30, 1970 New Yorker, pp. 26-29.

posted by william 12:04 AM
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I remember: "You could look five pounds thinner in a Playtex panty girdle. Five pounds thinner." The white-coated guy showed how if you pressed at just the right area of the abdomen -- kind of where Lee Harvey Oswald was shot (though I don't know that I made that connection then) -- you could look five pounds thinner. That's just where the Playtex panty girdle pushed!

posted by william 4:57 PM
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I remember that my mother taught me to count by twos -- 2, 4, 6, 8 -- which could halve the time it took to total up a quantity, and that when I did this once at the Hoges, their mother, Sally, pointed out you could count by threes, which seemed pretty radical.

posted by william 7:27 PM
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I remember "make no mistake" in political speeches on TV, and extrapolating that the phrase was a common Americanism.

posted by sravana 1:41 AM
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I remember posting this entry:

I remember my father taking me to vote. At P.S. 166! Where we usually lined up for recess there were voting machines. And grownups in coats lined up. We waited and then went into the booth, pulling the lever which closed the curtain. He showed me how you could flick the wrong toggles and then change them -- he flicked Republican toggles! but then unflicked them -- and then we voted Democratic all the way down (except, maybe, for Javits) and he let me pull the lever which registered the vote and opened the curtain simultaneously, which I thought was pretty neat.

I remember Democrats winning.

posted by william 1:15 PM
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I remember weddings I went to as a child--Phil and Stephanie's wedding, Ann and Moshe's wedding (in Miami), Maureen and Eldad's wedding. Phil and Stephanie's and Maureen and Eldad's I remember as loose colorful confetti memories--no shape, no strong images or narrative. Just color and the awareness that these are wedding memories. I do remember that Stephanie and Phil wore some very fancy traditional clothes from an Asian culture. Beautiful silk. I must have been older for Ann and Moshe's: I remember driving to Miami from my grandparent's house in Jacksonville; I remember a pool at the hotel and an old man asking my brother what kind of Jew he was (did he mean Orthodox or Conservative? Did he mean Ashkenazi or Sephardi--I don't know. I'm sure he was provoked into the question by my brother's payot (payis? long sidelocks)). Yossi didn't know what he meant, either, and said, "Just a Jew," which is always the right answer. He couldn't have been more than 5 at the time. I remember wearing a fancy dress (but which dress?) and my parents dressed up and a big hall with round tables and mood lighting and a wonderful band and dancing with my father. I remember being up late and eventually being put to bed (while my parents must have gone out or gone back to the wedding) in a room with an old couple who must have been sitters. I couldn't sleep, and they sat there watching one of those terrible (and boring) infomercials by CARE or a similar organization about starving children in a Third World country on TV. I also remember the very late drive back to Jacksonville, and how really cold it was, even in Florida.

posted by Rosasharn 10:21 PM
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