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 a little more about tying ties. I remember that the first time my father tied a tie around my neck, there was something magical about seeing that knot, which my father and his father had in their ties, suddenly materialize out of the simple over-and-under movements of the long and slightly triangular strip of material. Marc B also showed me a simple way of tying a tie and I could suddenly, magically, make that knot materialize by myself! And I still can.

posted by william 4:23 PM
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I remember my mother's double diamond ring (which I thought of a little bit as a more glamorous version of the purse hasps on my grandmothers' purses, but not on hers), and how it related to my uptown grandmother's single diamond. The single diamond seemed older fashioned, more stolid. It had my grandmother's physiognomy; it was an example I think of what Benjamin calls non-sensuous imitation. It fit her gnarled finger perfectly. My mother's double diamond was more glamorous, like her cats-eye glasses, and had her physiognomy: the resemblance was visible. Her mother, my downtown grandmother, didn't have a diamond ring at all, so there was a way, maybe, that I separated maternal and paternal vectors of dazzlement between my mother and my father's mother.

posted by william 11:31 AM
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I remember visiting the BSO in 5th or 6th grade as part of school. I don't remember who was conducting or giving us the talk. I do remember him asking us if we could figure out why they had potential new members give their auditions behind the curtain -- and to take off their shoes as they walk onto the stage. I couldn't. [It was so that the shoe-click wouldn't give away the gender of the performer.] I don't remember what the music was, but I do remember the pleasure it gave me. Utter absorption, utter recognition, utter delight.

posted by Rosasharn 11:38 PM
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From Giovanni Tiso:

I remember the first thing I wrote, when I was five years old. It was a letter to my parents, and it read as follows (I won't reproduce the typos in translation): "I'm tired of these injustices. I'm leaving. I'm going to the doctor's. I don't know if I'll be back. Giovanni." I left the letter on the dining room table and opened the door of the apartment. It was dark on the landing, so I didn't venture any further. My mother was so proud of my writing talent, she showed the letter to everybody she knew and quite a few people she didn't know. She seemed to take the fact that I wanted to leave the family entirely in her stride.

posted by william 6:53 PM
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From Pauline Dawson:

I remember Mr Marshall, our primary school caretaker. He was grumpy but not creepy in any way. He made wooden toys in his workshop in the boiler room. He made me a wooden doll's cot for Christmas once. But the thing he made that I remember most was an artificial Christmas tree. Artificial trees were unheard of in New Zealand in those days (well where we lived anyway) and in true kiwi tradition it involved wood and Number 8 fencing wire (and a lot of silver tinsel). We had it for years growing up and it got very tatty but we all loved it. I have no idea what happened to it.

posted by william 6:52 PM
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I remember that one of the things that I loved about the house in Stormville when we decided to rent it was that it had an upstairs! It wasn't like our apartment -- it was like a real house, the kind they had on TV or the movies. I remember that my mother told me that you could slide down the banister. First I'd heard about this -- a recreation I'd never dreamt of, and total fun. She showed me how, straddling the banister, which was all I knew about sliding down them till much later when Tad W showed me the terrifying break-neck speeds you could achieve by sliding down side-saddle. But kids who grew up in New York knew very little about banisters.

posted by william 10:52 AM
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fsollero remembers:

I remember when I was six or seven, how I hated the movies of the Three Stooges. I thought they were mean, bad, and I was very surprised when I discovered that I was the only one that thought that way about them. And I noticed that the other children - and the grown-up too - laughed at the disgrace of others. But they didn't like when THEY were laughed at.

It was a huge discovery - the continent of human contradiction.

posted by william 10:50 AM
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I remember my la leche league leader informing me that although I was seven full weeks (!) post-partum, my milk supply was not yet established.

posted by Rosasharn 10:29 PM
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I remember noticing, in the shower, that the difference between consecutive squares increases by 2. When I got out, I excitedly wrote it down, and was disappointed to see that it was a triviality.

(It was because of things like this that I preferred physics to math -- even a seemingly trivial observation would turn out to have an interesting explanation rather than the other way around.)

posted by sravana 4:35 PM
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