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 a friend of my sister's lived in the same building as Joel Grey (on the East Side), so she went over there to trick or treat. I don't think she saw him, though they rang on the doorbell of his apartment.

posted by William 8:02 PM
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I remember having to get "working papers" to work at the tennis court when I was fourteen. A doctor had to see me. I had to cough with my head turned while he checked me for hernias. We'd all sung "It's a rupture" when I was in third grade, though I didn't quite know what that meant. But I did know it had to do with one's crotch, supposedly, and here was this doctor confirming it. I was very suave and adult about the check up, and then he signed the form.

posted by William 1:36 PM
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I remember that my brother and I had digital watches that beeped twice on the hour and once on the half hour.

posted by Rosasharn 10:35 PM
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I remember that the barbers not only kept snipping their scissors in the empty air as they circled around me: they also kept opening and closing the drawers under the ledge beneath the mirror. They took out cloths, talcs, paper cuffs, various hair setting liquids. Sometimes they'd open a drawer and close it without taking anything out, a kind of counterpoint to the clicking of the scissors on empty air. The scissors made a little more sense to me though: they were like practice swings in baseball or bounding the tennis ball on the line a couple of times before serving it. But what was this odd frenzied ritual they did with the drawers? At home I kept my drawers open till I got everything I needed out of them: shirts, underpants, socks, tie, etc. They were going into their drawers all day long. But it was as though they kept thinking they had what they wanted and could now close the drawer for the rest of the day. Except they were opening it again within another ten seconds. Would they never learn?

posted by William 3:33 PM
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I remember the Hardy Boys novel (The Sinister Sign Post?) where they find a ton of money during a terrible storm. They put in a classified ad saying that they've found something of great value in a satchel, or something. They get a letter saying that they'd better give the money back, signed "Rainy Night." I liked the signature, but then in the next paragraphs they are very puzzled by its content. I couldn't believe it! How could they not understand that the letter-writer was alluding to the night the money was lost? Someone was not getting something: either me or them.

posted by William 6:26 PM
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I remember Beckwith's bike repair...what? Not a shop, at all, more a junkyard really, with a dilapidated barn and some shacks. Beckwith himself was an old and shambling man in overalls and covered with grease, the perfect and perfectly Dickensian spirit of the place. It was impossible to imagine him on a bike; just as it was impossible to imagine Beckwith's bike repair at the end of this gracious lane in Quogue, New York. But he could just sort of grab a bike in his large and awkward hands and hand it back to you fixed. I was surprised that he wanted money for his repairs, though: it didn't look like he ever had any need or occasion to participate in its circulation.

I remember as well -- for a minute I conflated the two memories -- buying a used bike with my father in Ithaca, New York, the summer I spent there between junior and senior years in high school. It was completely destroyed by the end of the summer, and I wanted to abandon it where it was chained to some sign-post downtown. (I'd gotten a flat and fallen and twisted the frame; I remember actually going to a doctor about the contusions I had, also downtown, and he warned me about my posture.) But on the phone the day before we left my father told me to sell it back, and I did get $10 for it, which surprised me: it was $10 more than I thought I'd get. Jonathan D's father Jack picked us up (my parents had driven us, and we'd listened to John Dean's testimony on the radio), and we drove behind a motorcycle for a while, which made Jack D. very unhappy.

posted by William 3:32 PM
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I remember when Searchers (the Outward Bound type program that three high schools did together) set up an underwater test for us. We were supposed to swim four widths of the pool underwater, about a minute and a half. We were supposed to practice getting over CO2 panic by hyperventilating and then holding our breaths for two minutes. I never could. Then when the test came I did maybe one-and-a-half widths. It was pure and irresistible temptation; once you saw you weren't going to make it it was impossible to get yourself to suppress the desire to breath for even one more completely pointless second.

posted by William 2:21 PM
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