But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
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
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
I remember that on the palings on the construction site of a new building (the Columbia Med School Library, it would later turn out) near my uptown grandmother's house, someone had done a beautiful, half-block long graffiti mural of Jimi Hendrix in psychedelic colors, in which purple haze (and its logo) predominated, with the slogan "Excuse me while I kiss the sky." This was the sort of wedge into Jimi Hendrix for me: I recognized the line, then, when I heard it, and later recognized the significance of the purple haze. One of those striking visuals I'd pass every day, and over the months -- years, possibly, or maybe just in remembering it -- absorb enough context elsewhere to make more and more sense of it.
Friday, December 07, 2012
I remember -- but why all these sensory memories now? -- the color of my parents' tea, my mother's darker, my father's more tinged with red.
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
I remember, by recognition, how my father's driving sounded/sounds. Some particular style of shifting that was distinctive in a way that my mother's wasn't. I could tell more easily when he shifted up, even before I knew how gears worked, and the car would roll back from stops a little more perceptibly than with my mother. But his driving was so calm and confident that it felt like the kind of casual imperfection that comes with mastery, and that made it -- the mastery -- even more evident. It was much like the imperfections of adults' handwriting that signaled that they had perfected it: undotted i's, scrawls verging on illegibility, slashes for tick marks on test papers.
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
I remember -- patterns of light again -- that all the curtains were drawn back on mornings when the house was being dusted, and only when.
Friday, November 30, 2012
I remember my Pocket Books ("not one word has been omitted") series of Perry Mason mysteries, by Earle Stanley Gardner. I loved the kangaroo logo, and the idea that they really did fit so well into your pocket. They were a little different from today's ottavo paperbacks, just a little squatter, smaller, less tapered, fatter so they really did fit into your front pocket (maybe people will remember different generation iPhones this way). It was a pleasure being able to carry them around this way, to take them in and out. The tops of the pages were edged or dyed a kind of maroon.
They must have been designed to be recognized as once hardcover but not highbrow, so that you wouldn't mind the wear and tear of pocketing and unpocketing them. They needed and accepted Scotch tape better than more modern or classier books would. They began right after the copyright page, without any blank pages between them, so you got to plunge right in. And the typography was somehow appropriate to that: utilitarian from the start, so that the story was all that mattered.
I think that they all originally belonged to my grandparents, though now it's hard to say which, since I think I remember reading them in my uptown grandparents' house, but I can't think that anyone but my downtown grandparents would have liked mysteries at all.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
I remember learning the phrase "Live and let live" (as a translation of "savoir faire") in 10th grade. It seemed like a lame variation on the well-known, glamorous "Live and let die."
Saturday, November 10, 2012
I remembered (when someone expressed surprise that I knew the story of Goldilocks!) my Goldilocks board book, in shades of yellow and brown, a sentence to a page. I remember the illustrations of the beds and the porridge bowls vividly, but can't recall what the characters looked like.
I had another board book on Cinderella that I got later as a birthday present after I had outgrown them. Cinderella's picture was that of a much younger girl than I had imagined or seen in other books. That (slightly yucky) incongruity went together in my mind with being given a book that was too childish for me.
Sunday, November 04, 2012
I remember first hearing about and hearing "Greensleeves" in an episode of Lost in Space. It was beautiful and unexpected.
Friday, November 02, 2012
I remember the patterns of daylight in our house, one of those things that are not remembered until they are recognized. The intensities and shadows streaming through the balcony window in the living room and the front porch -- fresh and wide in the morning, curtain-blocked glare on weekend afternoons, comforting heavy orange after school, dim gray in the rain. My windows and porch now also face east, for the first time, and it's all the same light as then.
Friday, October 26, 2012
I remember being at the Daily Pint, post-beach/tapas/sangria. We start to talk about our families and favorite authors. We get paper towels from the bathroom so that we can more accurately make lists and draw family trees. We make lists of our favorite authors, my favorite thing to do. We draw a smiley face next to the authors on each others' lists we like. We disagree with some, mostly agree on others. We finish, and I remember folding the towel into my purse. He watches me do this, pauses, then he takes my hands, folds them in his, and asks me to come back to his house. Finally. There's no more endearing creature to me on the planet at the moment. He tells me his room is a mess, but if I give him five whole minutes, he'll give me a glass of wine, and tell me a story while he cleans room. I remember he looked at me with the most radiant jade-blue-green eyes I've ever seen and asked me want I wanted to do. That puddle on the floor? That's me.
Monday, October 15, 2012
I remember "Milky Bar! Give me the power!" -- rhyming because of the free variant pronunciation of 'power' at that time (which doesn't seem to exist any more).
Saturday, October 13, 2012
I remember how to stop bouncing on a trampoline (by letting your knees bounce up to the same level as your hips or so).
Saturday, October 06, 2012
I remember losing teeth: the somewhat disconcerting onset of shaking, the delicious crackling moment when the tooth became dislodged from the jaw, the fun of playing with it, the rearrangement of pressure and tongue movement and taste for the few days before it gave way. I was uncharacteristically careful with the last tooth, hoping to delay its fall, and succeeding for a couple of months: much as I was in a hurry to grow up, that tooth was a countdown to some sort of finality I wasn't prepared for. It fell in the middle of an English class -- grammar, not literature, because I remember who was teaching it: we had an unusual arrangement in 9th grade of having two different teachers for English -- and I had to ask for permission to go throw it out.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
I remember Yom Kippur at the Havurah, which was long and boring and hungry, though we brought sandwiches for my brother and me. When Young Israel was on Dunbar Street, I remember sitting with my mother, fiddling with tassels on my skirt during the interminable Musaf. I remember the first year I had to fast, days after I became Bat Mitzvah, staying in Micah and Bev's apartment in the Old City and sleeping all afternoon, feeling sick. I remember Yom Kippur at yeshiva in Jerusalem: I remember girls sitting in the black street, white dresses scattered across the four silent lanes of Rechov Herzog. If I think about it, I remember Yom Kippur at Meredith's house, before her family moved from Brooklyn to the Five Towns; I slept in her brother's room, and, during the break from Shul, I read Portnoy's Complaint. I remember Yom Kippur in Cambridge: waiting out the last few minutes of the fast with Steve and Gil and Gil's sister Tamar, and, a few years later, pregnant, walking home up Oxford Street.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
I remember the spookiness of dinner in Windows on the World: clouds obscuring and revealing the scores of miles we could see, and the slight feel of the building swaying. A restaurant in the clouds: the rest of the building was pretty much empty, but you took those super-fast, ear-popping elevators straight up to a kind of movie set. Later, in May of 2001, we went to a restaurant in Cyprus, the Maryland House (!), which was on the finished top floor of a building the rest of which was just girders and scaffolds, under construction with no sheathing put in yet: you took a construction elevator to get there and then you were in a dark and lovely room. Windows on the World was like that too. I remember not even thinking about what a daylight meal, what breakfast, would be like there, amidst the bright blue of day, until reading about the people who were killed there on September 11. Clean, crisp napkins, bright, cold water in crystal: that's what my experience and my imagined experience had in common.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
I remember, starting sixth grade, that the cool kids wore their watches on the inside of their wrists, a little like the wrist-protectors that the Greek and Trojan warriors wore in the illustrations in my Myths and Legends book. My father and grandfathers didn't, but Peter Rogers did, and so I did too. It was the closest I could come in sixth grade to the cool kids' desert boots and long hair.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
I remember that Judith Crist lived across the street from us. She was a film critic for New York magazine. So she was in print! So what she said had to be right. But when I found out that she just lived in this building where my friends lived in an apartment like theirs and ours, I no longer felt I had to believe her reviews or judgments. Which was a good thing, because I disagreed with her about so much.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
I remember Marty Liquori and how thrillingly fast he was, and how fast he was getting faster.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
I remember pencil boxes with the little keyboards on top, and their tinny electronic sounds. They came with small booklets of nursery rhyme scores. I remember discovering the mapping between Carnatic and Western notes while playing around with one, and being surprised, but not very, that there seemed to be a one-to-one correspondence (and verified it as a fact later, but with whom?). I played Vara Veena on it obsessively for a few days.
I remember hearing and remembering Carnatic songs as sequences of syllables, one for each careful note (or three), and not putting the syllables together into words. Possibly because that's how they were written down, or because so many of the words were names of gods and their epithets -- entire verses of only epithets, so removed from normal language anyway.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
I remember McHale's Navy. My sister and I would watch it at 4:30, still very safe from our mother's coming home early. She rarely came home before 6, so we were unlikely to be caught.
Such a reasonable version of the Skipper, McHale was. I guess I can see now that it was the same show as Hogan's Heroes too, more or less. I remember the landlubber superior officer who at one point, in an access of vulnerability and imagining he was talking to some psychologist type began, "I had an unhappy childhood." I loved seeing the boat slapping on the water as McHale and his men looked out over the railings in the credit. I was surprised to see Ernest Borgnine do darker roles later. I mean I saw them later, because I liked him.
Actually, as I mentioned before, Bad Day at Black Rock was one of the first movies I ever saw, perhaps one of the first two I remember. But only when I saw it again in college did I realize that McHale was a villain. Even more shocking than seeing Raymond Burr as the villain in Vertigo.
Friday, June 22, 2012
I remember watching how the varsity goalie (Mike Stevens, All-American!) and the best fullback knew just where to line up on a corner-kick, the goalie standing straight and tall at the far goal post and the fullback at the other. The were partners, and they knew what they were doing. Later when I played goalie I loved thinking of the quasi-professional knowledge that I had: where to stand on a corner-kick. I had my place, and the goal itself marked it out, the goal post a schema and rough sketch of me, standing contiguous too it, just as Mike had.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
I remember sleeping over and having friends sleep over. I remember sleeping at Nina's, especially at Rae's house in Lexington. I have so many different memories of sleepovers at that house, I don't know what order they go in: jumping on the beds; brewing toothpaste concoctions in Nina's powder room once the big bathroom renovation was done; swimming with mermaid toys in the big bathtub; eating ice cream; flying around the house in underoos and green felt slippers; eating melon chunks for snack (at my house we didn't really have snack); holding hands around the table and throwing kisses as grace; describing my family's six-week visit in Israel (in 1979) at dinner; playing hide and seek in the lower level (office); watching movies about horses; watching Nickelodeon (at my house we didn't have cable); listening to Rae read The Runaway Bunny, Frances, and Mercer Meyer books to us. I remember that sleepovers were so normal to me, so obviously what friends did at Rae's house, that when Celeste moved in (Nina and I were around four), I figured they were having a sleepover, too.
Sunday, June 03, 2012
I remember that my father brought his portable desk-top transistor radio to Europe. I was surprised when he got it out at the beach one day, because I had no idea that the radio could receive anything outside the U.S. I associated that radio only with WQXR and the wonderful show "Limelight" on WNEW. But it turned out the radio could speak Italian! (Not that my father could.)
I should have known, of course, because my uptown grandparents had a Telefunken receiver with German (Austrian) captions: FM was uKW (I think that was the way it was marked), which my father told me was for ultraKurzWagen, ultra short wave.
But I think I didn't make the deduction because in New York everyone I knew over a certain age spoke with an accent, and so I thought of New York as a place where goods came in multiple languages. Among those goods were radio broadcasts, and in particular the classical music my grandparents listened to: opera in German and Italian, and Beethoven and Mozart, which was music in German (a German I understood as I understood my grandmother's German too). So there was nothing odd about their old receiver - it too was of a certain age, with its tubes requiring thirty seconds to a minute to warm up - having a different first language and yet (and so!) being entirely at home in New York.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
I remember being surprised that my Latin book had such a good translation of Martial, and also that Martial was so modern:
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.
The reason why, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well:
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.
I wondered a bit about what kind of doctor he was, and why his name didn't sound Latin.
Friday, May 25, 2012
I remember the challenge my mother set for making challah dough: You start the yeast first, with a little warm water and sugar in a tall glass. Then race to assemble the rest of the ingredients in the big bowl (12 cups flour; three quarters cup (or a cup) sugar and some amount of salt (2 t?) dissolved in two and some cups boiling water; six eggs; 10 T oil), wet ingredients mixed in a well in the center of the dry flour, before the yeast overflowed its container. You always add the yeast last.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
I remember the regular shock of things not turning out right. I remember, for instance, accepting the not-red construction-paper butterfly wings for the Siddur Party in first grade: It wasn't a big deal, because, I figured, I would simply color them red with crayons. Color as I might, they never became red, and I was so sorry, so disappointed--wings marred by irregular scribbles, nothing like the red and lovely adornments I wanted. I remember drawing figures--heads, bodies, hair, arms, hands, legs, feet, belly-buttons--all the parts that I knew a person ought to have, in the shapes I knew those parts to be--or flowers, with green leaves and petals in lovely colors--or houses with rectangular windows and steps and a chimney--none of which came out the way they ought to: they looked like a child's drawing, nothing like the beautiful things that I saw in my mind.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
I remember the nursery rhyme, sort of, which my father recited, I recall, in the lobby of my uptown grandmother's building:
...[something] scholar
What made you come so soon?
You used to come at 10 o'clock,
Now you come at noon.
The consistency of the irony seemed wrong: I would have thought the sarcasm would be if he'd arrived slightly earlier than usual but still much later than he ought to have. If he ordinarily arrived at 10, say, but today arrived at 9:30.
The idea of arriving at 10 was shocking to me, since we had to be at school by 8:15 at the latest. And I couldn't quite understand why he was being called a scholar, which I already took to be a term of praise, maybe from Hebrew School?
Anyhow I can see now that the jingle violated my sense and expectation of the irony of faint praise, which was the kind of irony my mother, the real ironist in the family, tended (and still tends) to employ.
Somehow my father's recitation of the poem (he was the one who did recite poems) made me link him to ways of speaking more characteristic of my mother.
Naturally, what I didn't see is that the poem itself was forced into the somewhat feeble shift of a sarcasm that didn't quite work, because it had to both lay out the situation (you're a habitual latecomer: "You used to come at 10 o'clock" plus today it's worse than ever since "Now you come at noon") and ironize it ("What made you come so soon?"). But I didn't spend my time on that kind of scholarship then.
Saturday, May 05, 2012
I remember the butterfly locks inside our bathroom doors. I was forbidden to touch them before I ever knew what they were. At some point, years later, I learned they were locks and that adults could work them, and years after that I wss allowed to use them too. They went from being yet another example of some pure adult object, not a symbol nor an instrument but just something serenely legible only to adults (when the locks were just inscrutable features of the adult world), to a kind of knowledgeable agent interacting with them, even adult visitors (when I learned they were locks), to a sign of my own arrival at an age of competence (when I too was allowed to turn them).
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
I remember Tirzah. I remember an afternoon at Colette's house. It was nice weather, and we sat outside her front door--Colette in her chair with her back to her entry, the rest of us arranged on the pillowed concrete benches built in to either side of the entryway. I remember Tirzah coming a little before dusk, and telling a troubled dream (which I don't recall). Colette asked Tirzah and then each of us how we felt at the end of the dream (or its retelling). Then someone showed a painting of a severe-looking, dark, long-faced man. I don't remember what I said about the painting, but I do remember what Colette said: You are attracted to what you fear. After Colette died, Tirzah held a salon in her house for the students to share their memories together. Though I was too young to have been a student when I was in Israel, Tirzah welcomed me warmly. Her home was beautiful, and we gathered in her enclosed mirpeset (balcony). I sat on the floor, which was so thick with rich carpets that it felt like sitting on a bed.
Friday, April 20, 2012
I remember that we would tug on the ends of our ponytails to make them tighter (rather than retying them), even though we were told -- by parents or teachers, I can't recall which -- that it would get the hair tangled at the end of the day.
I remember that in kindergarten, almost everyone had short hair with ponytails that stuck up from their heads like little fountains.
I remember the thin black rubber-bands we used for ponytails. Later, we would play with shooting paper pellets out of the rubber-bands. If they were shot right, they could go pretty far and really sting. I think I mostly did this on evening van rides home in the 8th or 9th grade against a group of St. Joseph's boys, playing both at hitting each other's team, and at how many unsuspecting pedestrians we could get from the window.
I remember we were not permitted scrunchies in high school, but it wasn't always clear what the difference was between them and thick rubber-bands, so they were occasionally worn anyway. I was always mystified by the word "scrunchy" -- it evoked crunchiness, which did not fit the object at all.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
I remember posting this entry over ten years ago:
I remember when my sister was born. We were at my grandparents' house for Passover, just two blocks away from Columbia Presbyterian. My mother went into labor, and my father walked her over there and came back. Later we walked by the hospital to the 168th street stop, and took the A-train (the "superexpress" my father called it) downtown. I loved the A-train and standing in the first car at the front window watching the tracks. A week later when my mother and sister were due home, I put into practice the fantasy I'd anticipated: that I would come home (but from where? I was five and a half, and in kindergarten I guess. I remember that I would be allowed to go from the lobby to our second floor apartment alone. But how did I get to the lobby? Fred and Al, my favorite doormen, saw me safely inside -- that I remember. I used to take the stairs up, and then go to the front door, but this time, I thought I would come home) and go up the stairs to the back door (which led to the kitchen) and my new little sister, Caroline, would be standing there in a little red dress. So I rang the back door, and my mother answered it, slightly puzzled that I was coming in the back way, and then brought me to see Caroline in a white baby-suit and hat, sound asleep in her basinet, looking very very small. I didn't hear her till early the following morning: I was in the bathroom pooping and was shocked to hear her cry from the next room. Suddenly I felt very big -- a person who knew how to poop and who could be interrupted in this adult activity by this strange, unrecognizable call from the unfamiliar world of infancy. For the first time I didn't know who she was. (But this wasn't the first time I didn't know who I was -- that came long before.) I remember that today is her birthday.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
I remember how shopkeepers used balance scales to weigh groceries, briskly adding or removing the hexagonal weights, balancing in mere seconds. I sometimes doubted whether the measurements were always exact, but since that doubt didn't seem to be shared by anyone in these transactions, I figured that they must indeed be exact, and that mastering the process -- estimating the weights to start with and change, deciding whether the scale was level -- was just one of those things adults were naturally good at.
I remember learning later, in connection to the difference between mass and weight, that balance scales are unaffected by variations in gravity. It was fun to think that your groceries would have a different weight on top of a hill as measured by a modern spring scale -- but the rustic balances wouldn't be fooled. It justified their apparent cumbersomeness.
I remember that the physics textbooks at all grade levels -- from 7th to 10th at least -- started with a chapter on force and acceleration, and ended with something on electromagnetism. All too predictable and repetitious, even if we were learning new things every year.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
I remember hearing on the evening news (on the little black and white TV we moved back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen) that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Even pre-RFK it didn't seem that surprising since JFK's assassination was, for me anyhow, the standard for what the real world, the world-historical world, was like. So of course people were assassinated all the time. I think this was a combination of the routine of shots of wounded and dying soldiers on nightly TV with the sense of all major political news as news of violence. Thinking back on it now, it seems odd that I felt this way even before RFK's murder; though I remember what was so surprising about Reagan and Hinkley was that Reagan survived. The two attempts on Ford's life were stopped before he was shot, but it seemed (especially after RFK) that the rules were: if you got shot, you died. And the other rule, pre-Hinkley but certainly through John Lennon, was that the assassins had three names: Lee Harvey Oswald; Sirhan Bishara Sirhan; Mark David Chapman. (The three named victims of most of them didn't strike me.) So it was no surprise, even though he came before these last two, that King's assassin was James Earl Ray.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
I remember brushing my hair in a very slowly moving vehicle in Cairo. The traffic there was mythical, cars and trucks and buses rolling forward bumper to bumper. I remember watching men climb off buses while they were moving. People helped them get down. I don't remember what kind of vehicle we were in, only that I was sitting in a big window, and that I saw people on the roads watching me brush my hair, but I did not stop doing it. I guess it was a bus. We were certainly on a tour bus when we went to Giza and the Valley of the Kings. By a few days into the tour, I remember having seen a lot of tombs, a lot of mummies, and so feeling nonplussed by the ones with Roman faces--they were latecomers, anyway. I remember seeing so much gold, and so much turquoise, and so much alabaster, that that was what the world seemed made of. There were many things I hadn't known about days before that I now took for granted, could recognize without trying. I didn't care for scarabs. I did like the repeating imagery of lotus and papyrus. I remember that at some point in those five days, looking at the crazy-amazing tomb-paintings felt normal, just what one did. Now I can only recall the vision from one: a starry sky, possibly from Queen Nefertiti's tomb. I remember that Luxor was huge and sunny, and that we ran around in the Temple, and we were driven in an open horse-drawn carriage, an allusion, for me, to Pharaoh's drowned chariot.
Monday, March 05, 2012
I remember that my parents let me keep a salamander I caught in the woods. It was beautiful: coolly, smoothly tangerine all over, its belly slightly pale, and spotted black down its back. We brought it home in a jar filled with moist soil and leaves, and they bought me a turtle bowl to keep it in. I don't know what they fed it. It was tiny and delicate, its diamond-shaped head elegant. It lived with us for four or five months, and then it died: I found it stiff, dull, and desiccated in its bowl one morning, and at first I did not understand.
Saturday, March 03, 2012
I remember watching the Monkees. They lived at the top of a house, with outdoors wooden stairs. I remember the corny, camp fun of playing them on the juke-box at Chicken on the Run (the pizza place), a year or two before the corny, camp fun of playing "A Boy Named Sue" there.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
I remember that whenever we needed a car, I'd walk with my father down to the Avis Rent-a-Car ("We try harder") on 77th St (I think) and Broadway. I liked that they tried harder, that they were the underdogs, always number 2, though according to one ad campaign number one and a half. One day they seem to have crossed the street: their office was now on the west side of Broadway, though that might have been temporary. At any rate it was here, on the west side of the street, that they were giving out buttons which just had the word (in Helvetica) "Henpecked?" I had no idea what it meant, couldn't parse it at all, though it seemed very funny, somehow. I articulated the last e as I tried to make sense of it. My father explained what it meant, but not what its morphemes were, so I didn't realize it was "hen" and "pecked." Of course I think of that scene, and that button, reading Byron now ("O you lords of ladies intellectual, / Do you not seen how they have henpecked you all?" - quoting from memory, in accordance with the rules I've given myself in this blog).
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
I remember learning from some fun-fact compendium, maybe to give a comic book redeeming social value, maybe at the bottom of a Bazooka Joe cartoon slip, that the ancient Greeks had batteries. This seemed very cool, opening up a world of possibilities, as I imagined their D-sized cylinders (standard battery size in those days, D-size and the strange, asymmetrical, alien 9-volt batteries for my transistor radio) powering what had to be similar technology, because what else would the batteries be used for? I was relatively sure that they would find, in the rubble of Troy, bright plastic battery-powered cars and lights and things like that. I felt closer to the people of Troy and ancient Greece when I learned they had batteries: they now seemed cultures like ours, cultures that even back then produced the goods that our wonderful toy stores were full of. I imagined them in modern caps and wool coats playing with their battery-powered toys on sidewalks of their walled cities.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
I remember that we kept rubberbands on the doorknob to the kitchen closet, which was so thick with them that their resistance to the torque they produced threatened to pull the shank off the spindle every time I twisted it to get something from the closet.
Thursday, February 09, 2012
I remember posting my first entry here, or indeed in any blog, ten years ago today. In another room, full of light. Perec wanted his je me souviens to be public memories, things that everyone the same age would remember. Brainard's, which were his inspiration, had a lot more private memories, and I went with Brainard. But I started out with the public memories: the light blue shirts you had to wear to appear on black and white TV (we learned this when our class went to see a taping or To Tell the Truth).
I remember that the rule I gave myself, and more or less followed, was to confine my posts to memories before graduating high school. More or less followed: I posted my 9/11 memories about taking the subway downtown and stomping around the World Trade Center with my friends when we were in junior high, but I also posted about Windows on the World, which I went to in grad school, up the eerily efficient silent elevators that brought us to the clouds. This entry would be an exception to the rule too, I suppose, unless I concluded it with an earlier memory. Soit! Here's one of my earliest.
I remember being with my parents and my mother's parents in a park, with some friends of their generation. I didn't quite get that my mother's parents were my grandparents. I had grandparents already, my father's parents. I knew and was close to my mother's parents, I just didn't know that they had a relation to me beyond the general relation that people with accents of their generation always had with me: refugees like my family, it would transpire. Somehow I learned that day that they were my grandparents: I have a vague sense that the other older people there parted, but my grandparents were still there. My mother must have explained to me that they were just as much my grandparents as my paternal ones. But my father's parents had names! Omama, Otata. (Mama and Tata to my father.) So they decided on what we would call my mother's parents: Granny and Grampa. Once they had those childish names, they fit right into place. I couldn't have been more than two or so, since no one had yet noticed that there weren't names for them in my world. But I vividly remember that odd act of christening (if that's the right word for a Jewish child), when we decided what they'd be called. It was strange, that moment, becoming aware of the fact that they were part of the family, not just some others but people closely related to me, particularly important to me. I looked at them again, felt them, saw them, somehow changing into people who were supposed to be as familiar to me as my parents and my other grandparents.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
I remember reading and loving the phrase "warmth-loving creatures" in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
I remember the following middle-school social-world discoveries: If I don't trust you, you certainly can't trust me. That was step one. Step two was recognizing that if I know you trust me, I can trust you. Step three was determining that if I were to go ahead and trust you, you could trust me, and if you did, my trust in you would be justified. It wasn't as simple as that, but thinking it through that way gave me courage.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
I remember when I realized I wasn't passionate about birds and ornithology; I just loved it as an intellectual exercise -- matching pictures in extensive atlases to names, memorizing intricate and delightful taxonomies and Latin nomenclature, the trivia, and of course, the pride in my relatively esoteric knowledge. Birds were nice, but not as nice as knowing a lot about them.
Friday, January 20, 2012
I remember being impressed by the well-defined and effective brown borders at the edge of my sunny-side-up fried egg, and how I vaguely wondered how that was done: it made the egg seem like a manufactured product.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
I remember how cool it was when my father confirmed my grandfather's trick, that to convert decimals into percents all you had to do was move the decimal point over two digits to the right. It seemed such a sophisticated European bit of knowledge and technique.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
I remember doing GoJu Ryu Karate. I remember how I loved my Sensei. I loved to do exactly as she did: count as she did, walk as she did, fall as she did, emulate her rhythm and form in the katas, turn my knee out as she did, breathe as she did, speak with her intonation when I instructed newcomers, make my body do as her body did.
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