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 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).

posted by William 8:56 PM
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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.

posted by William 8:37 AM
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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.

posted by William 8:09 AM
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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.

posted by William 5:02 PM
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I remember reading and loving the phrase "warmth-loving creatures" in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

posted by William 9:48 AM
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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.

posted by Rosasharn 4:21 PM
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