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 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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