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 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.

posted by sravana 1:36 AM
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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.

posted by William 7:37 AM
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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.

posted by sravana 12:32 AM
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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.

posted by William 5:21 PM
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