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 other people's homes. The houses of most of our relatives, even the distant ones, and even accounting for wealth differences, felt similar to ours. But there were distinctive elements in, say, my Christian friends' houses with the smell of baked goods and pets that were allowed on furniture, or the Brahmin ones, with religious artifacts in the living room, or North Indian homes where Hindi bounced off the walls. And there were other intangible features that I can't pinpoint -- at any rate, it was fascinating and a little bit intimidating; I was usually a bit relieved to return home.

posted by sravana 7:25 PM
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I remember posting about my memories of coming to know about Dylan Thomas (born a hundred years ago today) here.

posted by William 7:08 AM
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I remember my mother would put sweaters on me backwards while I was asleep so that my chest stayed warm. I'd wake up disoriented, feeling like everything was off-balance because there were no buttons or opening where there should have been.

posted by sravana 1:31 AM
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I remember that one day there were a couple of large convex mirrors put up on the long, beautiful winding street I took to school.  I thought that was really strange.  I'd become used to those convex mirrors in our elevator, but I noticed them each time.  Their weirdness seemed appropriate to the fact that the elevator was a machine, and machines had weird parts.  But on the road?  It felt wrong, the intrusion of the high-rise environment into the outside world, as though the mirror's machined optics made nature into something seen by the quasi-mechanical, compound eye of an insect: an insect adapted to looking for cars.  The landscape shifted -- too much -- from a place where the occasional car drove by to a place designed for engaging with cars, shiny steel and glass reflected by the shiny steel mirror that captured and projected their image in spherical expansion throughout the space that it now centered and defined.

posted by William 4:31 PM
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I remember first hearing about Jack the Ripper on a Time Tunnel episode.  I think they met him.  He didn't seem that scary, just as his nickname didn't.  After all, we ripped toilet paper and the like.  It seemed an innocuous moniker.  And Time Tunnel was sufficiently anodyne in its action that they didn't convey any terror.  I was surprised later on when "Jack the Ripper" became a watchword for terror -- for serial killed violence, during the Zodiac murders, for example.  Because I always associated him with Time Tunnel.

posted by William 1:11 PM
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I remember that Wonder Bread was supposedly raised by being plunged into liquid nitrogen so that it blew up into its airy cotton-candy textuds through a kind of doughy experience of the bends.  I always wondered whether this made it kosher for Passover since it had no yeast in it or other leavening in it.  I remember reading that if you suddenly found yourself in the vacuum of space, your blood would boil instantaneously.  At some point, when I realized that this wasn't because your blood was hot, I must have put this together with Wonder Bread.  I certainly put it together with the Ray Bradbury story of the spaceship that exploded and the radio conversation the survivors had as they drifted apart from each other.  One of them had to punch through the face pane of a panicking screamer who knew they were all going to die (his trajectory crossed that of the person who punched through the glass), so that the others could continue their last, meditative discussion.  (One was going to hit Earth's atmosphere, and become a meteor.)  The screamer's blood would have boiled.  I sometimes tried to picture what it would be like for your blood to boil: I imagined looking at my arms and somehow seeing the conduits of veins bubbling away, as though I'd partially uncovered the simmering channels.  It seemed to me it would be really interesting.  Then I realized my eyeballs would be boiling away too.  Oh well.  The stuff you think about in the Wonder Years.

posted by William 10:04 AM
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I remember night terrors, my fear late at night of the outside, of the woods behind my house, of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, names I knew because WGBH sometimes previewed NOVA programs about them. Undoubtedly those shows debunked the monster myths, but the previews did not, and they were all I encountered. I remember that the upstairs bathroom window was always cracked about two inches, summer or winter, and the light -- at least a night light -- was always on in there. So the one room with light was the room with an open window, facing the forest.

posted by Rosasharn 2:17 AM
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I remember the cane seats on the IND subways.  I remember posting about how I didn't like them as much as the more modern seats you'd always find on the IRT, but on this muggy summer day I am remembering them with fondness. We'd only sit in seats like that if we were taking the BMT or IND, and in the summers that would be to some interesting, above-ground station at a place you'd go to on a family outing on a hot day: Queens or Brooklyn or Coney Island or the Rockaways, in order to picnic or visit people with actual houses in the suburban outer boroughs.   And then you'd get a subway car with cane seats and it was as though the promise of a day of sun and fresh air fun was already beginning.  My uptown grandparents, whom I would sometimes visit on the A-train, the superexpress as I remember we called it, roaring through three miles of tunnel without stopping, to the 168th St. station three blocks from their building, wore straw hats that matched the seats'  plaiting in color and in weave, and it was a wonderful and calming change, on a hot day, to be in a train that harmonized with their old and mild ways.  I generally hated having to go outside, but taking a sunny, above-ground subway car made it worthwhile -- the best of all worlds, at least for the day.

posted by William 12:07 PM
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I remember reading aloud dialogue that was in all-caps. There was a lot of it in Enid Blyton. I got that it conveyed shouting, and I couldn't change amplitude in my subvocalization, so vocalizing it was the only option. After a while, I started feeling embarrassed doing it, even though it was only at home, and I also found that I could amplify while subvocalizing.

I do remember that I didn't know what italics signaled until my mother read aloud a story (at the phase when I was comfortable reading but still enjoyed being read to, so I was reading along), and emphasized that where it was italicized. This may have been why I started vocalizing all-caps -- discovering that typography could have a prosodic function. 

posted by sravana 6:43 PM
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I remember noticing that when my (uptown) grandmother swept the floor, she accumulated the dirt into a pile before sweeping it all into the dust pan which she emptied into the garbage can.  I think I had had a vague impression, from cartoons where you only saw creatures sweeping dirt under rugs (seemed fine to me), or maybe from the frames in Peanuts, that the proper use of dust pans was more or less equally magical, but a little more work, that they behaved like vacuum cleaners or carpet sweepers and made the dirt disappear.  So it seemed somehow more magical still to see that sweeping was a skill, that it was human and not machine knowledge that got rid of the dust.  Even if I had thought about having to empty the dust pan, I never would have thought to sweep all the dirt together first; I'd just have swept dirt into the dust pan every time I swung the broom.

posted by William 5:14 PM
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I remember thinking I was a good intuitive speller, which came from reading a lot.  Words looked right or didn't, and so I didn't tend to memorize spelling for quizzes.  Then one day (in sixth grade) I got vacuum wrong on a quiz.  I couldn't believe it!  Two u's in a row?  That just looked so wrong.  Somehow it seemed so bizarre, so out there, that it seemed appropriate to the vacuum of outer space, as though the u's were sucking the breathable sensibility of spelling out of each other, as though the two u's in a row were themselves a strange vacuum at the heart of the word.  I didn't like that.

posted by William 1:01 PM
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I remember the large speckled green tile brick walls of the girls' bathroom in my high school. I remember the grey-green doors. In those days, there was no wheel-chair accessible stall.

posted by Rosasharn 9:44 PM
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Flutteringly I remember the feeling of being little. I remember my conviction that the most important work in the world was that of the ballerina, and that I could practice this work right at home, in my house, when my father played the piano. I remember that the impressive, grown up (teen aged) daughters of my mother's friend Kate danced, and I remember speaking to one of them on the phone and asking this question: What does your head do when you're dancing. Feet, toes, legs, arms, fingers, even shoulders seemed important to me. But what does the head have to do with it?

posted by Rosasharn 7:51 PM
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I remember posting about Ralph Kiner (who died today) several times, early on in this list of memories.  I remember being surprised when it turned out he'd been a superstar for the Pirates, rivals of the Mets.  He was so much the quintessential Mets booster.  I guess I thought of the announcers: Ralph Kiner, Lindsay Nelson, and Bob (?) Something as the benevolent parental figures observing and praising and critiquing what their team, our team, was doing on the field.  Tom Seaver was a hero, and Gil Hodges was a demigod, father of the hero, but the three announcers were the genial judges of everything.  And yet, it turned out, they'd been players.  And not even for the Mets.  Strange.

posted by William 8:23 PM
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I remember my parents bought some Planters Mixed Nuts for a party.  I'd seem them at other people's houses (e.g. the Herings'), but never in their can.  We didn't buy them much.

You had to open them with a key that was attached to the top of the can.  You inserted a strip of metal which stuck out just underneath the rim into a slot in the key, and then wound the strip around the key as you opened it.  (Tennis ball cans, I would find out, were opened the same way, but with a more satisfying woosh of a vacuum being breached.)

I would never have been able to figure out how to open the can, and it impressed me that my parents simply knew how to do it.  All that knowledge they had of things that weren't part of our house, at least not day-to-day.  They knew about the household things in other kinds of houses as well.  But what really impressed me is that they knew, before they even opened the can of nuts, that you could get cut on the edge of the metal strip when you'd opened it.  They had a sense of possible childhood injury that I didn't even know existed.  They knew how a can of nuts might interact with their own child.  It was as though we were two little things, the can of nuts and me, and they were grown-ups who knew about us, knew more about us than we did.

posted by William 5:34 PM
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I remember S&H green stamps. (Or were they S&H Green stamps; anyway, they were pale green perforated stamps and my mother pasted long strips of them into booklets.)

One winter day, when I must have been four or five, because we still lived in DC then, my mother took me on errand to redeem the S&H booklets. On the way, on the sidewalk, a man said "Happy New Year" to my mother, and she returned the greeting.

I was amazed; how did they know to say that? how did they both know to say that? I asked her if she knew him. She said she didn't. That ruled out conspiracy.

Possibly the conversation went on--my questions, her answers--but if so, it was probably about the holiday, and not about the fascinating thing, how they knew what to say.

(I can't shake an awareness of how this scene would play in a novel or film. Which would be, of course, yes, she knows the putative stranger, and only the child doesn't know that it's asking the right question. But this was about something else.)

posted by Carceraglio 3:14 PM
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I remember "Adam Smith" (who died yesterday: George Jerome Waldo Goodman). I didn't notice the quotation marks around his name on the cover of his perennially best-selling books The Money Game and Super-Money when I was in high school.  They had a copy in the candy/stationery/newspaper store where I would take C'mere, the prejudiced lady's dog, to get her the first edition of the Daily News at night, and some chocolate Bonomo Turkish taffy for me.

Then I took a course on the Enlightenment, and was astonished to see Adam Smith ranged among the eighteenth century philosophes.  That was when the penny dropped (so to speak).  It was really interesting to see my own everyday environment -- what environment more everyday, every single day than a dark, richly stocked candy store? -- reorganized, framed and geometrized, as though by the plan and elevation somehow diagramed by those quotation marks, crystalized into an unexpectedly global lattice by a reading assignment about a world an ocean and two centuries away.

posted by William 1:56 PM
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