It's still the weekend, and I have a lot on my mind, so I think I'm going to run with yesterday's theme a little more. Specifically, I am going to try to recount the stories I heard growing up from my own parents and grandmother--the ones that left the greatest impression on me.

My father's childhood memories center around pranks that he and his friends, and later his fraternity buddies, played on each other and other people. There is one about a squirrel that I will not recount, as he does not come off favorably, and another one about a chicken. There are also a number about his sister--such as the time he defended her reputation to their mother when a busybody neighbor was making up stories about her--and about food, such as his friend Herbie's father's caramel corn store. But the story that sticks with me the most somehow, is about how he and his sister used to play Monopoly in the back of the family car on trips to Atlantic City to visit their cousins. Now recently, I brought up my memory of hearing this story to my dad, and he said he did not remember this happening, or telling me about it. What to make of this? I don't know. But the image is so clear for me, so evocative of a time and a place. I can see them, almost: both small, with the same thick, dark, wavy hair, on either side of the game board, safe in the little world of the back of the car.

I have heard more stories about my mother's childhood largely because my mother has more living relatives, most of whom live within a five mile radius of my mother, and were around all the time when I was growing up. The memory of hers that has stuck with me the most closely, followed by the time my grandmother's friend gave her a bad home perm, is the time when the family was supposed to go away for a little vacation to Cape Cod. I think it was not meant to be for much more than a weekend, but as they never went on vacations, this was a big deal. My aunt, the youngest of the three kids, got sick, and the vacation was canceled. I think my mother's disappointment, or the memory of the disappointment, really, must have come across in the telling, because this is the story that always comes to mind for me when I think of her as a little girl.

My grandmother likes to tell stories of her childhood, and I have been trying to get her to write some of them down over the past few years. It seems increasingly essential to me to do this, to make a record: one of these things people like me do to pull a shade over the passing of time. Although the close second is a snippet about a girl who was holding her arm out a bus window when the bus rode close to a lamppost and turned a corner, pulling off the girl's arm (memorable for obvious reasons), the story of hers that I know I will never forget is about how her mother, whom I vaguely remember from my very early childhood, used to take all seven of her children into town to run errands. On the way, they passed an ice cream shop, and inevitably the younger ones, at least, would start begging for ice cream as soon as they left the house. So my great-grandmother made a rule. Everyone could have ice cream if nobody asked. Even if they started walking past the shop on the way home, the rule was clear: no asking. Apparently they didn't get ice cream very much.

I wonder what stories I tell again and again, or what stories will make an impression like these on my children? It seems a little unpredictable, with the exception of the gruesome arm story, which I think was meant as a cautionary tale after we were spoken to one too many times about dangling our arms out the windows of the back seat. Writing this, I am wondering if this story is true, although I have never questioned it until now. Hmmm. Memory is an erratic master.