I Remember

As I was going through some old notebooks, I came across this writing exercise that I did in May 1995. It was based on the book I Remember, a memoir by the artist Joe Brainard about his youth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and young adulthood in New York City.

Brainard wrote down the words I remember, then followed them with the first thing that came into his mind.

Many writing instructors use the exercise as a prompt to get their students to write something.

Here are my writings, with some additions to clarify them. Most of the incidents happened when I was in grade school.
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I remember pissing in a Coca-Cola bottle or can while my family was on a long trip or vacation, and my older brother opening the back door of my family's car to pour it out.
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I remember the Burma Shave sings on the side of the road west of my home town. We drove past them as we went to my matern' al grandparents house. They were on the north side of U.S. 40 between our county roads numbered 200 West and 300 West. They stayed up there until 1966 or 1967.
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I remember the cool feeling on the back of my head after my mother gave me a haircut in our back yard during the summer. Back then, I had a burr or lived in Buzz City.
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I remember Fred C., a classmate of mine in second grade, telling me about life in the Soviet Union, and how the teachers told the schoolchildren to pray to God for ice cream, and how the schoolchildren didn't get any ice cream, and then the schoolchildren were told to pray to Krushchev for ice cream, and that it was carried into the classroom -- probably by KGB agents, though Fred didn't say if they were that -- I doubt he knew about the KGB back then. He's now a retired cop.
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I remember Scholastic Magazine, every week, showing a map of the Communist dominated countries in red. (This was in 1961-62, when I was in second grade.)
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I remember going to a football game where my older brother was playing during the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the adults in the crowd silent and quiet with fear.
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I remember watching Jack Paar's show -- this was after he left The Tonight Show -- which was broadcast at 10 a.m. Fridays on NBC. I stayed up to watch it because it wasn't on a school night, it seemed very sophisticated to me.
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I remember the first runs of many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
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I remember one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Buddy Sorrell was finally bar mitzvahed. It happened when he was an adult. His family couldn't afford it when he was 13 because they were poor. (When I saw the episode sometime within the last decade, Buddy's coworkers were worried because he was sneaking around meeting with a woman who was not his wife. However, she turned out to be the wife of the rabbi who was instructing him, and there was no affair between them.) It was the first time I had know anything about contemporary Judaism, because what I knew about Jewish people I had read in the Old Testament.
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I remember the time I had worms from eating dirt in the back yard of my house, and the purple pills I had to take to kill them. My parents forced them down my mouth, and they seemed huge (I was six or seven at the time). Plus, they tasted terribly.