I remember...

I remember...running in the grass, the front yard of my house, wearing a tan jacket with brown lining that my mother affectionately called "the Indiana Jones" jacket. I fell, and grass stained the jacket. It burned.

I remember...Christmas eve. A cold, bitterly windy Chicago evening. A man dressed as Santa Claus entered the house, emitting faulty "Ho Ho Hos" like a coal plant emits greenhouse gases. The man was my Uncle Bob. "It's Uncle Bob! It's Uncle Bob!" I screamed with jubilation, proud of my ability to decipher the falsity of the fake Santa Claus, the impostor. I didn't look like this.

I remember...watching "The Godfather" for the first time with my father on the Fourth of July. We were sitting in our claustrophobic family room, along with my mother and brother and maybe sister (I have the odd feeling she lacked the interest to watch the film), the lights turned low, the screen on the television bright and bold, and the images of blood, loyalty, and finally, family drowning out of the picture in the brilliant and muted cinematography of Gordon Willis.

I remember...arguing with one of my more ignorant uncles on the merits of the Conflict in Iraq (I refuse to label it a war). After watching he and a fellow uncle spar on the validity of WMDs in the region, in which ignorant uncle argued against evidence suggesting WMDs were a fabrication of movement conservative imagination, I sprang into the conversation, mentioning how Iraq bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Vietnam. "No, it has no connection," the ignorant one violently exclaimed. "In Vietnam, we didn't know what we were doing." The inevitable response was that we did not know what we were doing in Iraq, but I was too stunned by the forcefulness of his attack to say anything. I often find myself speechless at the passion of men so wrong.

I remember...the funeral of my Uncle Don and Aunt Marlene. The overcast day at the graveyard. The stone, blank faces of the various family members in attendance, the crying outpourings of emotion from the others. I wanted to cry. I wanted to show emotion. In some ways, I desperately wanted to cry, to show that I cared for this man, so show that the death of him and his wife affected me. The tears did not come. After the caskets were buried, and I walked back to the car, I started crying. Uncontrollably. Strong. Unfiltered. Unexplainable.

I remember...only one conversation with Uncle Don. I had recently begun playing trumpet, and and he asked me how the experience was going. "I know someone who plays trumpet," he said, a twinkle in his eye, a glisten of his salt-and-pepper beard. "Well," I responded, "I know someone who plays trombone!" Uncle Don was a professional trombone player, alternating between gigs with a big band and an interesting tenure as a limo driver.

I remember...ripping the carpet out of the flooding basement of my Uncle Ed and Aunt Amanda. It was in this house that I had the one conversation with Uncle Don. The water rushed into the basement in a fast and furious manner, like Vin Diesel driving a Toyota Celica. My dad and I ripped carpeting out of the ground, exposing a rather hideous stone flooring the carpet had been covering. At the time, I thought it looked cool. "Hey Amanda," my dad said, "I think you should leave the carpet and use this floor." "Yeah, maybe I should," she responded. I couldn't understand their tongue-in-cheek tone.

I remember...New Years Eve at my Grandma's house, taking place in a ridiculous sideshow my sister and cousins would direct of song and dance and moments we blush at when parents tirelessly replay the events from the old dusty VHS tapes of the family camcorder. The tape shows me walking into the room, a pair of drum sticks in my hand, size 48 shorts that hung around my buttocks, and Hawaiian flowers draped around my neck. I began furiously kicking my legs in the air, imitating a dance move I recently saw in "The Mask," and I threw the flowers at the camera lens. I was trying to let the flowers launch off of my wrist like a rocket. Instead, I threw them like a mushy baseball.

I remember...my brother imitating "The Mask" when my mother's brother came to visit. He thought the brother was crazy.