8:12 p.m. The little memorial candle that we lit last night at sundown is still burning. After all these years, it still surprises me to turn off the lights at night and realize that there's an unshielded flame ... flickering in our house. When I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom I am always suddenly disoriented, watchful, reminded.

The amount of light one small flame throws against a sleepy darkened wall is simply amazing. It's a moving light; skittish, almost breathing. It doesn't mean much in the middle of our modern electrical days and artificially lit, ever-longer evenings. But once the house is tamped down and quieted, it flares up in a dance, for joy! Without distraction.

This particular candle marks the anniversary of my husband's father's death many many years ago. We have a whole lot of these little glasses on a shelf. Once the candle burns out naturally you can scrape out the wax and rinse the glass in hot water and then try your very best to get the label off. Eventually you will succeed. Then you have a strange, sturdy, odd juice glass with a too-big lip, and then another and another and another.

When we used to move a lot, I used to leave the glasses behind. Every time I unpacked at the new place, I would be able to put my nice Crate 'n Barrel and Pottery Barn glasses on another new empty shelf, all in a row. No weird heavy-bottomed little candle glasses ... at least not at first. But then, like inevitable clockwork, they always start to pile up again. You can't escape these glasses.

They are the everyday icons of how short the life, how long the memory. For Jewish people this crucial memory is the unbroken link that binds them to their history and inspires them to face the future.

Sam Goldberg once told us about the time the Germans came to "talk" to his father. It was back when there were only whispers and innuendo and people were being taken from their homes but no one knew for certain what was really going on. Sam said his father took him aside while the officers waited in the front room and told his son to pick a date on the calendar, any date, and light a candle for him.

That would be, of course, the last time Sam ever saw his father.

People go on. Sometimes they stop and look back. And then they continue on.

When I was growing up in the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the nuns often suggested we try to pray at home, as a family. Sometimes we were given holy water fonts as inducement, or pretty blue matching rosaries for special occasions. But we were not the kind of family who prayed together.

We ordered pizza together and watched TV together and drank coffee at the kitchen table together, but we never, ever got down on our knees or bowed our heads in prayer together. We prayed in church with a veil and a hat, and that was that.

So every time my husband lights candles, I feel ... uncomfortable, underdressed, not pious enough ... it just seems so ... odd and out of place and strange ... to be turning your house into a place of prayer.

But then I round the corner on my way to the bedroom and I come upon the dark room and the little table that looks strangely like an alter and I see the dancing primitive flame flashing butterfly wings of light against the wall, older than all the memories alive on the planet, and I know that there is life and spirit and a kindly soul in the room with me.

It's nice to be remembered. It's more important to remember.