He can’t stand alcohol.

Many things that were not to be moved were burned in the backyard and I remember those jars from the attic being thrown in the fire, and how they popped in the heat and the fire flamed up from the alcohol.

That took up a great amount of time, for if you try to remember all the people you have ever known, going back to the earliest thing you remember⁠—which was, with me, the attic of the house where I was born and my mother and father’s wedding-cake in a tin box hanging from one of the rafters, and, in the attic, jars of snakes and other specimens that my father had collected as a boy and preserved in alcohol, the alcohol sunken in the jars so the backs of some of the snakes and specimens were exposed and had turned white⁠—if you thought back that far, you remembered a great many people.