Matty Pemulis's birthday, and Da — "He remembered the oval sound of…"
He remembered the oval sound of the cap coming off the jar of petroleum jelly, that special stone-in-pond plop of a Vaseline cap (not Child-Proof even in an era of Child-Proof caps), hearing his Da muttering as he applied it to himself, feeling the ice-cold awful cold finger between him as his Da smeared the stuff roughly around Matty’s rosebud, his dark star.
Context
The recall at maximum resolution — remembered at the level of a bottle-cap's acoustics. Carlisle glosses "rosebud" via Citizen Kane: cinema's founding emblem of the significant childhood memory, planted at the center of the book's most terrible one. His reading, recorded not adopted.