I remember being puzzled and impressed that scissors worked, that you could cut straight lines of paper with them.  I still am.

I remember a scene in The Swiss Family Robinson where the young boy is bitten by a spider (the web has come up out of nowhere) and the father sucks out the venom and gouges out the wound with a knife before it can harm him.  A very scary scene, but it was interesting that I understood what he was doing almost immediately, without having any knowledge or expectation that this was something you could do.

This is another of the earliest movies I remember, and that I associate with the large-screened Upper West Side theaters I saw them in.  The juxtaposition of the large, somewhat threadbare theater and its smells with the slightly underlit movies you saw there is something that I am only conscious of now.  They may feel underlit (now: this was natural then) because when I was little we went during the day.  Or they may seem underlit as I remember them in comparison to today's bright flat screen TVs.  (I recollect The Planet of the Apes as underlit as well, though I remember seeing it much later in my childhood.) But that was fine -- the movie world seemed all the realer in being both very large and somewhat distant from the crowd in the grungy theater.

I remember learning the word coincidence from my mother.  I don't remember what I was surprised by, but she said it was just a coincidence, and since I didn't know the word she explained it.  It seemed just wonderful that there was this benign term for how the world would sometimes get in synch with itself -- that two things should just come together cheerfully and wholly in the present.  She'd pointed out something lovely.

 I remember my uptown grandmother getting seriously and surprisingly angry at me when at the age of 9 or so I mentioned (we were driving down Broadway from their house in Washington Heights (I remember we called our grandparents' apartments "houses")) -- surprisingly angry that I said I wanted to be president when I grew up.  She (they were refugees from the Nazis who had several hair-raising escapes) said that was absolutely inappropriate for a Jewish boy -- that people would hate me and would hate Jews even more than they already did if I or any other Jew were president.  

I remember when Nixon resigned.  I was in the hospital after a water-skiing accident (thanks Doug) and the nurse (who had offered to sneak me beers) came in giddy with joy and said, "That wonderful man is going to resign today."  We watched him on TV (there were four patients in the room and the nurse).  Then the next day (fifty years ago today) we watched his self-pitying speech ("My mother was a saint") before he got on the helicopter.  It seemed like the country was going to get better now, and that the awful right was finally vanquished.

 I remember how much easier it was when the pants and shoes I was wearing permitted me to slip my feet all the way through the cuffs without having to take off my shoes.

 I remember being surprised that the fronts and backs of coins were always upside down from each other.  At first I thought that this was random, but after looking at four or five coins, and flipping them over or turning them on their axels very slowly, I saw that this was a rule.  I am still not sure why.  (I learned this considerably after I learned to balance a coin on its side.)

I remember being impressed and surprised that you could balance a coin on its side -- I idealized the coin as having only two surfaces -- and then a little later I remember being pleased that I was able to do it.  I remember that milled coins were slightly easier to balance on their sides than pennies or nickels.

 I remember my father explaining to me when we were watching a James Bond movie -- one of the earlier ones with Sean Connery -- that a 0 on the roulette wheel meant you lost no matter whether you'd bet red or black, even or odd, etc. (and that this was how the house came out ahead).  Not longer after we got a toy roulette set and I saw there was a 0 and a double 0 on the plastic mat you could lay out to place your chips on.  But in the movie there was only a 0.  I assumed that the toy set was more accurate and that  probability of getting black or evens or whatever binary bet you made was 18/38 or 9/19 -- that is less than the a break-even 50%.  (Only recently did I learn that the 00 was an American innovation: in Monte Carlo they only have one 0).

 I remember water-cooler bottles at my father's office, where he'd sometimes take me when he had to work on Saturdays (during tax season).  I remember being surprised when a bunch of large bubbles (bigger than ping-pong balls) would burst up, and not understanding (as I guess I still don't) why the bubbles would only gurgle into the water every fifth or sixth cup of water, and not each time.

 I remember Tommy Smothers.  I liked his high tenor voice.

 I remember (from high school history) that Calvin Coolidge invented the word normalcy.

 I remember that adults were capable both of whistling and of blowing up balloons, two skills which baffled and frustrated me as a child.  

 I remember that when my father used to do comic fake phone conversations when I was 7 or 8 years old, he'd always end the "conversation" by saying, "Okay, bye."  And I was surprised by that formulation -- not the bye, but the "Okay."  So I would try to do the same sort of fake conversation and noticed that I always said "okay" before "bye," and then noticed that I always said it in real phone conversations too, and that it was almost impossible not to.  That was really interesting.

 I remember being delighted when I learned that you could open our kitchen garbage can by pressing down on the foot-pedal.  I think it was a new one, but I'd seen the foot-pedal on the kitchen garbage cans at both my grandmothers' houses.  I never used them, though, so the pedals just seemed like some old person's variation of our own garbage can, which I think didn't have a pedal.  but then we got a new one -- strangely like the old people's -- and stepping on the pedal raised the lid!  That was really neat.

 I remember the first time I put my thumb over the spout of a garden hose, thinking either that I could stop the water running or that I could reduce it to a trickle.  I remember how surprised I was -- and then a beat or two later delight -- that the water spurted out in a powerful jet.  For a little while this was esoteric knowledge, or so I thought.  I imagined my friends didn't know that you could squirt a hose that way.  But of course they came to the same realization at about the same time.  And now we'd all reached a stage of greater worldliness and competence.

I remember being surprised and disconcerted when it turned out that the title of the Sly and the Family Stone song I loved was: "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)."  I remember wondering how much it mattered that I'd misheard it.

 I remember how obsessed I was with James Fenimore Cooper.  We had to read Last of the Mohicans over the summer for the start of school, when I was 10 or 12.  I loved it.  So I read all of the Natty Bumppo Leatherstocking Tales.  But it was The Pathfinder and Last of the Mohicans that I liked most: Natty Bumppo in his prime.  The Pioneers was still pretty good, especially when he intentionally only nicks that potato that is part of the skeet-shooting competition, to preserve his reputation (he did hit it), but to allow the young man to win (and impress the woman he's in love with).  I hated that he dies in The Prairie.  I remember distinguishing between the Mohicans (or the Lenni Lenape in general) and the cruel Mohawks.  And I remember embracing, in sheer ignorance, Cooper's contempt for Jane Austen -- I remember he'd been reading Austen aloud to his wife and flung the book from himself with contempt, since he could do better.  And then he wrote The Last of the Mohicans first, to demonstrate that.  So it took me a while -- till twelfth grade I think -- to read Austen, and to discover, to my vestigial surprise, how great she was.

I remember being surprised and skeptical when we were told in 7th grade Latin that videtur meant seems -- our book claimed that seems means is seen [as].  I thought (and still think), that seems is a weaker form of the categorical is.

A judgment which reminds me now that we did "The Emperor of Ice Cream" in high school -- what reminds me of that is the line in that poem: "Let be be finale of seem."  I remember being impressed by Mr. McCormick's showing us the sexual imagery in the poem: "the concupiscent curds."  I think I remember that he explained what a deal dresser was.

I remember another routine from Rowan and Martin's Laugh In: "Here comes the judge."  At least once it had this rollicking rhythm, which has stayed with me: "Here comes the judge; here comes the judge.  Order in the courtroom!  Here comes the judge."

Alexie, Alexie

Mustn't run and mustn't play,

Mustn't jump and mustn't climb,

Must be careful all the time

I remember that my father would put his socks on before his pants, which seemed strange to me.  In my memory the contrast of his black socks against his calves is very vivid.