Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember watching the moon landing in a hallway in a hotel somewhere in Italy. It was on a cheap black and white TV. We never saw TVs in Italy (once we watched Daniella, or maybe her baby brother, watching cartoons in Italian, but that was it). But all the adults were clustered around the moon-landing, so the hallway was full of stopped foot-traffic. I wasn't thrilled: I guess my space-age kid attitude was more: "It's about time."

Two footnotes:

I was (and am) sure that Aldren said "one small step for a man." Otherwise it made no sense.

I was thrilled, oddly, by the slingshot flights around the moon that preceded the moon landing that spring. There seemed something really exotic about flying to the dark side of the moon, flying farther into space than the moon itself, and then hurtling back to earth, all using unexpected and unscience-fictional effects of gravity. And the dark side of the moon still retained some mystery then. No one had ever seen it. It had only bee photographed very recently and sparsely. That seemed like a new world.

posted by William 1:44 PM
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I remember being bitten by our dog, Michael. She was a little white mutt bitch, my mother's, named for the man who found her as a puppy and gave her to my mom. She and Shandy, my father's whippet, were already old when I was born. I remember this sunny morning when Michael bit me; it was because I provoked her, though I can't remember what I did. I knew it was just, though: she was lying down in her place, and I was on hands and knees, intruding and teasing, and I got what was coming to me. Certainly she had growled plenty of warning, so it wasn't a surprise. What did surprise me was that she broke the skin, and so I had to report the injury to my father (who sided with the dog) and have my hand washed and a bandaid applied. Bill Cavish (sp?), a slim, bearded, balding single guy with a generous smile and a talent for great story-telling (a member of our Havurah community) was at the house when it happened, and I think he was a little appalled, and I enjoyed his sympathy very much, and I milked it for a story.

posted by Rosasharn 7:55 PM
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I remember that people used to say they were having a nervous breakdown. It meant they were a little keyed-up. Later I learned that they were somehow very intense. My grandfather's version was probably as intense as I could understand at the time, and the destruction of his ability to read did bother me. But I think it was only reading Marjorie Morningstar that I got a sense of them as disabling you pretty thoroughly, that and also reading that Franny in Franny and Zooey was having one. I think I understood (misunderstood) what Franny was experiencing through Marjorie.

posted by William 2:43 PM
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I remember visiting my great grandmother Babette, my mother's father's mother, in Jacksonville. I remember she lived in a complex of apartments (I remember the flowering trees on the grounds), and that as she got older her apartment shrunk, till she was in a two-room suite. Most important, she had a candy dish and she meant for us to take candies when we went to see her. I always chose the strawberry ones, in the strawberry wrapper, hard candies that had gel inside. I remember when I was about six she gave me a pin: a small gold chick emerging from a silver egg. My mother pinned it to the lapel of my furry purple winter coat. That was the last year we went down to Florida for my father's winter break, before he left academia.

posted by Rosasharn 10:57 PM
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I remember, after we'd seen a Chaplin movie, maybe a double-feature, my father telling me that Chaplin was as old as my grandfather but that he had a son who was my age.

I liked the idea, I think because of the complex ricochet of youth that it produced: Chaplin was young (on screen), like my father, and he had a young son, like me, and so my grandfather got to be young, like him and my father, at the same time as his son got to be the age of my father (since their fathers were born in the same year), which is to say the age that Chaplin was on screen, but being that age was really being 11, like me, so that somehow Chaplin was eleven too (as my grandfather and Chaplin both were in 1900, a fact that I always thought about which allowed his remote youth to come vividly alive for me, since I knew what it was like to be eleven, and also that 1900 was a significant milestone), and if he could be eleven, now, in his old age, then maybe my grandfather would live forever.

posted by William 11:16 AM
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I remember the Mitch Miller Show. My uptown grandparents watched it Sunday nights, I think. It was either before or after the Danny Kaye Show, so I tended to confuse them when I was little. But somehow I didn't like the Mitch Miller Show as much -- it might have been the name Mitch which I didn't like; or it might be that I don't really like the name Mitch because of its archaic association for me with the show. I remember horns that whined a little too much, and the name Mitch still has that whiney feel for me now. (Apologies to any Mitches!)

posted by William 12:57 PM
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I remember how pretty frequently there'd be workers on the track at the 96th street subway station where I waited for the train to school. They would wear yellow slickers, like rain jackets. I loved watching the calm way they'd step between the pillars that separated the tracks when a train -- or sometimes two -- came into the station, and wait in that narrow space of safety, to reappear when the train pulled away. I'd sometimes get to the station, or get home from school, just in time to see them going up or down the tiny ladder at the end of the platform, almost inconspicuous but always a kind of option in space that I liked knowing and thinking about since no one else paid any attention to it. Except the workers who belonged to the subway and to its history and procedures in a way that was part of the solidity of the city -- the city I lived in and whose subways I now rode, just like my parents.

posted by William 7:07 PM
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I remember the white plastic T-shaped tags that attached the stoppers of waterguns to their bodies when you filled them. They were always in the way -- they made the guns much harder to fill, especially with hoses, so I never felt that my watergun was satisfactorily full. By pulling hard you could force the T to collapse and fold over and pull the whole thing out, but somehow after that the gun never seemed to seal up quite right.

posted by William 10:52 AM
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I remember playing on the Moshav with the Moshav kids. Because these memories are visceral rather than visual, I can't easily describe this; outside. Dry sun on dry blond dirt. Running up and down scrabbly hills. The smell of heat, but also the variegation of sun and shadow as it falls on your back and of speed and breath as we ran, found a hiding place, squeezed and stilled into it, ran again. There were teams, so alliances, secrets, the pleasure of coordination, instant kinship. The memory/ies are conflated: I am four. I am nine. I am a stranger, accepted. I am there with Miri, my friend to be from the Old City. The place is full of siblings and purity, yearning, sweet & genuine spirit, and song. I wonder if we got our Shabbos clothes dirty.

posted by Rosasharn 8:45 PM
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I remember how much I loved Dr. Greenberg, the kindly principal of the Hebrew and Sunday Schools at B'nai Jeshrun. So much nicer than the rabbi whose first name I shared and who lived in our building. I thought that as authorities at the same place they'd be equally nice, but they weren't. Dr. Greenberg led the junior congregation. I remember being one of the Torah attendants a couple of times, while some of the older people read the Torah. I loved Dr. Greenberg's blessing at the end of the service: "May he cause his countenance to shine upon you and to give you peace." I remember his saying that the lamp above the podium was perpetually lit, which was very impressive to me: I thought about the building in ruins in some future century but people desperately keeping the lamp lit over the rubble anyhow.

Sundays we would sing songs -- I loved

By the Sea of Kinnereth,
Ancient legend declareth,
Stands a palace enchanted,
With woods divinely planted.

Who dwells there? It is only
A lad like a nightingale lonely,
Who with prophets and sages
Studies the Torah's pages.

I was somewhat puzzled about how lonely he could be when attended to in his studies by a retinue of prophets and sages, but on the other hand it seemed right: a young boy, lonely and alone, as he is intensively educated by servant-masters. The song was perfectly calculated for a chid's misunderstanding.

We also did film-strips of Torah stories. He would narrate a picture, and then rap twice with his ring on the metal hand rail to the stage when it was time for the next photo (later I played one of "The Sons" in the Tradition song of Fiddler on the Roof on that stage), In high school, when we did the first two books of Paradise Lost I was regarded as expert on the Bible because I knew those stories so well.

I saw him a few years later -- maybe three or four -- and he had a terrible limp and was wizened and old. This was very puzzling to me, because he already seemed to me to be old -- permanently old and wise and in command of his place in the world -- when I first met him. How could he get older? I think he might have been my first intimation that old people aren't immortal, haven't achieved the eternal stability of their vast accumulation of time. Old people get older and then they die.

I didn't quite know that before. Unlike any of the other old people in my life -- people who were old when I first came to know them, and not much older when I was a teenager -- he was getting older faster than I was. This left me sad and -- as though I were accelerating my own aging into heart-hardened experience to match the speed of his own senescence -- cruelly indifferent.

posted by William 9:08 AM
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I remember the claim that inserting 'only' between each pair of words in "I hit him in the eye" would produce a different meaning. I spent a good amount of idle time trying to convince myself that "I hit him only in the eye", "I hit him in only the eye", and "I hit him in the eye only" were more than subtly different.

posted by sravana 7:13 PM
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I remember going out to Doug B's house, maybe upstate? And there were several motor-cycles there, including his brother's chopper, which he'd ridden to New Orleans and back -- a fact whose physical magnitude didn't impress me as much then as it should have. But it was still an epic journey, cross country and unbelievably cool, all of course in imitation of Easy Rider (which I hadn't seen). One reason I didn't realize the physical demands of such a ride was that I'd ridden Vespas in Italy. So I thought I knew how to ride a motorcycle, was feeling cocky, till I got on one. It was amazingly powerful when you gave it some throttle. And I didn't know you had to change gears. Doug showed me all about the clutch and the gearshift. But I kept stalling trying to get out of first. Accelerate really fast and stall. It's probably a good thing that I never managed to get into second.

posted by william 6:13 PM
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I remember Ken H. knowing that if we rolled a bottle down the big hill on 91st street, it would shatter after just a few revolutions. I thought it would just roll, and maybe shatter purely by chance. But for him it was a technique -- roll and shatter. He took a Coke bottle and rolled it fairly gently, and sure enough it shattered into shards in less then two seconds.

posted by william 11:09 PM
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I remember going to my friend Geoffrey's house, and seeing a pure white marble chess set on their coffee table. Each of the sixty-four squares was white; each of the thirty-two pieces was white. I was puzzled, but then Geoff said that it was the chess set that John and Yoko and just given Bobby Fischer (who'd recently beat Spassky).

This seemed very cool to me. Thinking back now I see the coolness in several different ways. I was a better chess player than Geoff, but suddenly he had this great set, which I thought of as his, not his parents'. He had a great ability to seem to be his family's representative, to have all their weight and authority and insight behind him. I never felt that way about my family, but the S's were magical. Not their mother so much: she seemed the one who was not quite part of the rest of them. And because I liked worshiping Geoff, and didn't want to feel superior in any way, it was nice that now he suddenly had a more privileged relationship to chess than I did.

And at the same time that it helped boost one aspect of Geoff, the set boosted my view of Yoko. Since it was obvious to me that this was Yoko's kind of idea, not an idea that the Beatles would have. (Because it's only now that I see the chess set was an allusion to the White Album. Which I remember was white because the naked photos on the British version were banned in the United States.) We all hated Yoko for breaking up the Beatles, for fooling John into thinking her art was more interesting than the Beatles were. But here was this great chess set, and this new grouping: John, Yoko, Bobby Fischer! That was pretty grand.

And of course the grouping also included the S's, since they had the chess set. The chess set? Of course not. But somehow the world of commodities they lived in included things like this chess set. They could buy from the same cosmic store that John and Yoko could. They belonged to a kind of social Platonic realm, where the objects that people owned were works of art -- where you could just buy a work of art. So it turned out that what gave the art its aura wasn't that it was unique, but that it was an appurtenance of a transcendent social realm to which we sublunary types did not belong. But the S's did belong, and so did John and Yoko and Bobby Fischer, and the group they made up was almost as wonderful as the Beatles, and the S's at any rate lived just next door.

posted by william 5:41 PM
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I remember the pleasure and luxury of things that were lit up at night. Walking past a garden with spotlights (unlit), I remember visiting restaurants or houses for dinner where the lawns were impeccable and the lights nestled in the grass made it possible to see that. I remember that when guests were over for dinner, my parents turned on every light downstairs, and replaced the inevitably dead one or two bulbs in the chandelier. (And how the chandelier gradually lost arms over the years from six to two.)

I remember returning in the evening to the Lalita Mahal hotel in Mysore, and seeing it perfectly white and illuminated from a distance. And I was always excited about flying at night for the view (although I now fairly dislike it for its association with long international flights and leaving home).

posted by sravana 1:06 AM
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I remember that I wasn't really puzzled by the fact that burglars didn't use fire escapes.

There were a lot of them in my grandmother's neighborhood in Washington Heights, but none in our neighborhood. It was like a different ecological region, with different flora: lower buildings, many with awnings, and most with fire escapes.

I assumed that using them really was cheating. I didn't even articulate this assumption to myself until I read a Batman comic where (as I recall) someone disguised as Batman was breaking into buildings. Batman figured out that he used his cape -- his counterfeit cape -- to lasso the bottom of the fire escape ladder and pull it down. That was when I first somehow realized that adults couldn't reach up to the ladder, and that it was held nearly horizontal by a counterweight (which I saw clearly depicted in the frame of the comic). I had just sort of assumed that they were fixed structures, like anything else.

The fact that they weren't made me obscurely sad: some trust went out of the background of the world. It wasn't perfectly still and stable, its use and status unanimously agreed to. It was designed to frustrate some people and to protect others. We weren't all at one about the world we lived in.

posted by william 2:11 PM
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I remember thinking "musician" and "magician" were the same word. I didn't have the concept musician, and so I heard all mentions of musicians as being about magicians. One day they told me that my second cousin, a musician, would be coming to dinner at my downtown grandmother's house with us. I was very disappointed when I found out the truth.

posted by william 1:44 PM
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I remember dialing with my left index finger sometimes, maybe if I was making a lot of phone calls and had a pencil in my right hand, or was using my right hand for something else. It was much harder to dial with your left index finger, since now you were pressing against the spring resistance to the dial with the back of your finger, with your nail. And if you had a hangnail or any other sort of soreness in your cuticle, as I did all the time when I was a kid, it just hurt to dial that way. And the motion was much less natural, pushing the dial clockwise from the left.

posted by william 10:10 PM
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I remember "Purim Day, Purim Day, gladsome joyous holiday." "Let's make [something] pah! pah! pah!...with our dreidels play." "Hamentaschen good to eat! Cakes and candies sweet!"

But it was in a minor key, which puzzled me a bit, but also made some sense, since all the anarchic joy praised by the song was a sort of false joy, not the fun I would propose for myself if I could do anything that I wanted -- I'd be down in the park playing football with my friends instead.

posted by william 12:24 AM
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I remember that there were two ways to make mistakes on dial phones: to put your finger in the wrong slot, or not to dial the phone all the way toward the curved metal stop.

The second source of error is the interesting one: I remember that sometimes you might not make it all the way to the metal -- you might have stopped a quarter of an inch or so too early. Then there were three choices: did you hope that you had just stopped and not let the dial move counterclockwise at all, so that you could continue the clockwise dialing motion? Or did you redial the whole number? Or hope that you'd gone close enough for the right number to register? Your answer to this question might depend on how far into the number you were (first digit? sixth?) and how quickly you had to make your call.

posted by william 12:17 PM
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I remember that in the old, lighter green and yellow buses, the steering wheels were much more vertically oriented, the way they are in cars. In the newer, darker green buses, the pitch was much more horizontal, which made the bus drivers seem more godlike to me. They weren't confronting the wheel, face to face, as it were, but controlling it from above. I took pleasure in this constant reminder of progress.

posted by william 11:52 PM
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I remember one time there was a party at the dojo after class on Saturday. I didn't know it was coming, but after I got out of the locker room it was all set up. My adult white-belt friend was hanging out with the Sensei and with lots of other students, both kids and adults. There was lots of party food in the entry area (not on the exercise floor, of course). The sensei was sitting at his desk, relaxed, having a good time, very different from usual. Then as I was getting ready to go, they delivered pizza, so I hung out some more.

They were listening to a tape of classical music with the pizza. I heard my white-belt friend say, "Hear that? Every performance has mistakes in it." The sensei rewound the tape and we all listened to the violinist scrape his bow in some spasm of unintentional motion. I had never been able to hear the differences between performances before -- in vain did my grandmothers take me to hear Serkin and Rubenstein (though I liked their kindly looks). But this was a mistake I could hear, and I was proud of that -- not proud that I could hear it, because it was obvious, but proud to be part of the group of people listening to this tape and all hearing the same obvious lapse.

The party was still in full swing when I went home -- I didn't want my family to wonder where I was. But it turned out to be early evening when I got there (I didn't have a watch, so I had no idea what time it was). My grandmother was beside herself. I'd thought I was about half an hour late. But I'd spend four extra hours at the dojo. That afternoon was one of the best times I'd ever had: it just slipped away in fun.

posted by william 8:46 AM
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I remember telling my chemistry teacher, Mr. Reeves, also the soccer coach, about the story my grandmother had just told me (in eleventh or twelfth grade) about her cousin. This cousin, whom I called and think of as "my grandmother's cousin," had a friend who was seduced by a charismatic madman, who suggested a suicide pact. The friend declined, so the intense young man turned his attentions to my grandmother's cousin, who succumbed to his charms and his authoritative vocation for transcendence. He shot her and then shot himself.

This was all new to me, this cliché of excessively tormented adolescent eroticism, and I remember Mr. Reeves listening politely but not quite with enough interest. But it was a true story, and I don't know even now why he wasn't more interested (though maybe I'd respond the same way now in his position): at the time it seemed somewhat natural, though disappointing, that he wasn't engaged by what was after all just personal family history. But this cousin was so distant from me that I didn't think of her as part of my family, and yet I was interested. But maybe this was mainly because it came from my grandmother, who knew her, and deplored what she'd done.

Later the story of Kleist's death seemed familiar in just the same way that so many of the fairy tales and scary stories my grandmother told me were familiar when I reread them in Freud. There was something surprising about returning to that archaic culture -- archaic for me as well as for the world -- when discussing the reading with Paul de Man. And he was no more interested in my family, it turned out, than Mr. Reeves had been.

posted by william 10:04 AM
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I remember Lindsay Nelson, I think it was, calling a Mets game on the radio. Probably in 1969 or 1970. I was walking Powell down the big hill on 91st street and listening to the game on my transistor radio. Bud Harrelson took three grounders that inning, and threw out the runner three times, once at second and twice at first maybe. Lindsay Nelson said, "...and Bud Harrleson with three assists in the inning. That ties a record." I liked that quick, wry, lazy, afternoon notation: the routine ways records get tied in baseball.

posted by william 5:51 PM
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I remember the prefects when I was in middle school -- all-knowing, composed, and in some ways more adult than parents and teachers. I remember the authority associated with their names (always in full) when called out during school ceremonies. (I also remember thinking, much earlier, that "investiture" was spelt "investeacher", having something to do with leadership.) I remember how, in 6th grade, every second person had a crush on a prefect (and how you had to, to be considered cool), and using 'fan' as a transitive verb to denote that relationship. 

posted by sravana 2:51 AM
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I remember that my parents had a Selectric in their office. Just like Doug B's. And it was such a thrill, to see that ball spin so quickly to type just the right letter through the one-time film ribbon. It was like science fiction -- a kind of precursor to that blob on The Prisonner that went after the prisonners who tried to escape. It was just this sort of elegant, paperweight-like model globe, sort of floating in the space of an empty typewriter, like a tiny monument to the Pica letters it would once have typed, but then you turned it on and the ball came to life, and somehow knew just what it was doing. (I liked also that you could read the film backwards and see what people had typed, though of course there were no spaces there.)

posted by william 5:45 PM
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I remember Freddie Cooper challenging our touch football team, when we claimed that it was fourth down for his team, to name the plays. I was very impressed by his knowledge that this was a workable procedure. In particular he knew not only that I could do this, but also that I would see that I should be able to do this, that anyone would be able to list the last three plays, and that we'd all me able to evaluate the list, that memory wasn't just private, that the details of what has just happened was something we could all reconstruct, that the past was shared, part of everyone's present experience as past and not just ad result (down number).

posted by william 9:19 AM
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I remember a little more about tying ties. I remember that the first time my father tied a tie around my neck, there was something magical about seeing that knot, which my father and his father had in their ties, suddenly materialize out of the simple over-and-under movements of the long and slightly triangular strip of material. Marc B also showed me a simple way of tying a tie and I could suddenly, magically, make that knot materialize by myself! And I still can.

posted by william 4:23 PM
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I remember my mother's double diamond ring (which I thought of a little bit as a more glamorous version of the purse hasps on my grandmothers' purses, but not on hers), and how it related to my uptown grandmother's single diamond. The single diamond seemed older fashioned, more stolid. It had my grandmother's physiognomy; it was an example I think of what Benjamin calls non-sensuous imitation. It fit her gnarled finger perfectly. My mother's double diamond was more glamorous, like her cats-eye glasses, and had her physiognomy: the resemblance was visible. Her mother, my downtown grandmother, didn't have a diamond ring at all, so there was a way, maybe, that I separated maternal and paternal vectors of dazzlement between my mother and my father's mother.

posted by william 11:31 AM
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I remember visiting the BSO in 5th or 6th grade as part of school. I don't remember who was conducting or giving us the talk. I do remember him asking us if we could figure out why they had potential new members give their auditions behind the curtain -- and to take off their shoes as they walk onto the stage. I couldn't. [It was so that the shoe-click wouldn't give away the gender of the performer.] I don't remember what the music was, but I do remember the pleasure it gave me. Utter absorption, utter recognition, utter delight.

posted by Rosasharn 11:38 PM
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From Giovanni Tiso:

I remember the first thing I wrote, when I was five years old. It was a letter to my parents, and it read as follows (I won't reproduce the typos in translation): "I'm tired of these injustices. I'm leaving. I'm going to the doctor's. I don't know if I'll be back. Giovanni." I left the letter on the dining room table and opened the door of the apartment. It was dark on the landing, so I didn't venture any further. My mother was so proud of my writing talent, she showed the letter to everybody she knew and quite a few people she didn't know. She seemed to take the fact that I wanted to leave the family entirely in her stride.

posted by william 6:53 PM
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