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I remember / je me souviens
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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.
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But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
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
Monday, December 30, 2002
I remember the kids who had bus passes. You put them in bus pass holders with two plastic windows. Hugh Cramer and I tried forging them. Mine were self-effacing, as unchallenging as possible, in light, #3 pencil. The color of the paper was never right. (They changed the colors of the pass every month.) Hugh's were bold and beautifully done in magic marker. They were very impressive and almost always worked. When they didn't he'd just run away. I think we started doing this after watching The Great Escape (or was it Stalag 17?) where they forged papers and printed them I think with shoe heels.
Sunday, December 22, 2002
I remember toilets. I remember that I was surprised, when at my mother's direction I emptied the aquarium to clean it (the snail didn't keep the algae down as it was supposed to) the toilet flushed, just as she said it would. I thought the flushing required some sort of motor or machinery, and was amazed that you could get a real satisfying flush just by pouring a large quantity of liquid into it. I liked our toilets, without separate reservoir, and hated toilets in people's houses in the country, those that made you wait to fill up the reservoir again. I remember that I thought toilets were magical when I was very small. I remember my uptown grandmother teaching me to pee in a toilet by first teaching me to pee in a cup (a yellow cup). After I learned to do that, she would hold it over the toilet when I peed, and then she held it in front of me and then moved it, and I was peeing in the toilet! As I say, I thought they way they made things disappear was magical, and one day I threw one of those big apples she had, and which I didn't want, into the toilet and flushed. To my horror it overflowed, and Norris the handyman had to come. I couldn't believe it couldn't handle the apple: after all I would have been able to (and was expected to). My grandmother was very upset with me. I don't remember learning to poop ("making a pfui," we called it, after the interjection, Pfui! Teifel!). I suppose it was after I learned to pee in the toilet.
I remember the cotton glass we put in the aquarium filter, and how it was always feeling as though it was almost cutting your skin.
Friday, December 20, 2002
I remember, with painfulness even now, that I conceived a sudden and absurd antipathy to Brian Seeman one day, or one week. I recognize it now -- I recognized it then -- as having some masochist component. I cherished the antipathy. What I remember wincing is the day that I saw him walking home from school in front of me, and I felt that I would just punch him in the back. So I did. He was surprised and hurt. Whatever impulse this answered to in me, I think that took care of it. I seem to recall that there was parental discussion about this, and that I apologized -- actually apologized sincerely. But I never owned up to why I punched him -- that is, for no rational reason -- but came up with some paltry dodge, for which I could apologize. I think we stayed friends after that. It was ultimately a big deal only for me.
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
I remember that after seeing Mary Poppins -- my first Julie Andrews movie -- I got the book (or maybe we had it), and I was shocked and disgusted by what I read. Not that Mary Poppins was actually elderly, but that when the children are hungry she breaks off one of her fingers and gives it to them to eat: it turns out to be toffee or treacle or some such. I couldn't believe it. I read no further.
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
I remember that when we sang Had Gadyah (about the kid killed by the cat (was it?) chased by the dog beaten by the stick burned by the fire, etc. etc.) I was always puzzled by the fact that the angel of death seemed to be on the kid's side, while God, who punishes the angel of death seems against the kid. (Each punishment constituted a flip-flop, the innocent and their champions alternating with the evil and vicious: good attacked by bad rebuked by good attacked by bad, etc.)
Sunday, December 15, 2002
I remember how loud the ticking of the clock was at my uptown grandmother's apartment. At least once I remember that it kept me up. I remember also the hiss of the steam from her radiator, which was a puzzling sound to me, but comforting somehow from the start. I remember that the fruit she served after dinner -- after desert -- was very different from the fruit we had downtown. The apples were larger and mealier, the grapes more globular and more sour, and with larger seeds. I naturally assumed this had something to do with her, part of the package, with its advantages and disadvantages, of the food she prepared. I remember how much I disliked fruit after desert, and how oddly alkaline (I would have called it dry) water tasted after fruit. Or her water, after her fruit: it seemed to me that her water was subtly different too, less rich and round. I suppose this was an artefact of the glasses we drank from and of the less inviting metal of her fixtures. I remember reading a novelization of Get Smart! on her couch once -- this would have been before I read the Nordoff and Hall Bounty trilogy, doubting that anything written could get me to laugh if I didn't want to. (I liked Get Smart! partly because my friend Marc Bilgray was an avid fan.) But I was wrong: the first paragraph had Maxwell Smart carefully looking right, then left to make sure his entrance into a building is unobserved, then falling flat on his face as he trips over a shoeshine boy. I think I learned from that book that when he enters the phone booth in the opening credits, he's not ducking but going down an elevator. No one believed me when I explained this. I remember his shoe-phone. Later, when I started reading John Ashbery intensively, I came upon a line, in "Fantasia on The Nut Brown Maid," I believe, in which the speaker asks, "And who am I, talking into my shoe," which I assumed referred to Maxwell Smart. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
Friday, December 13, 2002
I remember that when I misbehaved at school, my parents tried to impress it upon me that it "reflected on them." This seemed ridiculous to me, and still does.
Thursday, December 12, 2002
I remember jill johnston, the lower-case lesbian columnist for the Village Voice when I first started reading it. I liked her.
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
I remember Robert Burnett. He was the only kid taller than I was in my grade in elementary school. This meant he stood right behind me when we lined up in the morning. Somehow we got to talking about reading palms. He claimed he could read them, and he looked at the tip of my index finger and intoned, "You will die when you are thirty-six." This seemed laughably old at the time. I thought I knew how he did it -- I assumed he had counted the whorls of my finger-print. But no matter how I counted, I couldn't get them to come out as thirty-six. I realized the likely explanation was that he miscounted. When I started approaching thirty-six I remembered this prediction. He turned out to be wrong. But by how much?
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
I remember that when my uptown grandfather was demobilized at the end of the First World War, he had to walk three weeks -- from near Russia, I believe, back home to Vienna. I remember finding out that he fought for Austria against Italy, and being unhappy since I loved Italy so much. It was strange consolation to know that Austria and Italy were on the same side in the Second World War -- it was only much later that I found out that this was the wrong side, and that Austria and Italy were against him.
I remember being "mali," Yugoslav for: the little one. How did that change?
I remember noticing one day that I could understand Yugoslav. Not suddenly understanding it, but noticing that I could understand it even though it wasn't my language. That seemed vaguely mysterious: it was like my relation to my grandparents. Familiarity, family-arity, but yet something different and not quite essential to me. It, and they, belonged to a world I could explore, that would welcome my exploration, but not quite to the world that didn't need exploring: home and my own language.
Monday, December 09, 2002
I remember that when I got to first grade the strip of cursive letters (we were taught to say "cursive") above the blackboard -- white on a green field -- was followed by the numerals from 1 to 0. I couldn't understand why 0 followed 9, and spent a lot of time bothered by it, when I should have been paying attention.
I remember my father taking me in to register for first grade, probably about a week before school started. We walked up 89th street to P.S. 166. I was five. I had no idea what he was getting me in to.
Friday, December 06, 2002
I remember that at Congregation B'nai Jeshrun, the rabbi was named William Berkowitz. (He got into some kind of trouble later, which I think had to do with money, and he left the Congregation; he then went on the radio, though I never heard him. I liked his son who was about eight years older than I.) My father always pointed out to me that we had the same first name. So once when I was there for a Purim party or Hebrew School function, and he (unexpectedly) came into the room, in very high spirits I said to him (genuinely glad to see him), "Hi Billy! I'm Billy!" (He may have been the second William I knew besides myself, after Billy Douglas, of whom see the posting from 2/22/2002) This was the first time I would say that anyone looked at me askance. It didn't much bother me, but the next day my parents were very angry. He had called them up to deplore my insolence and rudeness (so, I now realize for the first time, he knew who I was: maybe just through my introducing myself). I was supposed to have said, "Hi, Willie." I was surprised that my parents believed this version of the story, since my father so insisted on our having the same name. I felt not at all guilty, but that various authority figures were just wrong, their judgments fallible. Berkowitz's for being so touchy, and reading a kind of default affectionateness as insolence; my parents for thinking that I'd be interested in saying "Hi, Willie" to someone I would have no incentive to address except that we had the same name. I explained what I'd done, and my parents sort of accepted it. It wasn't a big deal as far as my parents went (except fot being one of those displays of misjudgment that progressively lead to the child's independence: they'd been fooled and this started meaning I could fool them), but it was as far as my relation to Berkowitz and his ilk, grave public men who were of a kind of Wordsworthian littleness underneath. No doubt this was good for me, but it was also a great disappointment.
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
I remember that in third grade Hugh Cramer would come over for a date, or I'd go to his house. Later, when I was thirteen or so -- I remember because I had a lot of acne and that came around thirteen -- I was friends with Lem Hering, who asked me about the acne: he was a few years younger than I. We'd arrange to meet, and he'd say, "It's a date!" I found this intensely embarrassing, since it wasn't a date. I wasn't dating yet, but I knew what a date was, I watched The Dating Game, and I wasn't quite sure that I wanted to date. But if I did (although I don't remember being in love at the time, except no doubt with Michelle Mailliet, the Gilberte of my early adolescence, whom I saw six weeks a year in Bellagio), it certainly wasn't with Lem. But I couldn't tell him any of this. He was frank and open, and I knew that it was just wrong of me to be annoyed and embarrassed.
Monday, December 02, 2002
I remember that when my reading was obsessive, non-stop, utter absorbed, as an early teenager, my downtown grandfather told me he had been the same way as a youth. My grandparents' house had very few books, mostly Readers Digest condensed books, and a few books on bridge, and some Leon Uris. I think they had The Good Earth, the first book I read consciously because it had been written by a Nobel Prize winner. (I didn't finish it.) My grandmother read a lot -- I seem to remember that she read Judith Rossner's August -- but she picked up her books elsewhere, perhaps at her bridge club, perhaps at my parents' house, and had almost none at her house. So I was surprised to hear that my grandfather was such a passionate reader. He said that he remembered standing underneath the street lamps, in Sofia I think, when he was seventeen, late at night, because he couldn't stop reading. And he said that he had a "nervous breakdown," and from one day to the next found himself unable to read a single page. He said that he then went without reading for what? -- maybe fifty years -- until fairly recently when he'd begun to read again, but very little at a time. I worried that such a fate was in store for me too, but so far I am still able to read, though not as then. I seem to recall that someone fairly obvious, whom either I had read or hadn't, was his favorite author in his youth. Dumas? Balzac? I wish I could remember who it was, since I took his tastes very seriously. The picture of him reading so passionately all those years ago, and that time of life having been obliterated, had something of the same effect on me as (later) Andre Kertesz's great photography book On Reading which just shows people lost in their books and newspapers. We see them reading, but we don't see what they are reading, and all these figures absorbed in their own worlds seem oddly and completely inaccessible to me. They are in another world, but the photo can't show what the world is, since we can't read what they're reading, not even the titles, and so we see them but we can't reach them. They are far more distant than most people in photographs -- even dead people -- usually are. And my grandfather seemed distanced in the same way. I do wish I could remember whom they (my mother and grandmother) said was his favorite author. That would give me some access, perhaps.
Sunday, December 01, 2002
I remember my parents and some friends (the Herings?) taking us to look at the Christmas windows downtown. I didn't know about them at all. We went at night, with lots of other people. It was dark and snowy. I was surprised and delighted by how elaborate the windows were. The lines were worth it. It seemed festive and strange. The festivity seemed distant from me, just as Christmas itself was -- a Christian holiday that we didn't celebrate (though the Herings did). So it seemed somehow exactly right that we were out in the cold looking through glass at scenes in stores that were themselves closed. The scenes in the window were inaccessible. They belonged to a space that we couldn't get too: the space of Christmas itself. I remember always being disconcerted by seeing window dressers in windows. The windows were somehow supposed to be free of human presence. At night during the holiday season they always were.
Friday, November 29, 2002
I remember eight-track tapes. "Eight-track, record, or cassette." I'm not sure what their point was. You couldn't record, as you could on a cassette, and it was hard to get where you wanted to be, as on a record. All four "sides" had to be the same length for any reasonable sense of continuity, so that songs would break in the middle as the eight-track switched from one side to the next. The only thing you could do was quickly reverse from side one to two to three to four, and so you were never more than 25% of the program away from where you wanted to be. But it wasn't worth it. I remember trying to figure out how they worked -- that is how you could essentially be at four places at once. I think we were led to believe that eight tracks meant greater fidelity and detail, not just four programs on one stretch of tape. I think I didn't really get how they worked until I saw cassette players with auto-reverse -- then it dawned on me, and eight-tracks seemed stupider than ever. I think I had two or three eight-track tapes, but I can't remember what they were now. Just possibly Grand Funk: Railroad.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
I remember splitting my pants. A lot. Especially after services or Sunday school, if I went to the park without going home, in my dressier pants. I remember walking around all day with split pants and trying to keep the split hidden. I remember trying to sew them up and not succeeding very well -- then they'd split without my hearing them go.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
I remember that when I was first learning to tie my shoes I would make just one loop, and pull the other lace straight through. I thought this was plenty good enough till I learned about double knots, which you can't do with one loop.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
I remember that when my parents went to Europe when I was seven (or possibly six), they agreed to send me a telegram saying that they'd arrived safely (in London). I think I had just learned about telegrams. I was staying with my uptown grandmother, and the next morning we got the telegram. I had never seen one before and was puzzled by the words taped to the paper, and by the STOPs. I remember that it said "ARRIVED SAFELY STOP MUMMY AND DADDY". I was very disturbed by the word MUMMY since I spelled it "Mommy." I entertained the paranoid idea that it was a mistake or forgery, but I think my grandmother figured out that it was the English spelling. At any rate, at some point I understood that the woman who transmitted the telegram (I think that they were all women at the time, but it could be that when my parents explained what happened they mentioned that they had dictated the telegram to a woman) had spelled the word in the English fashion. It somehow made England seem real to me, in a way that it never had before, and also it made me resent this woman, who did seem to be trying to come between my mother and me, the deviant British spelling proclaiming at once that from now on I would have a Mummy and not a Mommy and that any access to Mommy came through this Mummy who spelled the word that way and had the authority to do so, authority before which my own poor mother was helpless. I was glad when they came back home.
Sunday, November 24, 2002
I remember that multi-platter albums -- from Beethoven's symphonies to Tommy by The Who alternated sides, so that the first record had side one and side 2n, the second side two and side 2n-1, the third side 3 and 2n-2, until you got to the nth record which had sides n and n+1. The sides interleaved like a sestina. This was so you could stack them on a turntable. The mechanism was really neat -- I remember the first time I saw it on my father's new stereo. I was particularly captivated by the hooked arm that you brought down over the stack of records yawing on the catch that would allow one record at a time to fall onto the spinning drum. The arm forced them out of their yaw into perfect horizontality and pushed them down when it was time for the next record to drop. You could listen to a whole stack of records, and then grab them all and turn them over to get the second half of the album. The tone arm would lift up and move out of the way while the next record fell. I liked the way the records fit over the tall spindle; and the way the spindle itself fit into its socket with a twist. Of course this all turned out to be bad for the records -- the fall, the stacking -- but the turntable seemed so friendly, calm and competent and sunny, with its two strong and reliable arms taking care of the records for as long as was necessary. I liked also that the tone-arm knew when the last record had dropped (since the catch on the spindle wasn't compressed), and just lifted off and stopped.
Friday, November 22, 2002
I remember that on my little record player, you played 45s by pulling up a little plastic semi-circle or three-quarters circle and latching it so it stayed up around the 33 spindle. At first I didn't get what it was for, till my father played a 45 on it; and then I liked the way it came up and also the way it stayed up. I liked 45s too, and the way their sleeves had a one-inch hole in the middle, so you could hold them easily with your thumb in the hole. But they were (by design!) harder to keep than 33s, since they didn't have the outer cardboard casing -- no spine, nothing protecting them. My record player had speeds ranging from 16 to 78. I don't know whether 16 rpm records were ever produced. I guess they thought that the technology would improve sufficiently that they could get records that slow. I wonder where these numbers come from -- what induced the original records to be recorded at 78 rpms? And then why 33, and not 39? 78 can be divided by 6, so perhaps they were anticipating scaling down eventually to 13 rpms. (But why not 72 and 12, or the intuitive 60 and 10 -- 60 would mean one rotation per second.) I remember that my uptown grandparents had albums full of 78s, including, I believe, Caruso. I sort of knew that this large collection of short records was an album; but I think I didn't put it together with the LPs that I got later. It made sense that the brown Crosby Stills Nash and Young album was an album, since it had two record in it and lots of evocative photos. I liked thinking that they all lived together in the house in the album. I didn't get what was so Long-Playing about LPs, though, since 78s seemed like ancient history to me.
I remember that older records (roughly the same vintage as the olive-wreath pennies that were replaced by the Lincoln memorial ones) were thick and brittle. If you dropped them, they shattered. They can't have been made of vinyl -- they were practically porcelain -- they were like plates. Ralph Meeker (as Mike Hammer) smashes -- wait: that too was Caruso; but I'm sure my grandparents had Caruso, although maybe not on their 78s -- a record in Kiss Me Deadly when he's trying to get information. What I liked about the older records was that they didn't warp, unlike the later vinyl. It also felt as though they might be harder to scratch, but I doubt this could be true.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
I remember smoking unfiltered cigarettes (Camels, Pall Malls, Luckies) with the label end out. This was the way spies did it. That way they wouldn't be able to tell what cigarettes you were smoking from the butts. Andy Birsh was against this -- he thought it wasn't a good idea to inhale the smoke from the printer's ink.
I remember Hugh Cramer saying that the bad chemicals in cigarettes were in the paper. This relieved me: it made it ok that my grandfather smoked cigars, which didn't have paper.
I remember my father bringing in some Cuban cigars from Italy. He didn't smoke but wanted to give them out to friends and clients. He gave me a gray plastic shopping bag containing them which I was supposed to bring through customs. As I walked past the officer searching our suitcases, I turned around and went back to ask him where I should wait. He shooed me forward, and the bag wasn't searched, but I certainly wasn't very spy-like in the way I handled that.
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
I remember Lark cigarettes. Do they still exist? I didn't know what a lark was till much later. I think I knew what having a lark was before I knew about the bird. I must have learned about the bird from e. e. cummings poems. Or possibly from some junior high school production of Blithe Spirit. But I knew about the cigarette before any of that. It was sort of like the "sick" in MAD magazine. Later when I saw the Latin sic in verbatim quotations I thought it was a variant of "sick." I knew that when you told a dog to "sic him" it was spelled s-i-c, and I knew my friend Marc Bilgray, like Marc Chagall spelled "Mark" without the k. So I thought that the sic in quotations meant that the thing quoted was "sick" -- that is deviant, and that the quoter was just pointing this out, as MAD magazine would point out their own deviance. So that I got the meaning right, but for the wrong reason.
Monday, November 18, 2002
I remember that a whistle used to come with Cap'n Crunch cereal. You didn't really need to keep buying it though, and I don't think I had more than one or two boxes. I remember that Post vs. Kellogs vs. General Mills made for the cereal dichotomies, and that we were a Kellogs family. I vaguely remember the Kellogs chicken, who signed the word "Kellogs" in some animated ad, and might have been (might still be?) on the Corn Flakes box. I didn't like this chicken for some reason -- something about the green and yellow colors, and something about its unintended obnoxiousness. I remember not quite getting how the cursive letters in "Kellogs" were the letters of "Kellogs" -- there was some odd nub on one of the gs, which I also didn't like.
Sunday, November 17, 2002
I remember sandwiches. Sally Hoge introduced me to bologna, as I think it was spelled in the version I ate, with mustard, which she gave to Tommy, Ken, Butch and me. I fixed it for myself from then on till one day I was suddenly and completely disgusted with it. I remember American cheese with iceberg lettuce. I liked that, even if the lettuce was often rusty. I remember tuna made with mustard rather than mayo. Very dry. I remember the pleasure of rolling white bread into balls and cylinders of crushed rubbery dough. They tasted ok, and you could dip them in water. I remember bread sculptures sold as trinkets in Italy, made the same way and then allowed to dry, after which they would be painted. I thought about doing this a lot, but somehow I never had enough consecutiveness to do it.
Saturday, November 16, 2002
I remember lining up for a hearing test, probably in fourth grade. Hugh Cramer and Dickie Fleischer were on line with me, as well as some other people. Brian Seeman? The person who tested us wrote down an N after each of our names. Hugh told us with great authority that N meant excellent. Later, in seventh grade, I remember hearing Larry Cohen and some other people talking at the other end of a long double class-room with asbestos tiles. I could hear them perfectly. Larry was asking, "Have you seen Billy?" and I responded -- but had to raise my voice -- "I'm right here." He was amazed by how good my hearing was. Clearly an N. But the word acousticssomehow entered my mind at that moment, and I thought of saying it but didn't. I knew that the room carried sound well. I was kind of proud that he was so impressed, and I thought that he wasn't entirely deceived: there wasan impressive thing, namely my knowing the word "acoustics." And if the acoustics were so good, then he should have been able to hear me think the word, anyhow. I had heard it. So maybe my hearing was great after all.
Thursday, November 14, 2002
I remember Willard and Ben. Which was which? Malevolent killer rats. The posters advertising the movies in the New Yorker City subway were very effectively placed.
Monday, November 11, 2002
I remember Growing Up Absurd, by Paul Goodman, a book everybody seemed to be reading somewhat after they were reading Catch-22, and before Cat's Cradle, or maybe it was Mother Night. I assumed that like Catch-22 it was funny. This was when "absurd" seemed to be synonymous with "hilarious." I wonder, now, whether that was my misunderstanding -- did I take "That's absurd!" for "Too funny to be serious"? -- or the lingo of the time. I know that Beckett was supposed to be both funny and absurd, and I thought that the so-called "theater of the absurd" was supposed to be hysterically incongruous. I guess in my mind, and maybe at large, "absurd" and "hysterical" paralleled each other. I know that I made the same mistake about the word "famous," which I thought meant great. My father had told me (in the elevator, coming down from 7-F) that either FDR or Lincoln was the greatest president. "What about Washington?" I protested. "Wasn't he the most famous." Most famous, probably, but not the greatest. On the other hand this is not completely out of line with the British slang use of famous, as when you get along "famously." But I wouldn't, I don't think, have been affected by that.
Saturday, November 09, 2002
I remember a photo of Charles Manson when he was on trial, that appeared in Time. His lawyer was making an insanity plea. Manson appeared at trial with half of his head shaved. The other half was covered with a luxurious hair, beard, and even eyebrow. If you put your hand over half his face he looked like a new recruit. If you put your hand over the other half, he looked like a wild and aging hippy. (I remember how thrilling that word was -- "hippy." As thrilling as later "deconstruction" would be for a little while.) Manson's lawyer said that Manson did not want to make an insanity plea, and was trying to convince everyone he was sane by engaging in this transparent attempt to look insane. Wanting to look insane is what a sane person would do in his situation. But it was insane, said the lawyer, to want to look sane, and he was obviously doing that since he was so intent on appearing to want to look insane. I didn't think about it at the time, but the lawyer was making a Catch-22 argument. I was fascinated by the photo, and had no views on whether he was insane or not.
Friday, November 08, 2002
I remember that you could unscrew the mouth piece and also the ear piece of old Bell telephones. The speaker and pick-up would just rest on a sort of soft base, and you could remove them -- at least this was true of the pick-up; I'm not as sure of the ear piece. You could mute your side of the connection this way, or eavesdrop without being heard. (In the Hardy Boys there was always "heavy breathing" on the line when it was bugged.) My father could always tell when I was eavesdropping (as I loved to do) when he called my mother at home. I tried this to fool him, though I don't think I ever managed to do it adroitly. The point about taking the ear piece off was to be able to leave the phone off the hook without the off-the-hook signal coming on. Otherwise you would have to bury the phone in pillows. I remember when if you left the phone of the hook a live operator came on and called for you, and if you were in a fire or being attacked she could hear it and summon the authorities. I think.
Thursday, November 07, 2002
I remember, it being my birthday, a birthday party I had in second grade I think. I remember it because a few days before I had been swinging my pencil around like a rocket ship and as I whirled in my seat at my school desk I poked a girl named Mira in the eye. She sobbed uncontrollably; I resented her for getting me into trouble, or for being the occasion of my being in trouble; we were forced to reconcile, both of us unwillingly, me apologizing and she accepting my apology. Then I had to invite her to my birthday party. I was surprised that she came, and that she had on a really beautiful dress. And that she had a present for me, gift-wrapped, game sized! I imagine it must have been a game: but all I remember is what it looked like in its wrapping as she gave it to me. The dining room was unusually brightly lit (although in fact that might have been another time) because it must be that my father was taking a home movie of the party. I don't recall ever seeing that movie, but there is one of an earlier birthday -- maybe I was two? -- and I remember thinking how different and bright the dining room looked in the movie, how white and impressive the walls: so unlike the more normal dim dingy light of the room.
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
I remember in addition to Bat Masterson, who used a derringer (as Tom Wall mentioned in April), and who wore a black cape (or am I confusing him with Zoro?), Yancy Derringer. Only from a song, I think: Yancy -- Yancy Derringer. But then I confuse it with Samson, mighty Samson -- his mother, his mother made him swear, to serve the Lord, do know wrong, bow to God who made him strong, bow to God who made him strong and always use a derringer. I think maybe the phrase "always use a derringer" was in the song. This was a song I played on my little red record player. It was on the same album as John Henry (the steam drill only did nine, boys, the steam drill only did nine....) and Casey Jones (leading to shock when on Workingman's Dead, was it? "Driving that Train" has the same spot in the album -- last song on side two, as I think Casey Jones did on my record). I had another record -- who did the rainbow labels? -- with spirituals on it, and I really loved Swing Low. Again I was surprised when I saw other records with the same label (including possibly the Crosby Stills Nash and Young double album) but different songs. I remember falling in love with James Taylor, and being so pleased that there kept turning out to be pre-first album albums, including James Taylor and the Flying Machine, with "knockin' round the zoo" on it. The group explained the line in "Fire and Rain:" "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground." Later I liked Leonard Cohen, whom I listened to on WNEW-FM, and to bring it full circle, understood what Warren Beatty was up to in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, sound track consisting of Leonard Cohen songs, when he shoots Rene Auberjoins with a derringer thus disproving the latter's skepticism about McCabe's past: "That man? That man didn't shoot anybody."
Sunday, November 03, 2002
I remember going to the principal's office.
Saturday, November 02, 2002
I remember that when he was a little boy my Uncle Willy was playing with some nails at school. His teacher asked him what he had, and he popped them in his mouth. His teacher asked him to open his mouth, and he swallowed them. My uptown grandmother took him to the doctor, who made him eat mashed potatoes for three days. I imagined her as being my doctor, Dr. Steffy. I somehow always thought this happened in New York, but he was fifteen when they arrived in New York in 1940 (two days shy of nineteen when he died two days shy of D-Day), so this would have happened in Sisak, Yugoslavia. I think it is the only story she ever told about him where he was naughty. My father always complained, and still complains, that after his death all the family stories were applied to him -- his mother's incessant mourning (or melancholia I suppose in Freud's terminology: aggressive sadness, but not depression) poisoned his life. I remember his cigarette case, returned by the Army, among the curios my grandmother displayed (including letters from him), and that seemed always a slight disparity: if he was such a good boy, why had he smoked?
Thursday, October 31, 2002
I remember my father's partner Gus Casado. He was congenitally late, traveling in from New Jersey, so I had to call him every morning to be sure he was awake and getting ready to go. This was when I learned the 201 area code. I sort of thought this was a joke, but my father was dead serious, and unhappy if I forgot to make the call, which I often did between walking Powell and getting ready for school. I was supposed to call at ten to eight. Later Gus and his family were in a plane crash on their way to Florida. My father heard about a crash on the radio, and called just to be sure they were not on that plane. But they were. Gus and his wife and daughter survived. (The plane went down in the Everglades.) The people in the rows ahead of them and behind them died. I think half the passengers survived. There was a full page photo of Mrs. Casado with their infant daughter, both crying, on the front page of the next day's Daily News.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
I remember white tennis balls. Then the more visible green ones came in and they were pretty trendy. Then there was a vogue for fuschia. Fuschia! Luckily it passed. At the saddest moment of playing tennis, when it starts getting dark but you so want to keep playing, the fuschia ball tempted you to think it'll stay visible like a beacon in the gloaming. But it was more like a clown, and it got kind of bruised red and shadowy just as quickly as everything else. I'm glad they're gone. But I haven't seen a white tennis ball in a long time. I remember that Tretorn tennis balls were much too heavy and could give you tennis elbow.
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
I remember the dollar bills taped behind counters in bakeries. Cake Masters had one, and Lichtman's had one. I don't think Party Cake did. I remember somehow figuring out that this was the first dollar the business made. When silver certificates became valuable, I remember thinking that the silver certificate Cake Masters had taped up (you could tell it by its blue seal) was worth a lot. Like my grandmother's trove of silver coins.
Monday, October 28, 2002
I remember that if you manage to color in the whole screen of an Etch-a-Sketch you can see its workings. I remember that the stylus is controlled by two long crossed bars. I remember thinking that there was something slightly off about the fact that you cold turn the one-dimensional lines that the Etch-a-Sketch allowed you to draw into the two-dimensional, planar surface of the screen. I never worried about this with pencils, but I think that this was because my pencils were always so annoyingly thick. Plus you could tiltpencils and rub with the side of the lead. The Etch-a-Sketch was supposed to be a single, idealiziing point. No doubt for a lot of people the Etch-a-Sketch provided a kind of early introduction to the ideas of integration in calculus. I remember when I first started hearing jokes about etchings (come up and see my etchings) I sort of knew what they were -- visual representations of some sort -- because of Etch-a-Sketches. I think when I first heard the word sketch (now slang for "out-of-it"), maybe in the context of a sketch-pad, I also knew what the word was because of Etch-a-Sketches. They were always red in my day, and big, and, even to me then, surprisingly indestructible.
Sunday, October 27, 2002
I remember that in my bathroom there was just one spiggot in the sink, so that you could mix the hot and cold water together. In my parents' there were two, which made things much more difficult.
Saturday, October 26, 2002
I remember Grossinger's vs. The Concord. I liked Grossinger's and never went to the Concord -- always wondering what I was missing. I liked the huge meals there. We'd go there with the Schubins winter vacations to ski. I remember some day camp there, some child-care affair, and the counseller offering me (or anyone) a dime to drink from a horrendous mixture of water, salt, sugar, ketchup and God knows what else. I think I had a sip and won the dime.
Thursday, October 24, 2002
I remember the pitching rotation for the 1969 Mets. Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman (the only lefty, I believe), Gary Gentry, and Nolan Ryan. Sometimes there was a fifth starter, but I don't remember whom. The battery -- is that word still used in baseball? -- would usually feature Jerry Grote as catcher, but sometimes the marvellously named Duffy Dwyer, who pulled a shoe-polish trick in the 1969 World Series. Gil Hodges was manager. Cleon Jones and Tommy Agee were almost always in the outfield, and Ron Swoboda, slow but a great diver, was often the right-fielder. I just barely forget the shortstop's name -- he hit a homerun on his first at bat in the World Series? Or was it his first at-bat in the 1970 season? I think he only had two homeruns in his career. But he was a great fielder. I remember that the Mets always won their first game, from 1962 on. Then they'd lose plenty in a row.
I remember meeting Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra at Grossinger's. They were at a nearby table. I didn't really know who they were, but I got an autographed baseball from them. Later we played with the baseball in Riverside Park, and the autographs were obliterated.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
From Richard Moran:
"I remember how much my fingers used to pucker up in the bathtub. Why don't they do that anymore? Or do I just not notice it?"
Maybe this only happens to children for some reason. I remember noting this as a child, and my pet name for it at the time was that my fingers had become "blind". I would hold them up and show them to whoever was around, sometimes one of my brothers, saying "See? My fingers are blind!" The family got a kick out of that. --Richard Moran
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
I remember a nuclear fall-out warning commercial from my childhood. A man in a suit, holding his jacket over his shoulder, walks through the empty streets of a city, wondering where everyone is. You hear the wailing horn of the attack siren, but he doesn't know what it means. The announcer speaks with contemptuous regret of his ignorance. He doesn't have a clue, as the siren keeps wailing. The siren was exactly the noon siren that used to go off in New York and which we all set out watches by. So I didn't see what he was doing wrong, though it did seem odd that there was no one out and about at noon (which the siren indicated was what time it was).
Monday, October 21, 2002
I remember the first time I got a Chocolate Eclair from the Good Humour cart in Riverside Park, just north of the 91st street hill. Hugh Cramer told me how good they were. And they are. (Or were to my childish palate.) I was bugged, though, by the two domes on the bottom of the bar, on each side of the stick (as by the two black circles where the thermos glass was glued to the shell), and always hoped I'd find a perfect one. Still the eclair was worth it, and I overcame my fasitdiousness, as I never could do about the thermos. Later my downtown grandmother took me out to luch one day, and the waiter offered an "eclair" for desert. I leaped at it, but hated the chocolate covered pastry that he brought -- I felt cheated. It was as bad as strudel.
Sunday, October 20, 2002
I remember my elementary school French class. Mrs. Park would come in and say, "Bonjour, Classe!", to which we would reply in unison, "Bonjour, Madame." Then came "Comment allez-vous?" "Tres bien, merci, et vous?" "Tres bien, merci." Then names: "Comment tu t'appelle?" "Je m'appelle Guilluame." Then words: "Bouche," and she'd point to her mouth, and "fenetre." I rather think that was it. The cool kids would sometimes say "Comment vous vous appellez?" which we were informed was another way of saying "Comment tu t'appelle?" None of this was spelled out or broken down into individual words for us. These were ritual phrases. I didn't know how the kids who said "Comment vous vous appellez?" knew about this alternative sequence of phonemes. They were like the kids in music class who had recorders instead of the Tonettes the rest of us got. They knew things.
Saturday, October 19, 2002
I remember being car sick.
Friday, October 18, 2002
I remember my uptown grandmother's hearing aid. She'd been deaf from her twenties, and she carried a hearing aid the size of a transistor radio that hung from her neck, rather like David Lynch's in Twin Peaks or Truffaut's in Day for Night. Later, when I was about seven, she had an operation, and after that she could hear. I mainly remember her hearing, but I also remember her deaf.
Thursday, October 17, 2002
I remember the elevator in my uptown grandparents' building on Haven Avenue. Unlike our elevator its interior was stamped metal. It was yellowish -- although I think that might have been before it was replaced. I remember the porthole windows of both that elevator and our elevator at home, which was also replaced by a great blank door. I never used the elevator when my grandparents lived on the first floor -- you went up about five steps, turned a corner and went to the end of the tiled lobby. The mailboxes were there, and I remember once seeing the mailman opening them all up -- maybe fifty -- and filling them with mail from the top (diagonally). The only time I used the elevator was to go upstairs to see my friend Kathy Yerzley, who was a few months older than I. (See 5/9/2002) Later, my grandparents moved to the top floor, and so we always used the elevator. (Well, sometimes I used the stairs.) My piano teacher, Mrs. Jellinek also moved to the same building, and I took a couple of lessons from her there, I believe, after she stopped coming to my house to teach me (just as my pediatrician, Dr. Steffy eventually stopped coming with her car; I remember how strange it was to go to her office on Wadsworth rather than having her come to our house). I liked the airiness of the inner spaces of my grandparents' building. It was fusty and full of old people, but airy nonetheless. I liked the strange awning through the entrance court. I remember them also changing the doors of the lobby, adding a second set and buzzers (you used to be able to walk right in). I seem to dimly remember that the door had a wrought iron grill till replaced by the glass double-doors. My grandparents complained that the new doors were very heavy, which seemed an odd word to apply to a door -- you weren't trying to pick it up!
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
I remember the little fabric change pocket in my father's bathing suits -- of the same woven material as the under support. The pocket (it seems to me they still have them) was inside the corded waist, against the skin and held shut by the cord. It would sometimes hang outside the waist: grotesque and obscene, but in a mild and obvious and not at all troubling way. I remember that he once went swimming with a dollar bill in that pocket, and when I saw it I was sure he'd ruined the money. But it just dried out and was fine, and I was impressed by the quality of the linen in the bill. I place this memory in Bellagio, but why would he have been swimming with American money in his pocket in Bellagio?
I remember incessantly drawing with my pastels the view across the lake, a view I loved about all others. Years later, when I revisited Bellagio in a haze of intense surprise that all this should really exist, should have duration -- a visit like a return to some purely ideal time and space of childhood, like revisiting being able to fit under the bed or in the crib -- we climbed that opposing mountain which I had drawn over and over, and saw its contours and paths from up close. I didn't know you could do that. But nothing about doing it spoiled it.
Monday, October 14, 2002
I remember sherbert. With that second R. That's the way we spelled it in New York. I was surprised afterwards to find that everyone else spelled it sherbet. The et looked (and still looks) absurd to me. I thought I must have been mistaken, until once back in New York I found that it was still spelled with the second R in some diner I went to there. Rainbow sherbet? I think not.
I remember, I think, that Brach's had a dining counter, where one's grandmothers would eat downtown.
I remember that fingernails have little half-moons at their base.
I remember how much my fingers used to pucker up in the bathtub. Why don't they do that anymore? Or do I just not notice it?
Saturday, October 12, 2002
I remember going out one evening in Bellagio for pizza up on the square that you reached by climbing the winding cobblestone road behind the hotel. The square was typical Italian -- the only place in Bellagio that was generically picturesque. We sat down there and ordered pizza before bed (my parents always ate later, after my sister and I were in our room; I think my most recent memory of my yellow nappy footed pajamas was from Bellagio, so I must have been wearing them there when I was eight). The pizza had no tomato sauce! It had no cheese! It had strange grilled vegetables! And fish! Pizza, which was invented in Italy. What a terrible disappointment.
I remember also my parents' friend "the General," who with his wife had a villa up the lake from Bellagio. I went there once, and we had real pizza. Except that the General (I think he was a Second World War general) had a genuine and extreme phobia about cheese. He couldn't come near it. So the pizza we had was crust and wonderful tomato sauce -- no cheese. And I was surprised to find that I didn't miss the cheese a bit. Two different pizza surprises.
Friday, October 11, 2002
I remember the pre-Peter Graves Mission Impossible. The head of the Impossible Missions team then was dark haired and less cool (in the McLuhan sense); his sheer competence had far more energy to it. I missed him and missed those early shows. Probably one season's worth. No one else seemed to care. I suspect Peter Graves was far better, but for me it was like (later) when the star of Alias Smith and Jones shot himself, and they came up with an awful and uncharismatic double. Suddenly Jones was the last link with the original force that the show had contained. I see now that it was a TV spin-off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, so the Jones character was the last link with Newman and Redford. But this was not so disappointing as silver-haired Peter Graves.
Thursday, October 10, 2002
I remember when you opened beer cans with a can opener -- with the triangular end. My uptown grandfather did that. It seems very odd now. I also remember my father opening Canda Dry gingerale cans that way, and Sally Hoge opening large quart cans of Kool-Aid. I wondered why you had to open both ends. I wasn't allowed to open the cans myself then. When I did I discovered the air-pressure answer: the cans didn't pour unless air could come in. Why were the openings diametrically opposite to each other? I didn't think to ask -- it just seemed aesthetically right, as it seemed right that the non-pouring breach should be as small as you could make it -- small as you could make it while allowing the can to pour freely. Beer cans dropped out of my experience for many years (I stopped going to my grandparents' house in the afternoon, when my grandfather drank his beer), and when I started drinking beer, pull tops were long familiar. (We made rings out of them, worrying the tabs off the pulls.) So I remember soda cans opened with can-openers much more vividly than those old Rheingold beer cans. And I remember not quite understanding, when pull tops came in, why they didn't need that second friendly winking opening on the other side of the can.
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
I remember Tonettes. They gave them out in Music, in third grade. They still have them. I remember the cool kids who brought their recorders to Music, while the rest of us played Tonettes. I think Susan Steinmetz had a recorder. That was the first I knew of recorders, and the second thing I knew about them, years later, was that they were in Hamlet. It was cool that they had such a long pedigree -- that something I became acquainted with in third grade should reappear so glamorously in Shakespeare.
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
I remember how I used to stand watching Star Trek with my sister at the door of the bathroom which connected the library with my room. I would lock the door to my room in case anyone came in that way, so that I could claim to be in the bathroom; and I would duck into the bathroom if anyone tried to open the library door, so that they (my parents) wouldn't know I was watching TV when I was supposed to be doing homework. I watched a lot of Star Trek that way. It's not perfectly obvious to me why my sister was allowed to watch it every evening. Maybe school hadn't started yet for her. I remember the little lock twists that you used thumb and left side of right index finger on. They were like those purse hasps I've mentioned -- a kind of friendly bow-shaped affair. Also like my mother's double diamond ring. On the door to my room horizontal meant locked; on the door to the library vertical meant locked. I would also pretend to be bathing when I wanted to play, and so would lock the door to the library (vertical) leaving the door to the bathroom open from my room while I lolled around on the wall to wall carpet. I remember it as scratchy, which could be oddly pleasant when you were naked and getting ready for bed -- it sort of scratched a full-body itch. I think I actually might have liked lolling around on it most after a bath. I remember the carpet tacks and the soft rubbery foundation underneath it, and the peeling wall-paper near the radiators -- it was fun to pull it off since it was tough and didn't rip but peeled beautifully. I remember the bathroom tiles, and how pleasantly warm they would be if the radiator was on full tilt, the fact that its hear rolled over the floor captured by the warm tiles. I remember liking to sit on the warm tiles with my naked butt up against the bathroom door (to the library) reading, a warm and untouched bath drawn on the other side of the toilet. I could press my right toe up up against the fretwork on the radiator cage and feel how warm it was and how comfortable it was to press my toe into the arabesques and whorls. I miss that bathroom -- and bathrooms like it -- a lot.
Sunday, October 06, 2002
I remember U Thant.
Saturday, October 05, 2002
I remember thinking that everyone had a double. I got this idea from The Hardy Boys. The books had sentences like: "I saw either Frank or his double." The casual his seemed to mean we all had doubles. I wondered where mydouble was. For some reason I imagined him in India. I assumed he'd be just like me: friendly, thoughtful, anxious, shy. I wondered whether he'd be wondering about me at the same time. I could be reassuring to him: tell him I was just like him, which might make him feel more relaxed.
Friday, October 04, 2002
I remember, barely, and I'm only 90% sure that I remember it, T.H.E. Cat, starring Robert Loggia, which I came across the other day. I think it got almost entirely displaced in my mind by It Takes a Thief, which nevertheless it might have helped me follow. But it reminds me of how much I liked I Spy. I remember always wishing there were more tennis scenes in the show. I'm sure that I liked Bill Cosby so much because I liked Arthur Ashe so much, and I regreted that Robert Culp was the star and that they almost never played.
Thursday, October 03, 2002
I remember being very impressed when I saw my downtown grandparents rip some paper along a perfect straight-edge (a table edge) without scissors. I didn't know you could do that.
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
I remember Compoz. "Honey, take Compoz." "I don't have a headache!" "Compoz isn't a pain reliever. It will calm you down." Later: everyone is happy, since the mother/wife is her Stepford self again. I was impressed by her irritability though -- so different from the way commercials usually represented women, who so cheerfully did, and discussed, scut work. I imagine that Compoz was particularly intended for women with PMS. The FCC made them withdraw the ads, and I think the FDA the drug, when it turned out not to work.
I remember Geritol: "for iron-poor, tired blood." My uptown grandparents used it.
I remember how my uptown grandparents smelled of menthol. Ben-Gay, I found out in high school, where some of the athletes used it. It was very odd to find the same smell in the locker rooms.
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
I remember my globe. It stood up at waist height and spun under the metal latitude markers. It had a metal time-change indicator over the North Pole, and the South Pole was too close to the swivel, but otherwise it was fascinating. I puzzled over the ocean currents it marked: I didn't understand how currents could go thousands of miles in the empty ocean. I still don't. I also puzzled over the sizes of very small things. Could the currents really be as wide as the not-quite-one-dimensional line that indicated was? One day the globe got dented -- I think I was wrestling with a friend and we kicked it or knocked into it -- and I was deeply surprised to find that it was made of gray cardboard. It dented along a major latitutde/longitude intersection, since they were scored in the cardboard. That dent and the cardboard underneath always seemed like a rebuke to me afterwards, but I could never think of what: of the world? of my interest in the world? of the idea of representing the world in a little globe? Of the knowledge that I could know things -- see through things? -- a knowledge that I didn't want to have? Did my parents give me the globe? I think so. Was I too aware that it would be possible to see through their authority as well? I hope not.
Monday, September 30, 2002
I remember learning the meanings of shitand fuck from Hugh Cramer one year. FuckI learned from him and his sister Gloria. Hugh and I were standing in his kitchen, and Gloria (his older sister) was sitting at the table, and I asked "What does `fuck' mean?" "You don't know what `fuck' means?" they both said with the kind of simultaneity that you only get in movies. Hugh then explained it to me, but I flatly disbelieved him until my father confirmed the story that evening. I spent a lot of time wondering how you got yourself to squirt in that situation -- I thought it must be like peeing, and couldn't imagine that I'd be able to pee in such a position. ("The pleasure momentary, the position ludicrous, the expense damnable," as Lord Chesterfield said.) My father told me with gentle amusement that when the time came it wouldn't be a problem. I imagined him trying to pee into my mother. I imagined you fucked standing up, and it all seemed very unwholesome to me. That summer in Bellagio I was hanging out with some Australian kids. (One of whom had a Mogen David on a neck-chain; I was pleased and made a joke in imitation of my father when some contretemps about a sand-castle came up: "These Jews are all alike." She told her parents, they told my unutterably mortified parents, I protested that I was just imitating my father which mortified them more, and then my father explained that it was ok if someone knew you were a Jew yourself when you made such a comment in jest: otherwise not. This was one of those rare and surprising occasions when adults seemed genuinely distrubed by something that I had to say.) The elder brother of the family heard me saying or teaching the four letter words to his younger sister (with the Mogen David), and rebuked me. I think I dared him to prove he knew what they meant. He did, and then he told me that there were far worse four-letter words, and that I had gone nowhere in my exploration of the depths of linguistic depravity. I was amazed by this and asked him what they were, but he refused to tell me -- he said I would have to wait until I was seventeen. (I must have been nine or ten, and subsequent summers he still refused.) I didn't learn the words cunt or twat until senior year in high school, somehow -- they weren't part of our vocabulary. I learned the latter from e. e. cummings:
Some like it shot,
And some like it hung,
And some like it in the twot [sic]
Nine months young.
(My father (again) defined "twot" for me and corrected the spelling. I wasn't expecting this at all.) But I don't think the brother, Alexander Downer, can have meant those words, and I still don't know what he meant. He's now Foreign Minister of Australia, and apparently extremely right wing. He was involved in some financial scandal a few years ago, but seems to have weathered it. I think he sent Australian troops to Afghanistan.
Sunday, September 29, 2002
I remember when they were building Lincoln Center, near out apartment house. I remember when they tore down Penn Station, near my Chelsea grandparents' house. I remember the adults being upset about it. I remember when they redid the area around the Soldiers and Sailors monument on 89th street, which I liked thinking of as partly a monument to my Uncle. All these building projects and piles of rubble merge in my memory.
I remember another mother/father distinction. In our library my father always had a recliner (although I may remember when the first one was delivered -- black leather with buttons; I thought it was very neat) and my mother an armchair. And another: my mother drank alcohol, my father didn't (except Sangria at La Fonda del Sol).
I remember that at Tommy Hoge's house the equivalent room -- TV, books, desk -- was called a "den." Do people still have dens?
I remember when mail was misdelivered to us, and my father took me with him to ring on the bell next door (2-H) to give it to the Hoges. I wondered about this -- were we allowed to deliver mail? And couldn't we just leave it in front of their door, as the mail was left in front of ours? But Tom Hoge (the father) opened it, and they were both genial about it, and I saw some kids run to the door: Tommy and his younger brother Ken. I think they'd just taken baths. Tommy became my best friend for years, with many many consequences. I think it was a postcard that got misdelivered to us. I remember that the ring was different on their bell than on ours -- theirs was an unpleasant electric squawk, ours a higher pitched rapid ring, like a fast and continuous phone ringing. How does one describe this basic difference, like the basic difference in kinds of dial tone? Later when we moved to 7-F we also had the unpleasant electric squawk. I missed the old ring, which (since they always rang) was like the kind and loving voice of my mother or grandparents.
Friday, September 27, 2002
I remember "Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos."
I remember Tiajuana Smalls ("It's something new baby, for you baby; you know who you are. It's a little cigar.")
I remember "Brush your breath with Dentyne."
I remember "Double your pleasure, double your fun with doublefresh, doublegood, doublemint gum." The ads were about having sex with twins.
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
I remember how frustrating it was to go clothes shopping: trying on different versions of hugely uncomfortable clothes. I remember going down to Barney's on 17th street (when it was still a discount store and not the bankrupt upscale Madison Avenue institution it has since become) and being forced into uncomfortable wool outfits. I remember that after we decided on something, the dapper salesman gave way to a tailor who would chalk the clothing -- cuffs (both hand and foot), shoulders, waist, all of this increasing the frustration and claustrophobia and overheatedness of the whole thing. He worked with a cigarette in his mouth, and would drop ashes amid the chalk, but that was ok because like the chalk they would be gone from the finished suit.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
I remember that one of the standard meals we had was veal parmigiano. I remember when my mother first made it. I called it "pizza meat" from then on. That was when veal was no big deal in any sense.
I remember Accent. Pure MSG.
I remember Adolf's Meat Tenderizer. Adolf's.
Sunday, September 22, 2002
I remember my father listening to the news on the radio. He'd listen in the morning in the bathroom while he shaved. I remember him shaving and listening to news about the beginning of the Six Day War. I remember also riding in the car with him while the news reported, once, the death of John XXIII, and, another time, the death at 88 of Truman. If I'm not mistaken Truman outlived LBJ.
Saturday, September 21, 2002
I remember a memo book of fake leather from which Brian Seeman and I unpasted the end paper. There we found newspaper backing in Chinese or Japanese. We assumed this was some secret document that was being smuggled in hidden in the memo book. But somehow I knew it wasn't, and I was really avoiding the disappointment of even a pristine memo book's actually being made up of used material, of detritus.
Friday, September 20, 2002
I remember when apples had worms in them. Macs, especially (there were only two kinds -- macs which actually tasted good, and Delicious which actually were firm and sweet. No longer). They had worm-holes, and you tried to dig the holes out. Sometimes you'd taste something bitter, and there would be a brown serpentine section in the apple that I thought (and still think) was the worm itself somehow digested and assimilated into the apple it was trying to eat. I remember that the only thing worse than finding a worm was finding half a worm. Each half was supposed to regenerate, and if you ate half, it was supposed to regenerate in your stomach. I don't think I ever really worried about this -- rather it was a fact one knew.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
I remember that I had a canary when I was very young named (I think) Hans. I mainly remember that he died. I remember talking about the canary that I used to have with my parents better than I remember the canary. I think I had him a year.
I remember a parakeet flying through our window into our apartment on Riverside Drive. I wanted to keep it, but of course we didn't. My father took it to the ASPCA. "We don't take birds," they said. "You do now," he said, and left it with them.
I remember that my uptown grandmother made me chocolate farina that she called papi-papi. I loved it. I even liked its occasional lumpiness, because you could never tell if a lump would be farinesque or intensely chocolatey.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
I remember my father and me going to the airport with my mother when she had to fly down to Washington -- maybe to argue before the SEC? This was before my sister was born, so I was younger five or younger. My father had me hold the door open for a kindly looking elderly gentleman just arriving; my father said hello to him and he smiled back and gave me a nice smile too. I thought I was supposed to know him, but didn't (unlike the Fuller Brush man!). Then, after we separated, my father told me he was Cardinal Spellman, though I didn't know what that meant either. I don't remember this, but apparently he offered his ring to kiss. But obviously I didn't know what the gesture meant, and didn't notice it. I think this was the first I heard of cardinals, though later I got interested in Church hierarchy, just like nuclear weapons hierarchy and pigeon pecking order. My mother must have left on a Monday or Tuesday -- on Friday we rented a car and drove down to Washington to meet her. My father took me to the White House: I remember being excited about going, and I remember seeing a man walking on the lawn under a portico. I told me father I thought that was President Kennedy, and he indulged me. So I already knew and admired Kennedy, which makes it hard for me to think I was really five or younger. Maybe my sister was staying with our grandparents.
Monday, September 16, 2002
I remember sitting outside the bathroom door when my mother went into it in the mornings. I remember how warm and bright it was in our apartment, and the bright daylight that came through the crack under the door, and how nice it was to have her voice and her presence right there on the other side.
I remember the mourner's Kaddish during junior services at Congregation B'nai Jeshrun on 89th. Some people would stand up. They always knew they were supposed to, and I sort of knew -- maybe because the prayer book said it was the mourner's Kaddish -- that they must have been mourners. I felt jealous of them for being center stage, and looked forward to the time when I would stand for the mourner's Kaddish. I didn't know how close a relative you had to mourn, though. I think I imagined that some close relative whom I didn't know would suffice.
I remember my grandmothers lighting Yahrzeit candles in glass which burned all night -- I think for their parents and for my Uncle.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
I remember Dyno label makers. They still have them. I remember that you cut the embossed plastic strip off by turning the wheel not to a letter but to a little scissors icon, and pressing then. The machine looked like the Starship Enterprise.
I remember being surprised in a Peanuts cartoon at the phrase "a scissors." How could the word be singular? Would you say "a pants?" But I tried it on for size and now I sometimes say it. It feels naturalized but not natural. But it also doesn't feel natural anymore to ask for "some scissors." I always look to some fence-sitting formulation like "the scissors." But I think I do ask "Where are the scissors?" not "Where is....?"
Thursday, September 12, 2002
I remember the Camel ad in Times Square with the ring of smoke being puffed out by the smoker. I think it later became a Winston ad, or vice versa, but the smoke kept coming. Later I learned to blow smoke rings, and I remember the holy grail of blowing one smoke ring through another, without dissipating it. No one I know ever succeeded.
I remember the cigarette pack painted on the side of the building on 35th and 8th. You could see it from the balcony at my downtown grandparents' apartment. The building countour was perfect for the enticing come-on of three cigarettes poking out from the top of the full pack. Now I think this building side is used for DKNY and Gap ads. But it was perfect and somehow comforting for cigarettes. The obvious phallic meaning of the cigarettes poking out was less interesting than the way the cigarettes somehow reminded one of fingers in a friendly hand offered in greeting and protection. The hand was so big and so friendly that it looked parental -- the cigarettes offered themselves to you as reassurance that everything was ok. From my grandparents' balcony you could see the Empire State Building not far to the right of the cigarette pack, itself grand but friendly. It stood there in its majesty, having long-since accepted its role as symbol of New York, displacing the slightly nervous, Chrysler building which seemed as though it felt shouldered and shunted into being slightly off-kilter. The Empire State Building accepted what it was, like a dignified and gentle and slightly aristocratic great ape (how perfect to make King Kong climb it). The cigarettes represented themselves as its peers, as belonging to that arboreal or masonic level of the city, living there too in that impure empyrean. But they were friendly, they took notice of you, they were like a favorite uncle come to delight you even as they belonged to the grandparental world that the Empire State Building also represented. I suppose part of the reason for these associations, for me, is that my grandfather worked in the Empire State Building, and it was very tall (in those pre-World Trade Center days, the tallest building in the world), and he was very old, so that they both were regally calm about the great height which they had reached and which they were completely without anxiety about having reached. I think that I always hoped my grandfather would reach a hundred because the Empire State Building reached a hundred (and slightly more) -- its storeys and his years seemed to go together. But the cigarettes seemed more interested in me -- and this might also be because the people in my family who smoked were the cousins and uncles and old-world friends seen fairly rarely, but always offered stale cigarettes from the slim airline ten-packs that my family kept in little lacquer and metal boxes on their coffee-tables.
I remember my father's bathing suits, and the little change pocket that hung inside, just under the drawstringed waist. I remember how long his suit would stay wet. I remember him teaching me to dive. My mother could dive, but he couldn't (another division between them, as was her tennis playing); he couldn't go under water without holding his nose, and more to the point he couldn't get himself to go in head-first. So he taught me to dive while I was young before I developed a reflex against it. We would go out to the little wooden raft thirty feet or so out in Lake Como and I would stand at its edge and bend double at the waist and go in head first. This seemed to me graceless and pointless and much less fun than jumping off the huge diving board halfway out to the raft, or jumping off the two platforms on the raft, one three feet high, the other five. After a while I got okay at diving, and even dove off some high diving boards later on, till trying to impress a girl who'd done a wonderful swan dive I chickened out half way and did a belly flop. It stung a lot.
I remember that my mother's mother was a champion tennis player in her youth (which it turned out made her better than you'd think: she hadn't played for decades when I started playing seriously, but even in her sixties as she was then she could beat my thirteen year old self with much harder and faster ground-strokes); I found this hard to picture. What I understood even less was that she was said to have been famous as "a great beauty" in her youth, which I vaguely took to mean she'd had some official imprimatur as a great beauty. That was very hard to figure -- even looking at old photos or extrapolating backwards. I think I thought that old people must have always had strange and elderly tastes. But my mother said my grandmother was a great beauty, and my mother was beautiful -- this was the hard thing to understand.
I remember that my grandmother went and worked as a dress-maker in Paris for a year when my mother was a little girl, leaving her and her father in Sarajevo. They had a cousin there in whose shop my grandmother worked. Later my grandfather became a dressmaker in New York, and was a member of the ILGWU, which entitled them to own an apartment in Chelsea, in the union buildings. But they couldn't legate it to anyone, by the rules of the cooperative. There was a cooperative grocery store there too that had co-op milk and I recall muenster cheese. I remember my grandfather got some magazine as a union member and when I was searching for salacious material I found a promising copy that turned out, alas, to be about bras designed to be comfortable when worn with breast prostheses. When they came to the United States as DPs after the war, my grandmother sewed gloves for a while. I remember that she hated to be called "honey" or "dear" by clerks at department stores. I think I may remember these things together because someone at a glove counter might have called her "dear."
Monday, September 09, 2002
I remember a fireman coming to our school (P.S. 166) and telling us horrendous stories about stupid children who died because they didn't know what to do in a fire. (One nine-year-old girl, he said, got in the shower, but luckily her brother called the Operator and said, "My sister's on fire!" I remember that she was older than me, so I must have been seven or eight. Someone else dropped a cigarette in a couch and it caught fire in the middle of the night. And some kid blew his heel off stomping on an aeresol can.) I remember he warned us against false alarms, and said that some of them were under surveillance, because false alarms killed. I couldn't really figure out how they did, but then decided it must have been because a certain number of fire trucks moving through the streets at great speed crashed, and every time you set off a false alarm there was a chance of a useless crash. So everytime I saw a firetruck passing by, I hoped it wouldn't crash. I wonder whether I ever saw, then, some of the firefighters who later as upper management, in their fifties and sixties, were killed in the World Trade Center.
I remember when I had to get something at the Garden Market (the supermarket on the West side Broadway between 89th and 90th), I went to the produce section and asked a wiry bald middle-aged man who worked there where to find what I wanted. "What's that, son?" he asked. It was the first time, and maybe the last, that I was actually called son in ordinary conversation with a stranger. I asked my mother about it, and she said it was pretty typical. At the Garden (and at the slightly higher scale Key Foods on 92nd) you had your produce weighed in the produce section by the people working there. They tied it up in a plastic bag -- I feel that staplers were involved somehow -- and wrote the price large with a grease pencil. They calculated in their heads, never using the graphite pencil behind their ears. I liked the idea of using your ear as a pencil holder, but my mother detested it. Later retro-greaser types would keep cigarettes behind their ears (and packs in the sleeves of their t-shirts). I did both, but only rarely, and for convenience.
Thursday, September 05, 2002
I remember a science kit that I got. One of the first (and easiest) experiments was siphoning with a hose. It was amazing that water could go upout of a pitcher on our dining room table, into a pink rubber hose (I still remember the taste in my mouth of the cool water through the clammy rubber) and into a glass on a chair. This was one of the first times science surprised me. My downtown grandfather was there, and he wasn't surprised, nor did he feign it. He never did. I once showed him a moibus strip and he just said, "That's because you twisted it." He was very good with cards and gambling and other tricks, but for some reason didn't appreciate my appreciation for any tricks that he didn't do.
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
I remember, now, that my Uncle Cico was a survivor of the camps. I don't know which one. He was a kid -- I think he was 14 when he was liberated. My father told me that he told him the Germans would give the prisoners solid food (as opposed to soup) once a week, and they would throw it into the gutters and then kick and march on the prisoners who rushed to get it. I thought this was terrible but not that terrible; but I didn't know that my father was basically trying to keep knowledge of the camps from me, and strongly disapproved of his mother for telling me about them (and about my Uncle killed in the Pacific). Cico certainly never told me anything about them.
I remember meeting my Uncle Raffo, who had been one ot Tito's partisans and lived in Yugoslavia, in Belgrade, and was an M.D.
I remember meeting another family member who had a heart condition and was lying in a couch during our visit. My mothers' parents were with us on one of these visits to Yugoslavia, and I think my grandmother was saying goodbye to family members she was unlikely ever to see again. She had five brothers, of whom I met two or three. I don't know how the others died. Two whom I met were Mico and Raffo. And I might have met someone named Shuitsa. The man lying on the couch seemed sweet and weak -- schwach. I heard about a year later that he'd died. I don't know how I knew it was him, since I don't know who he was and don't recall ever knowing who he was.
I remember visiting my fathers' parents in Austria when they had taken a trip there and we were in Italy. We went through Trieste. so long and violently disputed. I remember going to Vienna, and remember lamp-posts there. But my father says they never went with me, so I guess I've never been to Vienna.
I remember being confused as to whether Alan Shephard or John Glenn was the first American in space. And there was one between them -- like Adams (whom we knew nothing of) between Washington and Jefferson.
Monday, September 02, 2002
I remember that my uptown grandparents had two friends named Vlado -- Vlado Hertz and Vlado Baum. Vlaudo Hertz was even older than my grandfather, and lived at the end in the Hebrew Home for the Aged on the Grand Concourse. He was a bachelor, the first (and maybe only) person I really knew under that description. He was an extremely good pianist, had a very cultivated slightly English Middle-European accent, and always had a twinkle in his eye. I always thought he looked the way someone named Vlado Baum should look, and I always tended to confuse them. Vlado Baum was younger and had a fedora as I recall, which made him look tough. One of them -- either Vlado Baum or the one who looked like Vlado Baum -- was once walking down the street when a baby fell from an upper-story window, and he caught the baby. When my father told me this story I couldn't believe how it ended: the baby died anyhow. I used to think about what would happen if I fell from our seventh story window -- there were bushes trimming our building, but I somehow knew I'd die anyhow.
Sunday, September 01, 2002
I remember Kruschev. I called him Nikita after his visit to the United States when I was about five. He looked like my uptown grandfather, and had a twinkle in his eye. When the triumvirate of Gromyko, Kosygin and Breshnev deposed him, I was surprised. Why didn't he just order them stopped? Everyone was concerned about this, and I now see scared. We talked about it in school. I remember that Kruschev was sent to his dacha on the Black Sea. A year or so later Life Magazine had an article about how he was writing his memoirs there. I looked forward to them. I was glad he had projects. Then a little after that he died. So he wouldn't have run the USSR much longer anyhow.
I remember that my uptown grandparents, in the antique wooden desk with a glass-doored bookcase where I found the Bounty trilogy that I devoured so avidly later, had The Don Flows Home to the Sea and its sequel, And Quiet Flows the Don, Russian novels which later turned out to be plagiarized. (I'm blanking on who wrote them.) I loved the evocative titles -- I liked the idea that a lord -- a don like Don Quixote -- would somehow turn into a flowing thing, like a river, and flow home that way. And that he would do so with a dignified serenity. Whatever made this make sense must have been whatever innate mythography makes river gods and river-personifications in fertility myths make sense. When my ninth grade classmates, in a fit of generalized exuberant destructiveness at the end of ninth grade grabbed my copy of Ulysses, which I was still struggling with, still proud of, I got my uptown grandparents to get me Finnegans Wake, a book I knew (from my father who nevertheless misinformed me a bit about it) to be even more extreme than Ulysses. (I'm not sure about the sequence here, since my grandparents inscribed it to me for Hannukah of 57-something. But I think I may have prevailed upon them to get me my Hannukah gift months early. I believe we got this at the Brentano's now where B. Dalton is on Fifth Avenue. Or it might have been at Scribners, where my grandmother would sometimes get me sheet music.) Well, all those to say that much later, in the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake the rivers do come to life (as Anna Liffey does herself), and I may have been receptive to this because of the Don, or for the same reason as I was receptive to the idea of a Don turning into a river.
Friday, August 30, 2002
I remember campaigns against crossing in the middle. I think there was a giraffe on a poster (though it's possible that I'm confusing this with Danny and the Dinosaur) who had three heads looking three ways. I remember the horrid jingle:
Don't cross in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle,
In the middle of the block.
Walk up to the corner;
Keep your eyes and ears up (?)
Don't something something (leave the pavement?)
Till the coast is clear!
And wait, and wait,
Until you see the light turn green!
I also remember:
Please, please don't be a litter bug,
Please, please don't be a litter bug,
Please, please don't be a litter big,
'Cause every litter bit hurts.
This was sung to the tune of "Oh dear, what can the matter be," a song I only learned latter and as a derivation from the litter bug song.
I remember how beautifully my mother sang "Somewhere, over the rainbow."
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
I remember:
Whistle while you work;
Hitler was a jerk
Mussolini
Broke his penee;
Now it doesn't squirt.
I think this was a last residue from the Second World War.
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
I remember that about a year after Kennedy's assassination -- but maybe it was 90 days -- Time published a cover painting of him that was representationally very odd. His face was made up of collops of paint, as though modeled in clay but not yet smoothed over. The maid (whose name I don't remember) said something very striking: "That's awful. It's what he looks like now underground." I think she took the magazine away from me to look at its cover, and after she said this I don't think she returned it. I jumped to the conclusion that what the cover showed was his face swarming with worms -- when I jumped to this conclusion I don't know -- maybe then, maybe years later when I learned (in ninth grade science) that not only were there more earthworms than people in New York (a fact which surprised me), but that there were maybe more rats than people, a fact which shocked me. I'd already read 1984 and couldn't figure out why the rat bothered Winston Smith so much. But suddenly I did, and began hating rats. So it may have been then that I realized (or thought I realized: could Time really publish a picture of wriggling worms as bearing the modelling of those familiar features?) what the cover showed. Years later I read Shelley on worms in "Adonais" and then years after that I met Joseph Leo Koerner, whose father was a very distinguished painter and had done many Time covers. Joseph had some of his paintings at his house, and the style seemed familiar. I know, from his obituary I believe, that he did Kennedy covers, and I think he may have done the cover that so struck me as a child.
Monday, August 26, 2002
I remember reading Herman Wouk. Marjorie Morningstar might have been the first adult novel I read. I liked the title. But I didn't realize till maybe 80% of the way through that her name was Marjorie Morgenstern. I saw the "Mor..." and read it as "Morningstar" from the beginning. I think it was when she reflects that both she and Noel had changed their names (Noel Airman from Saul Ehrman) that I looked back and found my error. I think the passages about Noel Airman might have been when I first heard of Noel Coward (whom Airman is said to admire). Noel always hold his elbow, but at one point he bows to Marjorie and she sees that he has a crooked arm. Much later, she's considering some void in herself and she thinks that it's like something. "Or a crooked arm." I remember being in raptures about "a crooked arm." A little later I started reading Wouk's book about a guy who buys a hotel in hte Carribean, and decides he's going to try to read Ulysses, "that difficult novel." My father had Ulysses on his bookshelf, so of course I tried to read it. And it wasdifficult -- there were no quotation marks around reported speech. But I persisted: it took over a year, and only half-way through, I remember, I asked my father whether Leopold Bloom was Jewish. So I got nearly nothing out of it. But I was impressed by Molly's monologue, and her use of "fuck" and "shit" (words she wants to cry while kissing Stephen all over his "clean young cock"). I also liked the letter from Joyce to Bennet Cerf and Judge Woolsey's opinion at the head of the Random House book. I think I learned the word "leer" from that opinion ("not with the leer of the pornographer"). Previously I'd known Bennet Cerf as the compiler of 1001 Jokes, which my downtown grandmother gave me, along with The Wit and Wisdom of John F. Kennedy, edited by someone who made a specialty of those sorts of books (I think he had an Adlai Stevenson one as well).
Sunday, August 25, 2002
I remember change purses. There were the little feminine purses both my grandmothers had -- little pockets of vinyl with brass fasteners that snapped together to form what looked to me like a bow, a double loop at the top of the purse. These sometimes contained two compartments. In his very old age my uptown grandfather would carry a purse like this to take change to the store when my grandmother (who couldn't walk without a walker) would send him out to buy something. As with all her other assignments, he followed her instructions uncomplainingly, but to me it felt like dilapidation, this use of a feminine change purse. I remember the change purses sold in trinket shope in Italy, which I lover. They were of fake leather, often fringed, a shape square on one end and semi-circular on the other, and about a centimeter thick. You unfolded one and then shook the change out onto the flat area formed by the inside of the open cover. Sometimes there would be a kind of pull out drawer inside, which you could pull out into that edged cover area. The second comparment left room when shut for some paper money wedged behind it and the back of the purse. I guess I liked these because they didn't have the feminine decoration, and because they reminded me so much of Italy, which I loved so much -- they seemed so right for lire, and all the Italian boys had them.
I remember, thinking about shaking change out into the top of the purse, poker dice, which they had at the bar at the hotel in Bellagio, and which I loved to play. You rolled them out of a felt-lined leather cup (not unlike the backgammon cups that got me into some trouble later on). It was so easy to get four of a kind!
Saturday, August 24, 2002
I remember the ads on the busses for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (before I knew who they or Stoppard were). And at the same place on the busses were ads either for How Now Brown Cow? or How Now Dow Jones? The latter was a parody of the former, but I'm not sure which was a play.
I remember another in the set of novelty trading cards mentioned a while ago: "You're a real peach" -- flip! -- "All covered with fuzz."
Friday, August 23, 2002
I remember the shirts I wore as a very little boy, with loops at the shoulders for the straps of my pants. They were the toddler version of dress shirts -- I seem to remember that they were smooth and often warm from the iron. The loops were interesting.
Thursday, August 22, 2002
I remember the last cobblestones in New York. I think there were some in Inwood, around Dykeman Street, and there were some near 180th street, and I think there was a large stretch of them on the gigantic hill up 165th street that we would take from Riverside Drive to go to my uptown grandparents' apartment. Eventually they paved over them, and now they may all be removed, but for a while in New York cobblestones would show through deteriorating macadam. (I remember how beautiful and somehow old-fashioned and friendly, with curves down from their crowns like a fifties car, the black streets looked in the rain.) When we learned about Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam, the cobblestones seemed a link to that past. Later, when I visited Stuyvesant Village, the modern high-rises seemed wrong. My Uncle went to Stuyvesant, and I remember visiting it once, in elementary school, but not finding the list of war dead with his name (my name) inscribed on it.
I remember that stoopis a Dutch word, used only in New York.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
I remember ABC gum. Someone offered it to you (to me), but the ABC meant Already Been Chewed!
I remember that the garbage trucks of my youth -- pre-Helvetica, pre-"Sanitation" -- had compacters that went around in a circle, like a water-wheel. Only later did trucks come in that scooped the garbage up into the body of the container. I remember how fascinating garbage trucks were, and how scary. The scooping ones seemed less scary because they brought the garbage up into a container that obviously had room for it. Whereas the earlier ones pushed it down, where it seemed there was no room at all. I sort of knew that it went around, but what was so eerie was that each vain or catch basin of the garbage-wheel came out empty, after going down full. How did it make that garbage disappear?
I remember that my downtown grandmother's building at an incinerator shute. Later incineration became illegal, but some people would still dump their garbage down that way. It became a very attractive place for roaches.
I remember that in my downtown grandmother's building (one of the ILGWU Union co-ops in Chelsea, on 28th street) there were two elevators, one for even and one for odd floors, and that the Ground floor was distinguished from the 1st, which made G even, and the odd floor elevator anamolous (since it stopped on G). My grandmother lived on the 11th floor, but I would take whichever elevator came first, and walk down from the twelfth floor if the even came first. Her building had criss-crossing stairways, so that you could switchback back and forth between floors, in either of two ways. I thought this was pretty cool at the time.
Monday, August 19, 2002
I remember reinforcements. And also self-sticking reinforcements. And also fabric reinforcements. And how easy it was to come home with a reinforcement stuck on you somewhere. I remember spending lots of boring time tracing the outside edges of reinforcements with my pen -- this almost always ended up with the pen-point prying the reinforcement from the paper and crumpling it -- and testing the inner edges, first by twirling my pen around and then by forcing it out on a radius against the reinforcement. I would also try to rip the paper under the reinforcement, almost always with success. I remember the huge frustration of trying to save a ripped-out piece of paper with reinforcements. One wouldn't do, and if you used two you could never get them just right. I remember the experience of trying to pierce reinforcements with the open rings when trying to replace a sheaf of paper. I also remember how hard it was to write in a loose-leaf notebook with the paper still in the binder. Your hand would be blocked by the rings. But it was also a real pain to take the paper out of the binder. There wasn't really room on your desk, and the gouges on the desk made writing hard anyhow (and if you used the binder as a backing, you were so tempted to pierce the vinyl). If you put the binder on the floor, you felt constrained everywhere. It was all very frustrating.
Sunday, August 18, 2002
I remember movies rated M (for mature audiences only). Straw Dogsmay have been the first M movie I saw, although I think some of the more risquee James Bond movies might have been rated M as well. I think that the neat and surprising movie Vanishing Pointmight have been rated M. The rating seemed so sophisticated. It wasn't a promise of nudity of the sort that (I was told) you got in R (Restricted) movies like Carnal Knowledge. (And how weird that Midnight Cowboywas rated X. It just gave it cachet, and made everyone want to claim they'd seen it.) The M seemed more like the M who headed MI-5 in the James Bond movies it adorned -- sophisticated, mysterious, superior. I remember the red M screen at the beginning of M rated movies. They had all the pizazz that foreign movies would have later.
Saturday, August 17, 2002
I remember these lunch snacks that I used to get at Merit Farms -- vile beyond belief. They were either two square apple pies or one turn-over shaped affair that came in a kind of waxed-paper package. They might have been made by Hostess, but I'm not sure; certainly they weren't wrapped in cellophane. I remember exactly how they tasted -- absurdly sweet with some more solid stuff that was supposed to be the fruit, and a hint of cinammon. What's interesting is that I doremember exactly what they tasted like, and the thought now appals me, but at the time the taste was good. The difference between something's tasting good and its tasting appaling has more to do with a cognitive response to the pure sensation than to the sensation itself. Charles Sanders Peirce says something similar, when analyzing what he calls "thirdness," which is at the heart of the semiotic structure of the world. But all you need do is repeat a taste that once seemed good, and does so no longer -- note the fact that it's the very same taste that now seems awful.
Thursday, August 15, 2002
I remember that The New Yorkerused to print passages from Ulyssesin the fine print of their Long Runs feature at the front of the book. The first and last long runs would be regular one line reviews; the others would be sentences from Joyce printed serially. I think they got to chapter 3 (Proteus: Stephen on the strand). Then the Times noticed this in an article and The New Yorkerstopped immediately. I think they stopped in the late sixties.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
I remember Checker Cabs! The jump seats! What could be more fun for a kid? For two kids?
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
I remember where I used to get my hair cut on Broadway on 88th street. Haircuts were a dollar. I used to give the barber a quarter as tip. The barbers there were never talkative, and I didn't get the jokes in movies about talkative barbers -- I mean they didn't seem true-to-life. These barbers had a shaving-cream machine -- black with a chrome nozzle, and after they cut my hair they would shave my sideburns, unnecessarily. They'd sharpen the razor on a leather strop, very impressively. I remember the odd loud sound of the razor scraping near my ears. But I think they thought of themselves as one of the institutions that prepared you for adulthood. In the age of AIDS this preparation turned out to be useless. There was a sign in the window: "We cut hair only." I never quite understood as opposed to what. Ears? Cloth? I remember that as they hovered around me they would always be snipping the air very rapidly, as though ready to pounce on a wayward lock, a practice which when I idly did at home my mother told me was very bad for scissors.
Monday, August 12, 2002
I remember how peeing in the ocean or the lake warmed you up when the water was icy. I hasten to record that I stopped peeing in pools pretty early, having a sense of the implicit social contract -- if I didn't others wouldn't. More fool me.
Sunday, August 11, 2002
I remember lipomas. Fatty fist-sized benign tumors that I associated with male adulthood. My downtown grandfather had one on his arm, my father on his underarm, my uncle Cico (pronounced Tsitso) on his back. They seemed one of those features of adulthood -- not relevant to my life or any life that I would call mine, but nevertheless relevant to adulthood, like shaving and going bald. Cico (my mother's blood-brother, but also a distant cousin) had his removed. I met him twice -- two years in a row when visiting Yugoslavia. The second year he'd just had it removed and had a bandage over the spot: I remember him diving into the ocean with the bandage on his spine. He was my mother's age -- mid-thirties, smoked like a chimney, and had lots of casual sex which he told me about in an indulgent and avuncular way. I was impressed with his athleticism when he told me about coming in from behind (a tergo, not anal), partly because I was slightly off about female anatomy. His athleticism wasimpressive; I was just in the mode of wanting to be a serious runner, and I would run every morning (I must have been twelve or so), but he was much faster than me with greater stamina, despite his smoking. He had red hair and seemed salty to me. He died of a sudden heart-attack a year or two later, to my mother's inexpressible grief. I don't think I know anyone in my generation with a lipoma, so maybe I was right that it belonged to the adulthood of a previous time, not our own.
Saturday, August 10, 2002
I remember The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong.The title, wittily, had the R in PETER reversed, like the R in Toys 'R' Us. Things always go wrong because people get promoted until the reach their "level of incompetence." My father and all his friends read this book. I read a bit of it. I remember one of Peter's example: the Astrodome, where the clouded-glass roof made it impossible for outfielders to see fly balls during the day. I think this was my first introduction to Darwinian theory, although of course what it was was a kind of dysgenic account of what happens when there aren't prices in survivability for the unfit to pay. It seemed a pretty interesting idea, though of course I didn't see why anyone would spend their time reading that book and not fiction.
Friday, August 09, 2002
I remember Cuban-Chinese restaurants in New York. I'd see them a lot, and then my friend Andy Birsh took me to one, I think before we went to see a performance of Shakespeare in the Park. It might have been at that performance that we saw Clive Barnes sitting just below us taking notes (for the Times at the time). That was the Comedy of Errors, which was done in cosa nostra style (settings in Sicily, costumes, etc.), and I couldn't stop laughing, but he panned it the next day. Another time I saw a guy collapse. I was with a friend -- Doug Breitbart? -- whose mother was an MD. The guy who collapsed was in the top row, and we were near the bottom, so we just watched as some other physicians pounded on his chest. My friend's physician mother told us the guy would definitely die. The disturbance probably delayed the opening for ten minutes or so. An ambulance came and took the guy away, and then we watched the play -- me flatly disbelieving that she could know the guy would die, even though I also knew she was right. But that wasn't the Chinese-Cuban night. The Chinese-Cuban restaurants had some Chinese food with yellow Cuban rice. And there were lots of egg dishes -- Carribean style versions of more familiar Chinese food. I loved these places once I found out about them, and probably patronized them religiously till Empire opened up on 97th street and Tommy Fenerty introduced me to the sesame noodles they introduced to New York. (Before that Szechuan and Hunan restaurants had been the new craze, after lifetimes of Cantonese food. I think Hunan balcony still exists. I believe that it was the coverage of President Nixon's trip to China that made Americans interested in Hunan cuisine.) I miss the Cuban-Chinese restaurants; I took my mother and she liked it too. Another restaurant I went to with Andy I took my mother to later, and she told me it was all right to leave cash on the table after we got the bill. I thought they'd think we were walking out, but she told me that leaving the cash was an element of "savoir faire," the first I heard of the term. It meant to me a kind of "Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect" kind of whistling. (I knew that song from the same song-book that I knew Balai-Hai and Dites-moi from.) But I practised it, and today I can almost do it without self-consciousness.
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