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

I remember a record of train songs that I had, which I used to play on my little orange record player. It had "Red Ball Express," which my father used to sing to me and which I loved (he gave me the record player, I remember; later he sang the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away from Me" which I loved even more; and I remember also once letting the turntable spin all night by accident: I was amazed by the continuity of time, that it should just have been going on without a break since I somehow thought the nights were absolute breaks between the days, until the first time I stayed up all night, which was like that skydiving discovery that there was a continuous trajectory from sky to ground; my parents were upset because they thought it was a fire hazard) "John Henry," and "Casey Jones." Later of course it resonated with the Grateful Dead Song "Casey Jones." Later also I tried to play Revolution #9 backwards on the record player. You could move the turntable counterclockwise by hand, and hear the needle singing unamplified. But there was nothing much to hear. I could hear "I buried Paul" though in "I am the Walrus." And we liked trying to creep ourselves out by pouring over the album material of Magical Mystery Tour and Sergeant Pepper. Luckily unlike UFOs I never really was committed to anything serious about Paul's being dead, and when I tried to get my father to feel a frisson about it and he told me it was just a gimmick I learned both the word and the concept by the way the Beatles obviously illustrated it.

I remember putting together a Heathkit Jr. They stopped making them a couple of years later. It all worked except the speaker, but I could listen to the radio I made through an earplug. I also built a "touch-operated capacitor."

posted by william 11:00 PM
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I remember "My calling card for the police." A line from a crime movie (on TV) that really stuck with me -- at least one scene did, and I remember it vividly to this day, and a bit of the set-up. But I don't know what movie it was and I never saw it again. A dashing, nicely dressed aspring criminal wants to make contact with and offer his services to some master criminal in prison. But he's told there's no way he can get to see the master criminal. So he goes out hitchhiking -- this is the part I remember vividly -- and an old man picks him up in his truck. He's amiable. Cut to the criminal with a gun on him. The old man: Oh. It's money you want? "I'll give you what little I got" -- the only other line I remember verbatim, the old man pulling out his notably slim wallet -- notably slim because my father's was notably thick -- I don't think that the wallet's slimness was meant to signify in the movie. I don't want your money, says the protagonist, I want to kill you. Why, asks the old man. The police will find you and arrest you. That's exactly what I want. Protagonist fires. Look of mingled shock and pain and surprise and incomprehension on the part of the old man. He collapses. Cut to his body outside the truck on a dirt lot. Protagonist takes off his sports jacket and tosses it on the old man's inert body. "My calling card for the police." (Later, I vaguely remember, he realizes that this is not all a game and that he's made a big mistake. He may get fried, while the master criminal may be eventually released, wiser than his ephebe. But all this may just be a generic add-on in my vague sense of what surrounds that vivid vivid scene.) Anyone know the movie?

posted by william 12:28 PM
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I remember clip-on ties. There were two kinds -- the ones like the rented bow ties you now get, that went all around the neck, and the ones that you just clipped to your collar. When I had my school picture taken in fourth grade I had to wear one.

I remember my father teaching me how to tie a tie. I could never master the Windsor knot. (Later I read an Ian Fleming James Bond in which the villain's penchant for Windsor knots -- Bloefeld's? -- is taken to show that he's homosexual; Goldfinger I remember is characterized by Bond's briefers as having semitic earlobes. I always wanted to apply the Windsor knot-indicator to President Reagan's similar penchant.) I remember also the intense frustration of having my father tie my tie, from behind. We stood at the mirror, since he could only tie a tie in a mirror, and his fumbling at my tie, getting the lengths wrong, etc., I found tormenting to a lunatic degree.

I remember plastic collar inserts. They were always in my father's and his father's change tray, as part of the paraphrenalia of adulthood: an inch and a half long, off-white, tapered at one end. I didn't know what they were and wasn't curious. Later I used them myself, and kept forgetting to remove them when I put my shirts in the laundry.

I remember my mother's stockings (of course). And my grandmothers'. (Including the fact that they might cover up that gouge on my downtown grandmother's leg.)

I remember, with far more surprise, my father's garters, which he put on to keep up his dress socks and which seemed to me one of the terrible things you'd have to do as an adult. He would sometimes wear a tuxedo as well (for the opera or a wedding), and those garters seemed to me like wearing a tuxedo every day.

posted by william 3:21 PM
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I remember street-crossing lights that were only red and green, and when they started putting in yellow lights and Walk / Don't Walk signs, and push-buttons to cross. Before that, you crossed on the green, and the red and green would both be on simultaneously for two seconds before the light turned red. I remember not knowing exactly what the blinking Don't Walk meant when it came on. I mean I knew it meant that the light would soon turn red -- I just didn't see exactly what I was being told: the content of the instruction made no sense. The old lights were flat, without the peaked tubing that makes it hard for drivers to see when the light is about to change for the cross-traffic. I liked those snub-nosed lights: at about the same time they were modernizing the busses in New York, and I remember liking the old busses, also snub-nosed and of a lighter green, more than the new aerodynamic busses that leaned forward into the wind. The Number 5 route (on Riverside) tended to use the old busses more, the 104 (parallel to the 5 for long periods on Broadway) tended to be newer. At that time there were also a few of the older IND subway cars with their plaited straw seats left, but I much preferred the new cars. The homely busses and traffic lights seemed much more like family, somehow.

I remember asking my mother what made the lights turn red and green. She said that a "governor" did it, and I imagined Governor Rockefeller, somewhere to the North of Spuyten Divel, sitting in a sort of lighthouse like structure overlooking the Palisades, flicking a switch every minute and a half to change the lights. I knew people wanted to be governor, and that seemed to me an interesting and obviously adult combination of desire for power with civic duty. I remember specifically that she said the lights changed every minute and a half; I now know that this is not true, but it's part of my temporal intuition -- a minute and a half for me means not 90 seconds but something both longer and shorter: how long you had to wait for the light to change on 90th and West End when you were five or so.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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I remember lanyards. Or "lanyards," really, as it turned out. You made them out of the sleeves of Wrigley's gum. Two to a sleeve. They were folded very fine and linked. The idea was to get a chain twice your own height. Then you were supposed to cut it in half (but why?) burn it, and sleep with the ashes under your pillow, to dream of the person you would marry. You chewed a lot of gum that way. No one I knew ever finished one, though I got mine several feet long.

posted by william 8:52 PM
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I remember wax fruit. Also a lard cake I found in the fridge once, and thought was just icing. Shocking. But not as shocking as the first time I tasted liver. I remember thinking a few months later that it couldn't be as bad as I remembered it, and I determined to like it (since I liked the smell of it frying with onions). It was just as bad -- it made me gag, and somehow this was entirely a function of its taste and not its smell, although now I dislike the smell as well.

posted by william 2:09 PM
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I remember learning about quicksand. There was something very creepy about it. I think I learned about it in a movie -- I seem to recall King Arthur being chased by some knights. But they and all their gorgeous trappings sink into quicksand, and my father explained to me what it was. Later, in the first Man from Uncle book (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), I think, Napoleon Solo or maybe Ilya Kuryakin gets stuck in quicksand, and then I learned that you could swim through it if you were very calm and maintained a perfect horizontal. The trick was not to hurry and not to panic. In the same book there's a terrible failure of narrative: Napoleon Solo has a dream that he has to climb an enormous flight of stairs or something, and he climbs and climbs and bursts through a steel door, and by this time the writer has forgotten that this is a dream, and the whole rest of the novel unfolds from there. I spent hours paging back and forth trying to find out where the dream ended. But it didn't.

I remember Bruce Tegner's books on self-defense. And in the same non-fiction section of the bookstore, books on UFOs. And they were non-fiction! And everyone reading Jeanne Dixon's A Gift for Prophecy. I remember trying to read War With the Newts, by Capec, who also wrote about robots. But I could never quite figure out what was going on. I do remember though some alien from a transcendental realm asking one of the heroes "What's the lightest color you can see?" and its disappointed surprise that the lightest color the human can see is white. I was very struck by this, because I knew it was fiction but it seemed such a neat reference to something you couldn't know how to refer to -- that realm of colors lighter than white -- even in novels.

posted by william 8:28 PM
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I remember continuous showing. You went to the movies without checking the schedule, and watched till you got to the place where you came in ("this is where I came in"). If you went to a double-feature, you saw one movie sequentially, the other not. It didn't matter though, and movies were on the whole shot so that they could be seen starting at any moment: the revelations were just as effective at the beginning once you'd seen the end. I saw Dr. No and From Russia with Love as a double feature -- I think at the Symphony on 96th street. Watching From Russia with Love recently, I realized that I'd always misremembered its shape: I thought Bond killed Grant in self-defense early on. But I now realize that I thought the garrote in the watch got explained after Grant tries to use it on Bond, and not before. (The opening scene is in a way all the better if Bond's apparent death comes after the apparent happy ending. And with that 60's monkeying with the credits -- the action starts before the credits come on -- you wouldn't know where you were in the movie. Even if you came in on time, you might think you were at the climax: and then Bond dies! This pre-credit sequence is a trademark of the movies now, but was more effective then, during continuous showing.)

I remember using a trick that Bond uses: I taped a hair accross a cabinet in my room where I kept comics and other precious things, and I could always tell when my sister had snooped. But one day she figured this out, and just replaced the hair with one of her own. And then I had to use two hairs. And then we gave up.

I remember we all got attache cases like Bond's in From Russia with Love. The automatic cap-pistol broke in all of them after only a few uses: there was a small plastic nub which broke off after being struck by the spring hammer a very few times. Then you had to pull back the hammer inside the gun by hand before you could shoot it again. Very low-tech and frustrating.

I remember European caps. They were made up of a series of small plastic cylinders and had more gunpowder than the red American strips of paper. The American caps would also be duds every few rounds: a circle printed on the paper but no gunpowder, or very little, there. You could set off American caps with a hammer, but you needed those cool European snubnosed revolvers to set off European caps. The whole set of them fit into the cylinder of the revolver at once.

I remember bows and arrows with rubber suction cups. I took them off and sharpened the wooden arrows in a pencil sharpener. My grandparents took them away from me. I remember also my grandfather showing me that if you shot upwards a little bit the arrow would go farther. I was amazed by this, and thought about it again when I took calculus.

posted by william 12:23 AM
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I remember Seven-Up. The game, not the soda. (But which came first?) Seven kids stood in front of the class, and you put your head down and tried to guess which kid tapped you. If you guessed right you got to be one of the seven up there. I cheated by looking at their shoes.

I remember some other stores: Berman Twins, on 93rd street and Broadway; Dragos' shoe repair; Eclairs, on 72nd street; Lichtman's (86th); Cake Masters (between 85th and 86th); Party Cake (on 89th, which got cited by the Health Department -- the New York Times used to publish their daily citations); Charles Chemists on 89th; the Garden Supermarket, and a toy and bookstore right next to the Garden Market that wouldn't sell me airplane glue unless I bought a model to build (which is all I wanted it for); and several other bookstores like Pomander (founded by a Spanish teacher from my school who quit and started it with his lover: it was right next to the Thalia Theater on 95th street), Books & co., and, most notably, Parnassus on 89th between Broadway and Amsterdam. I saw one day on my way to school that its owner was asleep inside on a cot -- he must have lived there. The bookstore didn't tend to open until afternoon. I didn't really get along with the owner, although in college Madeline Kripke was working for him -- Saul Kripke's sister, it turned out, though I barely knew who he was then -- and she took an interest in me when I asked her whether she knew of European Caravan, edited by Samuel Putnam (Hillary Putnam's father, it turned out -- and Hillary will have been Saul's teacher at Harvard, as was my friend Burton Dreben. Later I audited classes with Saul. Hillary was uninterested the one time I mentioned European Caravan to him.) European Caravan contained Beckett's first publication between hardcovers. Madeline Kripke was so taken with the fact that I'd asked for it that she sold me her water-damaged copy of it for $8, as well as a copy of the famous transition 49 no. 5, containing Beckett's Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. I still have them both. But the owner of the bookstore sold it a bit later, and decamped it turned out for Rhinebeck in Westchester, where he established David Lewis books: I think David was the name of his nine-year-old son, and that his name was something else. At any rate, neither he nor his son was the celebrated metaphycisian of possible worlds (and colleague of Saul Kripke). David Lewis Books was the first to publish Blanchot in English: in 1973 they came out with Thomas the Obscure, well before Station Hill began a series of translations. I was to become obsessed with Blanchot and even to carry out a short correspondance with him. But all this was well in the future when I used to go to Parnassus to look for Edgar Rice Burroughs's science fiction there as well.

I remember building a batman model, and trying to fit the molded plastic pieces together. I got the model by searching all the chairs in the house for change -- eventually I came up with the $1.98 plus tax that it cost. There was a toy store on 83rd street where I got it. It looked so good on the box, but of course the problem was that you had to paint it when you were done. I don't remember the name of the toy store, but I took my sister there to spend the $20 she found in the men's room of the Amsterdam airport when she was seven or eight years old and we were changing planes. My father took her to the bathroom, and she saw the American money I always imagined in a urinal, but I now am not sure that I ever heard that detail: maybe just on the floor.

I remember that there was a tailor in the basement of our building. I sort of assumed that this was a standard building amenity in New York, like the milk machine downstairs where you'd get a quart of milk -- whole or skim -- for a quarter. Later they raised it to 27 cents, which was a pain. The tailor was an old man with spectacles who would sew up buttons and rips. You could get to him through the courtyard that led out of our building and up a ramp to 89th street (the main entrance was on 90th, but my school was on 89th so I would use this back entrance). The kitchen and dining room windows looked out on this court -- there was a large and impressive birdbath in the middle of a grassy triangular plot below. I was amazed and impressed with myself when I let a rope down from our seventh floor window to the ground, and a friend pulled at the other end (Tommy Hoge?). I'd made a connection from above to below that before seemed only notional. I had a similar experience, I now see, the first time I went sky-diving. It turned out that the level of the plane and the level of the ground really were part of the same world, and you could connect one to the other without the technology of the elevator or of take-off and landing, machines that one understood but that seemed to work more like telephones, mediating separate spaces in a way having nothing to do in a way that was quite real with actual physical relation.

I remember Murray's sturgeon shop. I remember Merrit Farms on 87th street where I would buy knishes. One person behind the counter had a concentration camp number tatooed on his forearm. I knew what it was the first time I saw it, but I don't know how I knew.

posted by william 7:40 PM
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I remember cyclamates.

I remember a book my parents had in the library: The Loving Couple. (They also had Modern Marriage, a manual that I discovered a little bit later in a high shelf, and tried unsuccessfully to find titillating. I thought at the time that it was mildly depressing, and mildly competent, that they should have and know how to use this manual. I think now, though, that it was probably just a joke purchase. How little one analyzes one's own settled judgments.) The Loving Couple was bound so that you could start at either end by flipping it upside down and backwards: one half gave you "His Story" and one half "Her Story." They started with the same sentence. As I recall from flipping to the end, her story ends happily, his not. I never read anything else in the book, but it seemed a neat idea. Whenever I scanned the spines of the books in the library I would notice it, since its spine was the title repeated vertically up and down -- neither story was privileged. I think it was copyrighted on both sides too, though I'm now not certain of that. It had a black cover, with the type in that sixties semi-cursive style. I liked that the book existed: it seemed to stand for something pleasant about the adult world: not that it was sophisticated, but that it didn't have to be. I got what kind of fun the book was; it was a kind of fun I understood, and it seemed that if adults had that kind of fun with their books then there was a continuity between where I was and the adult world.

I remember everyone reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. (This turned out to have been ghosted by Alex Haley of Roots fame, but I'd never heard of him then.) This memory is specific: it was on the beach of the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio on Lake Como that people were reading this. I liked the name -- the X. I probably related it to the X-Men; I must have been more into Marvell comics by that time.

I remember Lance Loud.

posted by william 11:00 PM
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I remember "Do not fold, spindle, staple, or mutilate."

posted by william 5:03 PM
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I remember bell bottoms, and long side-burns. Yuch.

I remember a kid in the playground when I was about six or so calling in a somewhat annoyed voice, "MOOOMMMM!" And I was puzzled and asked my Mommy why he only called her Mom. (He was obviously older than I, maybe eight or nine, though all I heard was his voice from far away, outside the playground, on the amazing amphitheatrical sledding hill, echoing more loudly in the summer.) She said it was a kind of uglier name for Mommy, and that she hoped I'd never do it, or at least not before I was ten. I call her Mom now.

I remember kneaded erasers. My father told me I was really playing with shit. He got this from the Caine Mutiny -- the analysis of Queeg's little steal balls.

I remember a kid with a baseball jacket with patches from all the teams. I had a similar one in red, but his blue one was cooler somehow. I remember that this was when I learned the word "wind-breaker," and how much I loved windbreakers.

I remember meeting a kid called Billy Douglas. This was the first other Billy I'd ever met. I'd climbed the rocks ("climbing the rocks" was the standard name for our activity of scrambling up a granite outcrop in Riverside Park and 88th street.) His sister kept calling "Billy, Billy," and I kept saying, "Yes." I realized early on that he must be another Billy, but I decided not to show that I realized that, until they figured it out. Until then I'd be justified in saying yes. And this way we might talk and become friends. This was the kind of ruse I used for friendship then. I don't know how much of that has changed. Anyhow they did figure it out (she was a little younger than he was, and didn't quite trust me to be really named Billy.) I think I was the first other Billy HE'D ever met too. He turned out to know Tommy Hoge -- to be a cousin or something. So we agreed to be friends, despite his sister's reservations. But I never saw him again.

posted by william 9:28 PM
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I remember that The Sinister Signpost was the scariest and best of the Hardy Boys mysteries. Also that I learned the word "chums" from the series. I think no. 4 was The Missing Chums, but I'd already learned the word from an earlier one. My mother got me the first Hardy Boys book -- The Tower Treasure -- as a book I could read myself. Frank and Joe had chums even in the first. But The Sinister Signpost was a cut above (I learned in college that Franklin W. Dixon was actually a syndicate), sort of like the Robert Aldrich movie version of Kiss Me Deadly. I remember the older, burlap brown Hardy Boys books, and the newer ones, with a blue spine and Look Magazine drawings of the boys and their chums. I preferred the new ones, but I used to stare at the Grosset & Dunlap logo on the old ones, trying to make sense of the words, as though they were in a foreign language. I knew they were names -- but what kind of names?

posted by william 8:54 PM
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I remember the New Yorker bookstore on 89th street. It was run by the son of some famous radicals. I shoplifted Edgar Rice Burroughs books there. I could never find the first Mars or the first Venus book though -- and I haven't since. But they cheated me when I sold a beautiful Howard Pyle edition of King Arthur for 12 cents, so I could buy a Jimmy Olsen comic. They were attached to the New Yorker theater through a passageway upstairs. Now all that survives of that nexus is New Yorker films. When you went up the amazingly rickety stairway of the bookstore (it would be closed now as a firetrap I'm sure) you confronted a life-sized poster of Humphrey Bogart with a gun. I didn't know who he was then, but he and his world seemed extremely glamorous.

posted by william 8:13 AM
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I remember window-washers. Do they still exist, post-Mies? There were hooks built into the walls outside the windows, and they had thick supple leather belts which they would attach to the hooks. They'd lean back comfortably and wash the windows, hanging over the drop without a care in the world. You can see them in old comedies, but can you see them in reality?

posted by william 7:41 AM
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I remember 660-dialtone-9-dialtone-6. My friend Tommy Hoge watched a phone repairman dial this (on the actual dial of the time) and hang-up. The phone rang immediately. It was the number you called to see if you could receive calls. I showed my Haven Avenue grandmother this trick, and impressed her. The next day, the neighbors complained, the phone rang for four hours. I think it was
unrelated.

I remember exchanges. Ours (on Riverside Drive) was TRafalgar 3; my uptown grandparents' was WAdsworth 9; my downtown grandparents' was Algonquin 5.

I remember New York 24, N.Y.; not 10024.

I remember when the dial-tone and busy signal sounds changed. Not all at once, but the later changes to touch-tone seemed to track the same areas. For a while, when I called my grandmother, I still got the old busy signal, and at her house I got the old, reassuring dialtone, more a squawk, less a trill than the new one. It reminded me of her voice -- low, Viennese, accented, harsh but comforting at the same time.

posted by william 3:08 PM
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I remember Spaldings. And chinese vs. american handball (in chinese it had to bounce before it hit the wall; american was notional only and we never played it; if we had the ball would have been in the street all the time). You called "Ace-no higher!" if you wanted to serve, and the courts were the sidewalk squares of concrete. Width one square for each player's court, length two squares. And "Bhuddas up" if you lost.

posted by william 1:53 PM
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I remember GRID. And HTLV.

I remember tiles -- in the lobby of the building I lived in till I was two, on 158th street; and in my grandmother's bathroom in the building next door, before she moved at the same time we did.

I remember lunatic fastidiousness. A pirate t-shirt I used to like until I noticed a small spot in the fabric that wouldn't come out. A plate where some imperfection in the enamel left a black rough mark on it. I would always make sure to avoid that plate in the cupboard. I once threw out some scrambled egg served to me on it, and couldn't eat scrambled egg after that for quite a while. This was a period when I thought I was surrounded by poison. The exterminator came one day with a pump a little like the bicycle air-pumps on my parents' bikes. I think this connection led to a horrendous fantasy I had at the time: I hated wet kisses (and was famous in my family for always wiping kisses) and this was because I thought evil aliens were hidden in the plastic bodies of my family and when they leaned forward to kiss me, inside the aliens had placed a poison pump to the lips of the plastic model and were pumping poison at me. If I wiped the kiss off I'd be ok though. This seemed like a sustained belief, but I don't see how it could have been: where did I go for comfort when I fell or got sick? But I thought all adults were like this, but the more affectionate, the more vividly. My friends I assumed were human though.

I remember how very itchy the very itchy beard I wore at a Purim party at Congregation Habonim (on 99th street?) was.

I remember that my grandmother (from 158th street) had a pyramidal gouge in her leg. I didn't ask anyone about it: it was a fact both uncomfortably specific and yet somehow eternal. I asked my mother about it only a year or so ago, eight years after my grandmother died. It was the result of a childhood accident: not a big deal, but I now see a big enough deal that my mother had asked her about it.

posted by william 2:00 PM
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I remember desert boots. They counted as shoes at school, but were the farthest thing from real shoes that we could wear.

posted by william 2:57 PM
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I remember old Best-of Superman books, in which the older comics showed Superman with a lantern jaw. I hated that Superman and much preferred the contemporary round-jawed forelocked version. They both had blue hair though, which I never quite got.

I remember feeling self-conscious and an outsider when my friends (especially Hugh Kramer and Dickie Fliescher) jeered at me for liking DC comics. They had graduated to Marvel (which I didn't know about and which didn't have the seal of approval): Spiderman, X-men, Fantastic Four. But I still liked Superman and Batman, and rooted for DC. It was like rooting for New York over Pittsburgh -- my friend Tommy Hoge was a Pirates fan and New York was so big and familiar and clunky. But I still rooted for New York.

I remember that this was like liking the Empire State Building. But the Empire State Building also reminded me a little of the old, rock jawed Superman. And I associated D.C. comics with the Empire State Building, I think because my grandfather worked there and my friend Marc Bilgray's father was an entertainment lawyer and through connections Marc got a free subscription to Superman, and I claimed that my grandfather worked for D.C. and got me a free subscription as well, but I actually paid for it. Marc didn't believe me, but one day he was over at my house and saw the comic come in the mail, and then he did.

I remember the thrill when the comic came, a week before it hit the newsstands. It was folded lengthways in a thin brown sleeve, and it made the mail happy that day.

I remember being amazed that my father would throw out junk mail without looking at it.

I remember The New Yorker also came in a brown sleeve, but not folded, and how hard it was to put The New Yorker back into its sleeve, so that my father could read it in the pristine and unread state that he demanded. Once I made a joke about the four horseman on the apocalypse -- Death, Plague, Famine and Butterfingers -- and later that day got into trouble when my father opened the New Yorker and saw the cartoon that I had gotten it from (a football cartoon).

I remember Jimmy Qualls breaking up Tommy Seaver's perfect game with one out in the ninth. The ball fell between Tommy Agee and Cleon Jones, and I couldn't believe they didn't dive for it. The next day the newspaper said that Agee just shook his head at Jones -- they couldn't get it. The Mets won 4-0.

I remember that Tommy Seaver pitched three perfect innings against the cubs a week later, but came nowhere near a perfect game, dashing my hopes. I think the Mets won that game 1-0.

I remember that TV-Guide said that Flipper was on, but when I turned on the TV it was a Yankees game. I couldn't believe it. How could TV-Guide be wrong?

I remember feeling the same way when the Shuttle Exploded. Or when the New York Times the next day had its single headline: THE SHUTTLE EXPLODES. They couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that they would be so wrong up until that point that they would have to print THIS, and not the news they were scheduled to print.

I remember Windows on the World.

I remember hoping that Bugs Bunny would burst through the Warner Brothers logo. Loonie Tunes usually came on without the logo, but sometimes the logo would cut to the Loonie Tunes title, and I was always disappointed. But very occasionally, Bugs Bunny would appear in a Loonie Tunes cartoon.

I remember Officer Joe and Sandy Becker and Hambone. Marc Bilgray once got to be in the audience of the Sonny Fox show (his fathers' contacts, again).

I remember that I thought "All the news that's fit to print" meant they printed all the news that they could fit in. And then one day I realized it couldn't mean that.

I remember when the New York Times had eight columns.

I remember "Special to the New York Times." And that I thought this meant it was a story particularly special to them. I would always read those first. I was glad that they thought sports victories for the New York teams were special.

posted by william 11:59 AM
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I remember symmetrical windshield wipers: they both swept semi-circles, moving in opposite directions simultaneously, towards each other in the middle, then away to the edges. I hated when parallel wipers came in, unbalancing the window into a cubist form, with a high, nearly vertical angle on the left rotated to a near horizontal on the right.

I remember as well having a similar distaste for what I called I-books. I deplored the fact that Jack London's Sea-Wolf was in the first person, after White Fang and The Call of the Wild. The feeling was like that of the windshield wipers: there was something asymmetrical about the point of view. It felt masochistic to read them -- a combination of pleasure with disgust, where the pleasure was almost nothing, and the disgust barely tolerable. But somehow I changed my mind when Wolf Larsen had his stroke -- and I think now it's because it then became a he-book: he became opaque to the narrating I, and that must have made for a kind of symmetry at the end.

posted by william 3:14 PM
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I remember flat topped milk cartons with little wax cords attached to the one inch-corner square you could pull out.

I remember when soda cans got pull tops. And when the metal rings pushed the metal into the can.

I remember "You like it. It likes you."

I remember sucking the iced wool on my gloves when I was out sledding. You'd warm your hands and quench your thirst, and then it would all ice up again and you could repeat that experience of tasting water and smelling wool.

I remember thinking in first grade, "At least I'm in a grade."

posted by william 3:51 PM
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I remember that during the days of black and white TV, men who were to appear on TV were told to wear light blue shirts instead of white.

posted by william 3:08 PM
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