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 "How would you like a nice, fruit-juicy Hawaiian Punch?" "SURE." Bang!

I remember also how much it hurts to be punched in the nose.

I remember that Houdini died when he was punched in the belly unexpectedly by someone testing his famed ability to take such a punch.

posted by william 7:28 AM
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I remember chocolate cigarettes. We got candy cigarettes too, but I liked the chocolate ones. Both kinds had red endings to show the cigarettes were lit. On the candy ones the red was a candy glaze, painted into a sort of cavity at the end of the cigarette; on the chocolate it was brighter, redder, and thicker. The candy cigarettes were white because they were made of candy; the chocolate cigarettes had a white paper sleeve like real cigarettes. The white paper sleeve made them a little harder to eat, since somehow you had to do something with the emptying paper. I would bite it or carefully rip it off to try to make it conform to the diminishing chocolate. I remember crumpling the paper in my mouth, where you could hide it so that what was visible looked fine. But as the paper got wet it became harder and harder to slide the chocolate you were nibbling through. Until it got wet enough that it would just sort of dissolve off, but then you had this slightly sweet slightly gummy paper in your mouth. Still, it was worth it. Candy cigarettes were sturdier, and came in dusty and bleached packs; chocolate cigarettes would break before you finished the pack, but they looked so wonderful, all those chocolate cylinders packed loosely in their sleeves, and the packs were somehow nicer, brighter and I think wrapped in cellophane, to prevent the chocolate's going stale.

I remember Connie's, a store near our rented cottage in Stormville. It was about a two minute drive to Connie's, which was a general store, dark brown and musty inside. We used to get our candy and chocolate cigarettes there, and comics , and gliders made of balsa wood, and also (for more money) propeller planes powered by a rubber band. You put the plane together (I remember delicately fitting the tail stabilizer into its razored slot on the fuselage), and snapped the red plastic propeller onto the front. It had a hook on the bottom which the rubber band attached to; there was another at the rear of the body of the plane (itself a thicker oblong of balsa). There was also some landing gear of metal wires and plastic wheels (none of this was on the glider.) The plane also had dull red insignia printed on the body and the wings. You then spun the propeller clockwise (but how did we know it was clockwise?) and it would sometimes fly a little bit. The propeller would also make it roll if you didn't spin it too tight.

I remember that when we tried walking to Connie's, it was a really surprisingly long walk -- it was so fast by car.

I remember when we first visited Stormville, when the Herings decided to buy the place (we rented from them).

I remember their kids had no trouble running barefoot on the gravel, but I hated it. Farther up the hill, where our cottage was, the road was rutted dirt, and then grass. There were also the remnants of a stone barn that had stone wasp nests in it. There was a wasps' nest in the portico to the cottage too, and I got stung above the eye once.

I remember a spider in the bathroom cup (at the top of the stairs: my parents' room was to the left, and my room to the right).

I remember the first night there when they gave me sheets (that came with the cottage) they had blood stains on them, but my parents said it was ok and they somehow didn't bother me (even though I remember them).

I remember that it was there that my father first showed me Superman comics. He'd also read Kipling out loud to us: I knew Gunga Din and "O East is east and west is west" and "The Road to Mandelay" by heart.

I remember that later he got me a record of Frank Sinatra called "Come Fly With Me," which had "The Road to Mandelay" on it as its last song. But Sinatra didn't sing the whole poem, which seemed a gyp to me. I still loved the record though.

I remember that when my parents were away in Europe and my grandmother (uptown) was taking care of us in Stormville, we found a dog and were very happy. Later we drove to Connie's to get some dog food, and the dog bolted the car in sheer joy (it had been subdued till then) and we realized it must have belonged to the owners (who lived out back).

I remember that when I was very little my uptown grandparents used to rent a bungalow on Long Island (Amagansett, I now know) called Costic's house. This was before the Long Island Expressway, and it took forever to get there. But I liked it, although my only actual memory of the place (rather than of driving off over the Triborough Bridge to get there -- "Triborough" also seemed to me, like "Fort Tryon," some accented distortion of my grandmother's) was of standing in front of my grandfather on the beach and watching the waves foam and churn at our feet, frothing white and then a light brown as the sand got stirred up. It was beautiful. I remember standing there a long time, my hands held up from behind by my grandfather. Somehow the foam and froth reminded me of shaving cream -- not the way it looked, but somehow because it had both the foaminess and the insubstantiality of lather.

posted by william 7:15 AM
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I remember PF Flyers. They had some wedge in the heel that helped you "run your fastest, jump your highest!" (Or was that line from the Keds ad?) They were Pepsi to Keds' Coke.

I remember "roofing" -- in a variant of stoop ball we'd throw the ball against the side of a building. If you could throw the ball so that at its apogee it got higher than the building (and hit the side on its way down) that was called roofing, and you got bragging rights. This came up when they opened a new playground near P.S. 166: we used to play in this arid back alley during recess, but when the new playground opened just down the block there was a lot more to do. The playground was bordered on one side by a very tall building, and it was that building that the really athletic kids could roof. I certainly couldn't.

I remember monkey-bars. Now I think there are only a couple left in New York, because they're supposed to be so dangerous.

I remember swings, and lore about kids who could swing so high they could flip over the bar. In swinging too there was the equivalent of roofing -- getting higher than the bar. I don't think I ever saw anyone do it, but people claimed they had. Hugh Cramer told me about "centrifugal force," which like the speed of light seemed a magical concept.

I remember different surfaces in Riverside Park: hexagrams which were bad for skating on, rough black asphalt, and smoother, newer cement. There was also the Promenade (which you can see in You've Got Mail), surfaced with a newer, more pebbly asphalt. After reading Hugh Atkinson's The Games (one of two or three books whose sex scenes I remember vividly and would read over and over again: they were better than the sex scenes in The Hundred Yard War, a football book which never was explicit for long enough -- I kept somehow imagining that if I read it with more attention it would somehow unfold its hints into something entirely satisfying: I thought real sex would do this too, at that time) I used to run on the Promenade every morning, intending to be an Olympic runner. Later I joined the track team and we would run around the Reservoir in Central Park.

I remember that in The Hundred Yards War (was Dan Jenkins the author?), there's a sex-scene that begins with one of the players pissing outside into the ocean -- "a phosphorescent stream" -- and a woman comes out to where he is and touches him "with her hand, a soft, warm, working hand." But then? Not too much. Whenever I pissed outside in the pitch dark I would be disappointed -- with the book, I think -- because piss just isn't phosphorescent.

I remember kids climbing over the cyclone fences into the playground -- they were too high for me, and I remember the feel of your Keds or P.F. Flyers when you stuck the front part of your sneaker into the fence as you tried to climb up -- unpleasant. There were two places where there were holes in the fence at the bottom, and I'd always go through those, sometimes getting my jacket caught.

I remember -- more fastidiousness for symmetry -- that I hated the training wheels on my bike because they didn't both touch the ground (the black asphalt) at the same time. I thought this meant there was something wrong with them or they were mis-installed. I insisted on getting larger training wheels that effectively turned the bike into a trike.

I remember my red trike.

I remember riding with only one training wheel, a bit later, and then finally learning how to stay up on a bike -- also on the promenade. Hugh Cramer tried to teach me, but it was my father who succeeded. He also taught me how to swing up into the saddle and to swing off. He could also push his bike one-handed just from the saddle, which I never quite mastered (and still don't know whether I would say I can do).

posted by william 7:33 AM
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I remember that on manual typewriters you form an exclamation point with an apostrophe and a period.

I remember mechanical adding machines: you pulled a lever (like the lever that you pulled on the typewriter to go to the next line) after you entered each number. It would sometimes churn for seconds with machinary popping up and down to give you the result.

I remember couches covered in uncomfortable transparent plastic fabric protectors that would be removed only for the guests.

I remember that when I slept on the couch at my grandparents' (both sets), they would push chairs up to the side so that I wouldn't fall.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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I remember that my Chelsea grandfather used to wear a hairnet to bed. I think he had curly hair (like me), but the hairnet straightened it. I hated my curly hair too, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Once I tried a trick I read about in Gunther Grass's Cat and Mouse, and put sugar water on it (a kind of home-made version of the "greasy kid stuff" from which Brill Cream offered itself as a large step up), but it wasn't worth it.



I remember Dog Years, by Gunther Grass, and the day I realized that the dog on the cover was made by a hand and its five fingers. (There was also a red tongue painted into the mouth, which is why it took me a while to see the fingers.) My parents had it, but I would see it most often in the waiting/changing room at the exercise class at the Breton Hall. It was another cool adult book, but much longer than Cat and Mouse, so I never read it.



I remember Old Gold cigarettes. My father's partner, Ed Zeitlin, smoked them. When my father started smoking again (for a brief period when I was eight or nine), I think he started with Old Golds.



I remember "I'd walk a mile for a Camel," and the shoes with worn out soles that the smoker, relaxing and tilted back in his chair, showed the camera.



I remember what I thought of as sex-based distinctions between my mother's and father's preferences. My father liked Pepsi; my mother I noticed once had a Coke. My father read the New York Times, my mother the Herald Tribune. My father was a CPA, my mother a lawyer. (I remember the law professor at Columbia she worked for, Willis Reese. Later I confused him with the Knicks' star Willis Reed.) My father took the subway, my mother the bus. And my father's parents were my Ashkenazy uptown grandparents, my mother's my Sephardic downtown grandparents.



I remember that the Knicks were the Knickerbockers, and the Mets were the Metropolitans -- the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club. A friend at school made fun of me for thinking that Knick was short for Knickerbocker, but I knew I was right. I was unhappy about the word Club in the Mets' official name -- I thought it was a team. (This was before the announcers routinely talked about teams as clubs.) Club seemed so unserious, so uncaring about the rest of us, so...clubbish.



I remember Ralph Kiner and Lindsay Nelson (I can't remember who the third member of their team was.)

posted by william 6:58 AM
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I remember Bill-Dave's after-school recreational program. This was in the line of the after school programs Salinger writes about in Nine Stories. They'd pick you up in a van, and you'd go skating. The counselors had jackets with round Bill-Dave patches on their sleeves.

I remember a boy named Carrol who was my classmate in kindergarten at L'ecole francaise. He used to say: "Guess what?" What? "That's what!" I drove my parents crazy with this bit of wit. Amanda Plummer was also my classmate, but I don't remember her -- my father told me this much later. I remember a metal stairway, outdoors, in a cage, from the courtyard to the building at L'ecole francaise. I remember we had to take "dictation." I hated it. The first day I went there (a van picked me up and I remember driving to 96th street -- towards Washington Heights -- I threw a tantrum because I'd been told we were going to Lycee Francais, and when it turned out to be L'ecole francais I was sure there was a mistake. I refused to participate until the end of the day when I finally agreed to play hide and seek with the other kids.

I remember my father taking me to P.S. 166 when I was 5, to register for first grade.

I remember my grandparents taking me to Fort Tryon Park (which my grandmother loved), a short drive from Washington Heights. I liked going via the West Side Highway, because you entered through large arches overlooking the Hudson. One day I became sure that it was really Fort Ryan Park, and that my grandmother's accent made it sound like Fort Tryon.

posted by william 6:49 AM
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I remember my grandmother's basement in Washington Heights (where she did the laundry with those silver coins). It was bright and airy: Haven Avenue was at the top of the heights, which fell precipitously towards Riverside Drive and the Hudson below. So the basement opened out onto a little planted courtyard, which itself led to a terrace overlooking the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge. This is where my grandfather taught me to shoot arrows slightly upwards. It was also in this courtyard one day that at four I decided that I couldn't understand death (I think because we came out of the basement into some dazzling light). It seemed to me that there was no way that my consciousness could cease to exist. I remember saying to myself that I might die, but then there would be someone else, like John or someone, and I would be conscious by having his consciousness. Since my own consciousness was the ground of anything I knew, it seemed inconceivable to me that it could disappear. (It sometimes still does.) I mentioned this theory to my parents, who named John my imaginary friend (a term I assumed at the time was right, like the sparks of my "sparks dream"), which shows either that they didn't understand what I was saying or that they did. I have a memory of going to the Bronx Zoo with my grandparents (though it might have been the Central Park Zoo), and seeing some elephants in a stall: one raised a bag of peanuts up so that I could see up its trunk, and I assumed that its whole trunk was full of garabage: that it somehow managed to pack garbage in and in like the garbage trucks that also fascinated me. For some reason I remember this scene as taking place in my grandmother's basement: maybe the quality of shade and of institutional green paint. When my grandmother was dying of a brain tumor, she went down to the basement in some sort of delusory haze, wanting to do something there -- travel, or return some food to the store -- which made a chilling sense to me because of my own confused memory of the elephants there. Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (from which, as she said after the diagnosis, "I go home to die") had since built some high rise buildings that block the light -- the view of the Hudson from the terrace. I somehow imagine that she went down there also seeking that missing light. And though it still seems inconceivable, I too no longer quite have confidence that the light and the view won't be closed up forever. I might be John now -- that would account for the continuity and the difference between me then and me now. But if so, John doesn't believe what his friend believed when John was only imaginary.

posted by william 7:36 AM
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I remember PhisoHex. It came in a green squeeze bottle. It tasted terrible if you got any in your mouth. After it became illegal in the U.S. you could still get it in England, which I did when I went to England in college. Once it was illegal it seemed to work much better on acne than it had done before.

I remember school desks, with their cubbies for your stuff beneath the surface. The new ones were of blond wood (or maybe plastic) that resisted carving; the old ones were of darker wood and were hacked up with initials. I remember the paint and the blue ink that would get into the grooves forever. (I remember our smocks when we fingerpainted too). The dark wood desks had a round hole for ink bottles (although we didn't know that that's what they were for, knowing only ballpoints), which was also unpleasant -- it broke the symmetry and the integrity of the surface of the desk.

I remember Bic pens leaking in your pocket. Also chewing and sucking on the ends of them.

posted by william 7:08 AM
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I remember the way I used to jam myself up doorways (in rock climbing I believe this is called chimneying), so as to be able to touch the ceiling. I liked the mechanics of it.

posted by william 4:53 PM
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I remember that the subway stations on the IRT line at 181st Street and 168th Street have metal bridges over the tracks -- I think they're the only station where there aren't separate routes to the uptown and downtown sides. If you realized you wanted to change directions, those were both good stops to do it at. They also have elevators to the surface, unlike most stops. I think 191st does too -- in fact I think it's the stop farthest underground. In high school, in the Bronx, I used to have a three hour break three days a week (from 10:38 to 1:38), and I'd often take the subway down to my grandmother's house near the 168th street station and have the jam pancakes (palachinken) or dumplings (knoedel) that she would make for me. I liked reading on the subway too -- I read all of Ulysses on it for an independent studies my junior year with Mr. McCormick. It was also for him that I wrote the first story that I really liked. It began (ready) and then was punctuated by (aim) and ended with (fire), and of course it was the last thoughts of someone about to be executed. I remember "One alone stood facing rifles trained on him. One once had a name, but now he was just one alone." This was after (aim) when I thought it became clear what was happening. I'd been coy after (ready). I hadn't yet read Borges's "The Secret Miracle," but I had read Jack London's "To Build a Fire" which impressed me enormously, and also a lot of cummings, from whom I think I took the preciousity of that "one alone" (sort of like: "anyone lived in a pretty how town," etc.). I remember that when Mr McCormick read the story aloud (he'd read to the class if you wanted to preserve anonymity) he bellowed "Fire!" at the end, whereas I wanted it to be understated: (fire). I remember the two other stories that most impressed me in that class were by Jonathan Easton and Andrew Birsh, and that in the discussion of (my story Andy said that it was painful to listen to, which I decided to take as praise, and which he sort of meant as praise. Jonathan's story had a wonderful scene in which two kids notice that the same guy has signed the elevator inspection certificate in one of their elevators as in the elevator in the other kid's building. Which reminds me that I remember New York City elevator inspection certificates, and that all the elevators were Otis, including the brushed steel elevators at 168th street.

I remember in that elevator once seeing a skinny guy, tall, limping, with a green cane and white framed glasses, very charismatic, come in with two short friends or hangers-on. We were the only four people going up, and he pulled out a marker once the door closed and tagged the inside of the elevator: Louie 167. (That's how you tagged in those pre-Basquiat days.) And so I always looked for his name afterwards: he was only a walk-on in the graffiti world, but I liked seeing his name unexpectedly all over the city.

I remember Taki 147(?), the first of them all.

posted by william 11:20 PM
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I remember Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand. It was a novel from the hallucinogenic age -- on my parents' bookshelf near Ulysses and near The Loving Couple -- the hero takes hallucinogens and somehow meets some virtual people, or people of another time, down outside the house on the strand where he is living. I loved the idea (as I loved my favorite Atom comic strip, when The Atom actually gets so small that he enters the world that exists on an atom and gets involved in some of the Golden Bough cultural anthropological otherness of the beings there), but I could never get very far into the book.

posted by william 5:06 PM
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I remember Peter Max -- his posters at the back of the bus. They replaced the interest of riding on the rear bumper with that of pulling one out of its metal frame. I think it was the same finger-tip experience: trying to get purchase on an extremely narrow surface. I remember waiting for busses with Peter Max on them, so as to try to get a poster. I once almost got one out, but then the bus took off. Marc Bilgray tried more assiduously than I did, and he did get one eventually (unless his father arranged to get him one through his entertainment world connections). It turned out to be amazingly larger than I thought it would be. As in college later so did the I-95 signs that people had managed to wrestle into their rooms.

posted by william 2:42 PM
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I remember a German steam engine I got. Its fuel was little white oblongs -- like parfarrin sugar cubes, but I don't know what they were made of. Steam built up in a little pressure chamber, with a safety valve that didn't whistle (to my intense disappointment) and it pushed a piston which turned a train wheel. (I remember noticing the external pistons on train wheels on a trip I went on with my mother and her mother.) The wheel didn't move. The whole thing was made of beautiful brass, some painted bright red, some a natural yellow.

I remember my Swiss Army Knife. I left it on my bureau and when a friend came over I went to show it to him, but it was gone. We looked all over. For years I thought it would show up, when we moved or threw stuff out, or otherwise turned the place over. But it never did, and I now think that friend must have pocketed it. But this hypothesis only came to me very recently.

I remember a ping-pong table taking up almost all my room. Also a pool table that my father got me for my birthday, but that I was disappointed by because it wasn't regulation size. He got it at Rappaport's on the East Side, and when we went to pick it up it wasn't ready and he had a fit at the guy who worked there. I was intensely embarrassed, as I always was when he reproved strangers. Eventually we got the pool table, and eventually it was fun, despite being too small. I liked the chalk. We fenced with the pool cues a lot too.

posted by william 8:03 PM
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I remember the President's Council on Physical Fitness and the light blue pamphlet of calisthenics they distributed. There was a picture of President Johnson, with signature, on the first page. I also remember the Royal Canadian Air Force book of exercises, and the testimonials from aging pilots that it came with. (I think I sort of remembered all this on September 11, when the question or fantasy or idea that the fit pilots might have fought the hijakers off arose.)

posted by william 3:25 PM
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I remember "Is it true blondes have more fun?" And the song, "Be a Lady Clairol Blonde and be a shinging blonde." Can this be right? Anyhow, when I later came to read Empson's "It is the pain, the pain endures," and Bishop's "Love's the boy stood on the burning deck," I had somehow been prepared for the mildly Irish syntax of those poems (It is the pain [that] endures; Love's the boy [who] stood on tbe burning deck) by the hidden mildly salacious pun: both Is it true that blondes have more fun? and Is it true blondes who have more fun? I don't know how I knew this from the start, even without knowing it.

posted by william 2:57 PM
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I remember going to get a Batman costume for Halloween. But the mask had the Batman logo -- the black bat on a yellow elliptical field that Comissioner Gordon would project into the sky -- on its forehead. The real Batman's mask was all black (or night blue); the bat silhuouette device appeared on his chest only. So this was intensely frustrating -- all the masks had the stupid logo. I went home and tried instead to get my (Chelsea) grandmother, who sewed very well, to make me a cowl. But she didn't get what I meant about Batman's ears, and I tried to figure out a way to prop them up myself so that they would look like bat's ears, but I couldn't. I was deeply disappointed.

posted by william 7:06 PM
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I remember pneumatic drilling outside the classroom window -- maybe in fourth grade?

I remember standing in line in the lobby, waiting for school to start, arranged by height.

I remember the sixth grade monitors, and hall passes to go to the bathroom.

I remember being sent to the principal's office, Mrs. Eben.

I remember the vice-principal, who was infinitely nicer and who once took our class as a substitute teacher.

I remember notes home on little canary slips that you had to get your parents to sign. I once managed to dodge this by repeatedly "forgetting" to bring the note back. Then spring vacation came and after vacation, Mrs. Brenner forgot to ask for it.

I remember another time of sheer fun -- jumping on the Sterns' trampoline, which we found next door. We scattered when Mr. Stern saw us, but he chased us and invited us to jump, and then his youngest son Geoffrey and I became best friends. We did flips in the air and went way up high. It was the kind of trampoline later outlawed as too dangerous -- if you fell the wrong way on its frame you could break your neck.

posted by william 6:24 AM
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I remember test patterns and then The Modern Farmer and Sunrise Semester, and then finally something interesting to watch, while the adults slept.

I remember kids riding on the rear bumper of the busses, up Broadway or Amsterdam. They'd hang on by the very tips of their fingers to the tiny purchase between the rear window and the shell of the bus. Sometimes the bus driver would get out and chase them away. They'd scatter and then get back on the bumper before the bus pulled away. The newer busses didn't have bumpers you could ride on. I once saw someone do this on the subway -- ride outside the last car.

I remember throwing snowballs at cars on Amsterdam. One car stopped and a guy got out and chased us. Scary.

posted by william 9:22 AM
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I remember a very early birthday – I might have been five? when my parents took me for a helicopter ride. All I remember is looking down and seeing the water of Sheepshead Bay enamalled in sunlight. I think this was the first time I flew.

I remember a slightly later birthday – except now I realize it couldn’t have been because it would have been in the summer – when my father took me up in a small plane in Stormville and we looked down at the patchwork quilt of lots and flew over the place we were renting. I thought I could see it, but probably not. I remember the plane was yellow. This was the first time I was in a plane. Later, for my twentieth birthday, Margot Tweedy took me sky-diving at the same airport: Greenhaven, near the prison.

I remember just before my fifth birthday having what is now known as my “Sparks dream.” I described it the next morning to my mother in the dining room at breakfast: she put her arm around my waste as I stood next to her seat and I told her that I saw my baby-head, as if from behind, in a crib, and that I saw scores (as I would now say) of candle flames without candles flickering in the dark space of the room all around me. She called them sparks, and it became my sparks dream. She predicted that I’d forget it by adulthood, and I bet I wouldn’t. I remember the dream, and not just remembering it. I win.

I remember that on the eve of my ninth birthday, at the Dollard’s apartment. They had an aquarium which I was sitting with my back to, when my father told me: “Tomorrow is your last one-numbered birthday.” I remember also a bit later telling my mother that I would count as a teenager when I hit – either ten or eleven, I’m not sure. And her vehement denial.

posted by william 4:27 PM
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I remember that the Wicked Witch of the West later became Madge, the Palmolive dishwashing liquid mascot. In the commercials she gave manicures to women amazed by how soft her hands were. It was the Palmolive: "You're soaking in it." "Dishwashing liquid? Oh, Madge!" "Relax...." Palmolive softens hands as you do the dishes.

I remember "Us Tarrytown smokers would rather fight than switch." And "I'd walk a mile for a Camel." And "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should," which was altered in the children's parody to "Winston tastes bad, like the one I just had; no filter, no taste, just a [toot toot] forty cent waste!" But they did have filters.

I remember the first cigarette I tried, in Italy. One puff and I was worried that I was hooked. And the first cigarette I finished, in Riverside Park, in some bushes, with Tommy Hoge. A Kent. Whenever I quit and then started up again, I'd get an intense evocation of that initial drag.

posted by william 12:36 AM
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I remember Palisades Amusement Park ("swings all day and after dark: Palisades from coast to coast, where a dime buys the most!" Why from coast to coast?) I went there once. It was fun enough. I was surprised later to discover that the word Palisades referred to the cliffs over the Hudson, not the park. My parents took us to the "Palisades Park" with a couple of other families, and I was all excited, and then it turned out that we were walking through the woods. The kids kind of got away, and we went splashing around in the Hudson by some rocks. When they found us they were appalled, and we were rushed home into the tub, and scrubbed for a very long time.

I remember bead belts -- I might have gotten one at Palisades Amusement Park, or maybe in the Poconos.

I remember riding on a roller-coaster with my (Chelsea) grandmother at Coney Island. I thought I knew roller-coasters since our friends the Herings (on whose property in Stormville we rented a little cottage: see yesterday) had a kind of track rollercoaster that you rode down from a ladder. It was fun but not scary. So we went to Coney Island, and I had no idea what to expect. Neither did she, I think. It was terrifying, and we both wanted it to be over. I remember seeing some other people screaming and laughing, their hair taken by the wind, ahead of us, when the ride started. But then once we got going, all I saw was the track. We didn't do it again.

posted by william 5:16 PM
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I remember my mother teaching me to play chess. It was in a rented summer house in Stormville, New York. I think my father was at work in the city, and we were alone -- my mother, my sister, me. And I took her queen with my knight in my very first game. I couldn't tell if she really didn't see the knight move, or pretended she didn't see. She never needs to show that she's doing you a kindness -- which makes it all the kinder.

I remember that my grandfather (her father) played according to an Eastern European custom whereby both white and black made two opening moves -- I guess to get into the game more quickly. My grandfather and I were evenly matched. We would play when my grandparents came to dinner.

I remember my dog Powell. We found him in the park, and I naturally wanted to name him Snoopy. But the kid who found him was named Powell, and after my mother's intervention with my father, who desperately didn't want a dog, he agreed to allow us to keep him after we told the story of the kid Powell's finding him if we named the dog Powell. I was very embarrassed by the name at the time, thinking that people would think he was somehow named after Adam Clayton Powell as a sign of disrespect. But I came to love the name, and Powell himself.

I remember that my other grandfather (uptown) would take off his glasses to smoke a cigar in his wing chair every evening. (Eventually he had to quit, in his eighties I think. He died at 99.) He looked very different without his glasses -- younger, a stranger. He also had a Rheingold every afternoon. It tasted awful. I liked the cigar rings, and the Dutch Masters box (though I seem to remember being frightened by Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson: somehow I got to see a reproduction of the painting in some connection with the box, which I think only showed the figures of the spectators, not the lesson itself. If it showed them at all.

I remember being horrendously frightened by Mr. Potatohead. This had something to do with a Purim party at the Association of Yugoslav Jews. Maybe the same one in which I wore the itchy beard. But I think it was more archaic than that.

posted by william 2:56 PM
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I remember manual elevators. The elevator was a cage, and the operator took you up and down with a manual throttle. The floor numbers were painted in large numerals between floors. You had to keep your fingers in or they'd be cut off. It would sometimes take two or three adjustments on arrival before you were level. Then the elevator man would open the cage and then the outside door. I think they still have these in factories, etc., but not in passenger elevators any more -- too labor intensive.

I remember a kid in school -- I think a year ahead of me: second grade maybe? -- who was missing several fingers. My downtown grandfather had a little joke where he'd put his thumb down into his palm and pretend he'd lost it. I was imitating this joke at school, and this kid showed me how much more effectively he could do it. I was impressed. Then I could swear when he was done that he had all his fingers. But it turned out later that he didn't -- maybe a day or two later I found this out. The power he had over the rest of us!

I remember that there was a closed 91st street station on the IRT. Between 86th and 96th you'd go through this ghost station. It was lit up -- later I think I found out that this was because it attracted homeless people, and the MTA either wanted to scare them or wanted to make it safer for them -- but not even the local stopped there, and it was wonderfully eerie.

I remember "No salga afuera!" Also "Little Enough to Ride Your Knee? Little Enough to Ride for Free!"

posted by william 3:45 PM
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I remember "The Elongated Man." I think he was the B-comic for Green Lantern, though maybe not. I remember that D.C. had a series called Detective Comics (hence the D.C.?), which might have had Batman in a cameo role. I liked Detective Comics, though I barely remember anything else about them. The Elongated Man could stretch like India rubber in all directions. It's where I learned the word "elongated."

I remember other words I learned from the comics: phantom, ultra, dimension (since Mr. Mxtpltx or whatever his vowelless name was came from the Fifth Dimension. Later I loved higher-dimensional geometery, prepped by the comics.) I learned the speed of light from the comics -- since Superman and once or twice Flash would exceed it. I justified them to my mother in the basis of this educational material, but she didn't buy it. I remember Bizarro World in Superman, where everything was backwards. Bizarro Jimmy Olson walks by a sidewalk collapsing and publishes a headline: People Line Up to Put Money in Bank. I was puzzled by the question what some opposites were. What was the opposite of a square? A circle or a triangle? Why not a sphere, which seemed more opposite still than a circle. I remember that bizarro earth was a cube. I didn't get why no one noticed their odd, faceted white faces.

I remember "imaginary stories." Lois Lane would die, or Robin would be killed. In one Batman himself was completely defenseless and about to be shot (but then luckily lightening hit the gun of the criminal). But in general the imaginary stories allowed for playing out a scenario otherwise intolerable -- a possible alternate route. They were framed in cloudly lines, like thought balloons, not the straight orthoganals of the frames of non-imaginary stories. I sort of objected to them, because rules of difficulty -- how will the story get out of this impossible situation -- were suspended.

I remember always disliking the fact that the teaser first page of the comic always contained a scene not in the actual story -- a kind of abstract summing up, that promised the same scene in the story but actually represented the telescoping together of several scenes and relationships. Stills in movies, I was to find out, cheated in the same way, but more subtly.

I remember a Superboy comic that didn'tcheat, where Superboy figures out the summer camp he's attending is populated by aliens. Everyone is kind and pleasant, but in the end he suddenly and shockingly turns against them and arrests them all. Their mistake is that they all have two left hands. I was dubious, but checked each frame, and they did. I now realize that this was an allegory of communist infiltration (like the two left wings on Boris Badenough's plane).

I remember Felix the Cat (the wonderful wonderful cat. Whenever something something --icks, he reaches into his bag of tricks....watching Felix, the wonderful cat.)

I remember that in Spy vs. Spy, the winning spy in the little pair in the (I suppose if you were an art historian you would call it) remarque in the first frame would be the losing spy in the strip as a whole.

I remember hiding my comic collection in the bedding storage area in a convertible couch in my room.

I remember sending away to an ad on the back page of the comics to sell greeting cards and make a quick $100. What a nightmare that turned out to be. All the difficulties of Halloween and none of the pleasure.

I remember canvassing for John Lindsay was equally unrewarding. I was after all supporting a Republican and going against a Jew, Abe Beame. I remember looking for Lindsay headquarters, on both 96th street and 72nd, and not finding them. Jonathan Richmond, a big political junky (who knew Kennedy's inaugural address by heart) told me they were on these streets. I wanted to volunteer. My mother was very upset when she found out I'd gone so far afield.

I remember Lindsay closing the Central Park roadways. My parents and I used to bike through the park weekends and Tueday nights, when it was also closed.

I remember Happenings.

I remember Fun City.

posted by william 10:19 PM
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I remember that we used to drag our Flexible Flyers on the rough sidewalk to scrape the red paint off the runners. They went faster that way, but you had to dry them when you brought them in so the runners wouldn't rust.

posted by william 7:08 PM
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I remember that I used to have a winter-coat I'd bundle up in, with hood and fasteners that I used to call my "space-suit." And then I got a second one. The first was navy, the second more silverish. It got really hot waiting for the elevator.

posted by william 2:48 PM
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I remember that you have to keep the label up or back and not aim it at the ball, to avoid splitting the wood of the bat. I think I learned this originally from a Peanuts strip.

I remember wooden tennis rackets and presses.

I remember the first Wilson steel rackets with their prominent network of steel loops around the frame, through which the strings were threaded.

I remember gut vs. nylon, and that gut was better but would break in the rain.

I remember white tennis balls, and then the greenish-yellow balls that came in because they were more visible near dark. I also remember the vogue for fuschia balls. That's when I learned the word fuschia.

posted by william 12:11 AM
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I remember the Audobon Theater on -- what, 165th street? Much later I found out that Malcolm X was shot there. My grandfather used to drive me up to Washington Heights, and when we took the 158th street exit and went straight up to Broadway, we would pass the magnificent marquee of the Audobon on our right (on the East side of Broadway). I remember another time that he drove me uptown on Broadway (I used to love the way the IRT surfaced and then submerged again) instead of the West Side Highway or Riverside, when we passed the striking students at Columbia. The gates were closed and police were lined up on Broadway, and a student with longish hair in jeans walked down the top of a structure set-off from a building at the same level as the top of the fence just to peer up and down Broadway and then walked back. He seemed very adult and very competent -- a person who knew what he was doing within this important event.

I remember another theater on, I think, 180th and Broadway -- where Broadway started going a little funny -- where the Reverend Ike used to preach.

I remember new wall paper: sports stuff and books on shelves. I remember when they put it up, but not really what was underneath. Baseball mitts and balls, and caps. Dark brown on light tan. I remember looking at the seams where the patterns broke, and the way it started peeling from near the ceiling.

I remember the ceiling over my bed, and, in particular, when we came back from Europe one August, noticing the lights the busses going down Riverside Drive cast through the window onto the ceiling. I could never quite figure out the geometry of this.

I remember sitting on the radiator (enclosed in a tin box with a lattice front, whose top swung open so you could put a pan of water right on the radiator itself) when it was icy outside, and warming myself up, my back to the cool glass as my bum baked. I remember also pressing my forhead to the cool window and sometimes rolling it back and forth and feeling the waviness of the glass. I remember standing on the radiator as well, leaning back into the wooden lattice of the window.

posted by william 12:37 PM
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I remember silver money, coined through 1964. Mercury dimes and Buffalo nickles. (In an episode of It's About Time("It's about time, it's about space, about two men in the strangest place; how will they live (?), what'll they do? about a time when the earth was new; it's about two astronauts, in the strangest place, it's about their rocket ship (?), it's about time, it's about space!") our intrepid time travellers go back to the cowboy west. One is amazed that dinner for two at some saloon is only 25 cents. He pays, but is then accosted by the tough who runs the place: what kind of money is this? That's 25 cents -- two Roosevelt dimes and a buffalo nickle. "I know what a buffalo is," sneering. "But what's a roosevelt?") As they got rarer I stopped looking for 1943 copper pennies (Hugh Cramer said only 4 were known to be left in circulation), and looked for silver money instead. Then one day I was shocked to discover that my grandmother (uptown) was doing the laundry with a drawer full of silver dimes and quarters -- she had maybe $10 worth left. I begged her to save them. There was some resistance on her part: I think she was willing to trade them to me for newer money, but of course I couldn't really afford them even in the later, debased coinage. (But why not? My grandfather regularly gave me money whenever I asked: up to $3 at a time.) I also remember silver certificates with their beautiful blue printing.

I remember lire, francs, and marks.

I remember that O'Neil's Balloon was originally called O'Neil's aloon, since in La Guardia's New York you couldn't call something a saloon (you couldn't have pinball machines either), but the liasonmade it sound like a saloon.

I remember Idlewild airport.

posted by william 11:40 AM
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I remember Phil's Pizzeria on 94th and Broadway. I went there with my father -- sometimes we all went -- and we sat on short revolving stools and ate greasy pizza on wax-paper and drank purple grape juice in conical cups put into cylindrical holders so it looked like you had more than you did. At some point, the conical cups went from paper to plastic. When they were paper, it was hard to get the last drop out of the bottom; when plastic the surface tension kept drops stuck on the sides. So you got frustrated and always had to have more. But the pizza was ample. The tables at Phil's were the style of the time, formica with a thick milled or rippled edge, maybe two inches thick. We had a table like that in our kitchen at home: good to look at when you were upset. My Chelsea grandparents had one too, but ours was beige with a kind of greenish siding: my grandparents' strikes me as having been yellow. My Washington Heights grandparents had a larger wooden table.

I remember hearing there, at that table, from my grandmother about my uncle's death in the Second World War. (I am named after him.) She told me he'd been "killed in action," and I somehow already knew the phrase "missing in action," but I didn't know what "in action" meant (except that it had something to do with GI Joe since the GI Joe dolls were action figures). So I thought that maybe in actionmeant a way of being missing, and that if he was killed in action he was only presumed dead (I knew about being declared dead from a George Reeves Superman episode that I'd seen in which the criminal disappears in a kind of fortress-tomb for seven years in order to get himself declared dead so that he can galivant around scot-free when he emerges). So I told her that I hoped he might turn up. But she said no: he'd been the only person killed in this campaign on a Pacific Island. They'd been short of ammunition, and the GI next to him had asked him for some. To get it out of his pocket he'd had to stand up, and then he was shot in the chest. I recognized that difficult aspect of clothing, and it seemed strange that something which I thought only bothered kids -- that getting stuff out of your pocket when you were prone was a pain -- should have led to his death. It again somehow made for a continuity between me and the adult world. She then told me about the holocaust, and the death of her family in the camps. This was the first I heard about it -- it was interesting and distasteful. Later I found out that my father was very upset that she'd told me all this, but he was much more upset than I was.

I remember that George Reeves was a suicide. Hugh Cramer told me that George Reeves went crazy and thought he could fly. He jumped off a high building and started falling. He grabbed some wires -- Hugh had a sure narrative sense -- and they held for a moment and then broke, and he died.

I remember Kurt (?) Wallenda falling to his death off the high wire in Puerto Rico between two hotels. He tried to kneel down when a gust of wind blew up, but somehow his balancing pole knocked him off. I think he was 73.

posted by william 2:24 PM
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I remember the first black-out. I was standing on my head (in an exercise class in the Hotel Breton Hall on 86th and Broadway -- this was, and still is, a residential hotel populated by performing artists who valued its thick walls; we did exercise to music pounded out on a loud piano. Sometimes I waited for my mother in the dark musty dining-room while she did her class. There was also a changing room with a bathroom behind it, also dark. I'd sometimes get water in the bathroom filling a musty old glass from a musty spigot. I didn't like all this mustiness, but it was somehow all right as well because the smells were not unlike the smells in my Haven Avenue grandparents' house. Or maybe I did mind, because the glass for the water and the mustiness of the smell were associated for me with my grandparents' false teeth sitting in their wide-mouthed water-glasses all night long. I also remember that my grandmother would keep a glass of water by her bed and that it would slowly aerate over the course of the night and be full of bubbles by morning. All of this was unlike the brisk cleanliness of my house.) I was standing on my head and I could see the light fading out and then coming back. This was puzzling -- not something you could really judge standing on your head. I stood up and the light lasted a minute or two more and then went out for good. It wasn't quite dark yet, but I was sent straight home: I remember headlights and the unilluminated stop-lights, and being struck by the fact that the blackout wasn't universal: some lights worked, just not the power-grid. The next day people were amazed that everything had worked so smoothly -- no looting or anything. I didn't know what they meant: why should there be anything different just because it was dark? I think this shows my great confidence in my world back then, when my world was basically a neighborhood in New York City.

posted by william 2:43 PM
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I remember aspirin crushed with sugar which my mother used to give me when I was sick. And how amazing her voice and her comforting was.

I remember when my sister was born. We were at my grandparents' house for Passover, just two blocks away from Columbia Presbyterian. My mother went into labor, and my father walked her over there and came back. Later we walked by the hospital to the 168th street stop, and took the A-train (the "superexpress" my father called it) downtown. I loved the A-train and standing in the first car at the front window watching the tracks. A week later when my mother and sister were due home, I put into practice the fantasy I'd anticipated: that I would come home (but from where? I was five and a half, and in kindergarten I guess. I remember that I would be allowed to go from the lobby to our second floor apartment alone. But how did I get to the lobby? Fred and Al, my favorite doormen, saw me safely inside -- that I remember. I used to take the stairs up, and then go to the front door, but this time, I thought I would come home) and go up the stairs to the back door (which led to the kitchen) and my new little sister, Caroline, would be standing there in a little red dress. So I rang the back door, and my mother answered it, slightly puzzled that I was coming in the back way, and then brought me to see Caroline in a white baby-suit and hat, sound asleep in her basinet, looking very very small. I didn't hear her till early the following morning: I was in the bathroom pooping and was shocked to hear her cry from the next room. Suddenly I felt very big -- a person who knew how to poop and who could be interrupted in this adult activity by this strange, unrecognizable call from the unfamiliar world of infancy. For the first time I didn't know who she was. (But this wasn't the first time I didn't know who I was -- that came long before.)

posted by william 10:26 PM
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I remember "Hey Roscoe! Try Bosco!"

I remember that "boss" was a term of praise. ("That's a boss record.")

I remember that we used to have a carpet sweeper: sort of the manual lawn-mower version of a vacuum-cleaner.

posted by william 9:53 PM
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I remember the Million Dollar Movie -- the great credit sequence and music. I also remember The Late Movie and The Late Late Movie.

I remember The Millionaire.

I remember the Symphony Theater used to have on its marquee "Fight Pay TV" -- they were afraid that cable would destroy the movies.

posted by william 6:30 PM
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I remember thick pencils at school. I guess they were for little hands. You could only get them at school. The pencil sharpener had two slots -- one for standard and one for thick. The thick pencils had no erasers, and were stubby and short. The wood they were made out of was darker and softer and splintered more easily if you chewed on them (and didn't taste as good). I don't recall ever doing any work with them. They were just unappealing, and seemed a thing only to be met with in school. I think this was also because they tended to be painted a kind of institutional green or brown -- not the bright yellow of Ticonderogas -- like the school walls, olive to about head height, then a dingy brownish yellow above that. (Why was this?)

I remember (as an element of my lunatic fastitdiousness) how upset I was when I got my first thermos. When you opened it up you could see two black circles with imprefect annealing -- where the glass was glued to the shell. But I hated them, and I kept looking for thermoses without these imperfections. Finally I would pour my drink from them without looking at the bottom. After a while I got over this.

I remember also how easily they would break. That's why I got so many.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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I remember thinking that "idea" had an r at the end of it. Also that "I forget" was an odd formulation: I think that maybe my parents never said it. They did say "I forgot" about things which required correction. But "I forget" at first sounded to me like an odd action to be doing: the first person acquiescence in the imperative "forget it." Why would I forget if I wanted to remember? But people did say "I forget where we were supposed to meet." Yes, my parents would certainly have said "I forgot where...." I think I put these two memories together -- "idear" and "I forget" because I think both these realizations occured on 89th street between Broadway and Amsterdam: I said "idear" one day and someone mocked me, and then we had an argument about how the word was spelled; and someone said "I forget where..." which struck me equally with the notion that "idea" didn't end with r.

I remember three occasions of sheer self-forgetful fun. The first time I played Ring-a-lario instead of tag, in a new playground on my way home from school one day. What an amazing game: it was completely exhilarating and you could use everything in the playground and it was nonstop. Later in Henry Roth's Call it Sleep I read about stickball (which we also played, though we preferred stoop-ball, and as mentioned before handball) and Ring-a-levio. Roth's name for it just sounded wrong to me, though I since found it was standard, but then more recently and delightedly found in the Opies that "a-lario" has a very old English pedigree. So I feel the memory of the fun was thereby saved. Occasion 2: in Yugoslavia (that then was), a large pole, worn completely smooth and set out horizontally over some lake water (although this was very near to the Adriatic.) Older kids -- mythical teenagers -- were playing a sort of king-of-the-hill game on it. You sat at the end and people got wet so as to be able to skid down the pole extremely fast and try to knock you off. If they didn't do it at first you wrestled, until one or both fell in. Some of us younger kids got to play too. They'd earlier asked where I was from and I tried to convince them that I was Yugoslav, in my American accent and with my grammatical errors: I thought it was much cooler to be from Yugoslavia than from New York. (I always tried as well to convince people that I'd been born in Milan -- in "Milano" -- because I thought it would give me added cachet.) They refused to believe me, but the blissful game on the log made me forget all self-consciousness. And the third time was when soccer practice was cancelled in tenth grade because of a huge rain storm. So I hung out with three of the 12th graders and we just played in the rain and the mud, diving for the ball (three of us were goalies, and one a forward, and we loved diving and tackling) and got covered with enough mud to be extras in a realistic war movie. Time has never flown so quickly as it has those three times.

posted by william 2:15 PM
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