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 the expression "The devil is beating his wife," a German or Yugoslav expression used when sun and rain are simultaneous. When I first heard my father use it it I liked it and suggested that the hot sun was the devil and the rain his wife's tears, but my father laughed and said that wasn't so. First I was disappointed, later I realized that he couldn't know for sure the origin of the figurative expressions he used. It took me a long time to see he was probably right. It was interesting to realize this -- to realize that you could somehow develop an intuitive sense of how a language worked which trumped a lot of things that seemed theoretically possible.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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I remember that at Cake Masters there were large brass globes of string hanging from the ceiling, with the string coming down within reach of the counter-workers. When they closed a box they would pull the string and tie up the box deftly and rapidly, snipping it with scissors. If you got a box of cookies, it was very hard to open it up without undoing the string. I would try to slip it off so that I could slip it back on unperceived, but it was usually too tight, and it would cut into or crush the cardboard. And I could never just untie the string, because I couldn't retie it.

posted by william 7:10 AM
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I remember a joke from 1964: "Did you know that Goldwater is still alive and living in Argentina?" I laughed knowingly when I heard it. When my father asked why it was funny I said "Of coursehe's living in Argentina," which I was confusing with Arizona. I think that's when I found out Argentina wasn't a state. (During the same period my father and I were biking down Riverside Drive at 95th street, to get to the Promenade, and we heard some kids chanting at every passing car, "We want Goldwater! We want Goldwater." So I told my father I was rooting for Goldwater too -- the chant got into my head. But he explained to me with some passion that Goldwater was an evil man, though today one doesn't think so anymore, and I was quickly brought round to LBJ.) I don's know when I got the Goldwater joke -- I think it was several years later when I heard about Marting Bormann, who I think wasliving in Argentina. And much later still, I heard from my uptown grandmother the story of how Mengele spared a cousin of hers -- a beautiful dark-haired girl who had just died of cancer when my grandmother told me the story. The SS was about to take her away, but when Mengele reviewed the group of experimental subjects he said of her "let the dark-haired one go." She was ambivalent about him henceforth, and guilty about her ambivalence.

posted by william 7:39 AM
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I remember pneumatic drills -- I couldn't believe how loud they were. It seems to me they're not quite so loud today, maybe because of noise ordinances? They were drilling on the street outside our class at P.S. 166, and you couldn't hear a thing in class.

I remember carbon paper, and onion-skin.

I remember mimeographs.

I remember (sound again) the sort of reverse pow-wow I would do during morning assembly in P.S. 166. We would meet by class in the lobby, and line up by height. It got louder and louder as we stood in line, and sometimes I would put my palms over my ears and open and shut them to hear the hubub pulse. When it got loud enough, Mrs. Eben, the school principal, would come in and blow her whistle, and we'd fall dead silent: we were all terrified of her. I don't think I was ever sent to see her, but I do remember being sent to the principal's office. Maybe I saw the assistant principal, who was much nicer? Mrs. Eben announced Kennedy's assassination to us, over the school loudspeaker. It was near the end of the day, a Friday, and I was already in my coat, but we were at our desks still, making Thanksgiving decorations for the party we were to have the next week. I was coloring in a feather on the cream construction paper. She made the announcement, and we all didn't quite know what to do. I think our teacher, Mrs. Comiskey that would have been, told us this was shocking and serious, or maybe Mrs. Eben had already asked for a moment of silence or of prayer. (At some point, there definitely was a moment of prayer, and I said the Shema -- I had no idea what else you were supposed to do. I still don't.) Then we just sat there, and I went back to coloring my feather. Monday they cancelled school, and we watched the funeral and John John saluting the caisson. I think I didn't know the song yet about the caissons keep rolling along, since I remember this is when I learned the word "caisson." But I wasn't very good about the words of songs, especially of choruses, or about seeing that they were the same words that we might use in other contexts. On Friday, after we went home, my mother asked me whether I still wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History, where she had promised to take me to see the dinosaurs. I had been reading Danny and the Dinosaur and I really wanted to see them now. I said I still wanted to go. It was nearly empty: I remember that in the dinosaur room there was a young couple (in their teens or twenties I'd say) and a guard. I was struck by how empty it was, and I think I wondered what theywere doing there. I was disappointed by the dinosaurs because they were just skeletons, not the dinosaur that you saw in Danny and the Dinosaur which was more a taxidermy model come to life. They told me I think the next week that Mrs. Eben was weeping when she announced the assassination, although I don't recall this or noticing it. We had an assembly in the auditorium when we got back to school, and I do remember how subdued she seemed then. I remember Johnson's first speech on the radio, and being impressed that he could lead the country so quickly -- he seemed so much more authoritative than the assistant principal (Mrs. Nadler!) ever seemed when she took over just because Mrs. Eben was out. But that hierarchical principle still kicked in, and we all thought the vice-president was no match for Kennedy himself, the greatest of all presidents ever, as we assured ourselves for a long time. We felt both sorry for Jonathan Richmond and in awe of him since he knew Kennedy's inaugural address by heart (see an earlier entry); it was as though he was the great surviving member of that time, and as though Kennedy's passion could now survive subjectively only in his memory. His recitation skills were much in demand for the next little while.

posted by william 7:06 AM
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I remember penmanship classes in sixth grade. I remember the Palmer method. You had to move your whole arm, and not just your hand. It seemed really inefficient. But I never learned to write legibly. I remember that my parents told me they learned to write script ("cursive!" said our penmanship teacher) before print (block letters), whereas we learned it the other way around. My mother has a beautiful hand. But no one I ever knew alternated thick and thin strokes (except a few affected calligraphers). I remember my uptown grandmother's handwriting (those self-addressed postcards to Wengen), and I was surprised to find when I got a letter from Maurice Blanchot that the handwriting on the envelope was almost identical (I think it had been addressed by his sister-in-law who would be almost exactly contemporary with my grandmother, but French, not Croation).

posted by william 9:23 AM
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I remember tie clips. People still wear them occasionally of course, but I remember when they were standard. In sixth grade, they'd be made of hard plastic, and it was always surprising when they snapped and you saw the grey snapped off place under the gold paint. I remember ribbed undershirts too, famous from A Streetcar Named Desire.

posted by william 7:11 AM
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I remember The Time Tunnel. I remember on episode where the shorter star met his boyhood self on Hawaii on the day of Pearl Harbor. He couldn't tell anyone about it, but I think he managed to save his family. So like in the Terminator later (but not T2), it turned out that the intereference with the past far from leading to paradox was always part of the structure of the event (he survived because of his own interference, etc.) I liked these paradoxes of time travel, which Isaac Asimov also talked about, and which Jack Finney's Time and Againis great on. There was also The Time Machine which I don't think brings up the paradox, and the Tay Bradbury (I think) story called "A sound like thunder," about a time travelling safari company that allows you to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs, but only those they know are about to die violently anyhow, so that you won't cause any changes. In the story, one of the time-travellers panics, and steps on a butterfly, and when they return to the present, the whole biological history of the world has changed. The sound like thunder is the sound of his angry guide shooting him. Later I wondered whether this story wasn't the real origin of the term "The butterfly effect." And I remember another Time Tunnel where they manage to get back to the present but it's frozen in time. They leave a note. I thought that was an amazing episode. It may be the source of Nicholson Baker's wonderful book The Fermata. In The Time Tunnel the intrepid time travelers go running down a spiraling barber pole like tunnel with a perspective on a vanishing point. I always wondered how far the tunnel actually went, in the underground lab where it was built.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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I remember that when Marc Bilgray and I wanted to draw and write our own comics, my father offered to give us a corporation or to allow us to incorporate: I think he had registered or paid to register a corporation which he didn't need, and he was willing to hand it to us, obviously as a lesson in the workings of the financial world he hoped I would some day enter. (His father had been a lawyer in Vienna before the Second World War and when he came to the United States in his early fifties he retooled as an accountant. My father became a CPA and he and my grandfather formed a firm for a time, although my grandfather was never a CPA. My father hoped that I would become a lawyer: he and my mother -- who is a lawyer -- worked as a team.) I remember that I was intimidated by the idea of a corporation: somehow I thought it was a physical thing, a physical plant, a building full of offices that we would have to run; and when he explained that this wasn't true it still felt that there was some huge abstract responsibility that would devolve to us as real and palpable as a physical building. I somehow knew that we would never get anywhere drawing these comics, and I thought that we would therefore fail our responsibility to this corporation, and I wanted no part of it. I think now that this must have looked to him something like someone refusing with anxiety the idea of having a web-page of their own: as though this almost purely notional or potential thing were actual and demanding and real. This was I think my first timid and risk-aversive response to the modern free enterprise system.

posted by william 9:00 PM
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I remember being fascinated by hierarchies. Actually, I think Hugh Cramer was more fascinated than I was, but he was always interesting on the subject. So I remember discussions we had when I slept over and we lay on the bunk beds in the dark about the relative destructiveness of atom bombs, hydrogen bombs and what he informed was the cobalt bomb which could destroy half the world. And then there were white belts, yellow belts, green belts, brown belts, black belts in their various degrees, and then the one or two people with black-belt degrees so high that they were awarded honrary red belts. And Hugh also was very good at catching pigeons and keeping them in boxes in the courtyard behind his building. He explained the extremely complicated pecking order, which seemed to contain teegers (?), white teegers, homers, king homers, king white homers, bald king white homers, after which was only the division of eagles. Hugh was trying to catch a bald king white homer, but as with red belts (and 1943 copper pennies) there were only a couple in circulation. Pigeons were supposed to follow unquestioningly any superior bird. I believed Hugh implicitly. I do remember the varieties of pigeons, and in particular the light tan variety which I don't think you see much any more. These were the same color as the swirling sand at the ocean's edge which I used to contemplate (see an earlier entry) standing in front of my grandfather.

posted by william 6:36 AM
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I remember my car seat. I don't think I had it long, and the reason I had it was to stop me from squirming or jumping around in the car, not safety. If anything it was probably marginally more dangerous than not. It had its own steering wheel and signal levers. I would imitate my parents and my uprown grandfather in constantly adjusting the wheel. I remember I had no idea why they did this -- the car would seem to be going straight down a straight road, and they were constantly twitching the wheel back and forth. This seemed useless to me, but it made the toy steering wheel more fun.

I remember trying to count to a million, many times. On a long trip one day my uptown grandmother told me it would take eleven days and nights to do (which is a roughly accurate approximation of the number of seconds in that period: I wonder how she knew or heard that, since certainly she wouldn't have done the calculation). I did get up to a thousand on that trip before I got bored. I remember some Isaac Asimov book saying that we were given roughly two billion heartbeats as a birthright, and that if we took care of ourselves and didn't smoke we could hope for another billion. I wonder whether this was Fantastic Voyage.

I remember always being surprised when it was morning, because I never managed to catch myself falling asleep. This has changed, and I think it means that when I was very young I really would fall asleep from one second to the next, which is the way I thought it worked anyhow. Of course I remember being half-asleep, as the adults called it, but that was a different state from what I ever remember experiencing lying wide awake in bed waiting for sleep to come. Somehow I got it into my head that you lay awake for an hour and then fell asleep, but I think I probably just lay awake for a few minutes or so.

I remember that I could never get a compass to form a perfect circle. This was because the pencil grip never held tightly enough. If you pushed down enough to get the pencil to make a continuous mark, it would always slip upwards by the time you got all the way around. Probably even if it didn't slip the circle wouldn't have been perfect because of the graphite wearing away as it drew. But it would have been close enough.

I remember being very impressed by my parents' answer to how the first straight edge was made. I'd asked how rulers were made, and they said with other rulers, and I asked, well how about the first, and they said, with only a very short pause for thinking, "with string." And I understood immediately: it was I think the first moment that I can remember of intellectual revelation.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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I remember my father getting me cardboard blocks that you folded together to make bricks, and larger ones that were supposed to be a lot of bricks mortared together but whose surface I thought was just covered by abstract oblongs (partly because they were different colors). I remember being amazed when he folded them together, since they just came as sheets of thick cardboard. And later I used to unfold them and hide things inside them that no one ever found. Once when I was in trouble I had to produce something hidden there -- maybe a note from school or a bad report card -- but I managed to get it out without letting my father know where it had been hidden: I think I said it was hidden in the fold-out couch, so that this best of all secreting places remained undiscovered.

I remember Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials on TV in the afternoon. I don't think I ever saw a serial through, though I tried. Each episode was about five minutes long. I preferred Buck Rogers.

I remember that there was a Batman serial too, and it was rereleased as a movie. It never showed on TV, and I never got to see it.

I remember Officer Joe, host of "The Three Stooges."

posted by william 7:11 AM
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I remember "Give a damn." A button and also a poster in the busses and subways: white characters on a black ground. Only the G was capitalized, so it felt like stunningly understated design. I had the button. Ths logo made for a powerful equation of liberalism with adult seriousness, whose grim determined frisson I can still recollect and evoke in myself. Its effect was probably intensified by the way it recalled the somewhat earlier Time magazine "Is God Dead?" cover, which also seemed of an unusual seriousness, and was also made of light-colored letters on a funerally black ground. The Time cover seemed to me what intellectual and moral seriousness would mean -- I was shocked later on to find out about Henry Luce. This was much later: before that I had met Richard Clurman, father of my friend Michael Clurman, who had been vice-president of Time. (I suppose there were more than one, but I didn't know it then.) He seemed to be very impressive -- not in the same way as the cover, but not inconsistently either. But the cover was not as impressive as "Give a damn." with its extraordinary period. The propagators of the sign didn't want anything from you for themselves: they just wanted you to care, in the severe, unsentimental adult mode of caring. The period had a stripped down finality about it that made the imperative feel irresistable. I wore the button around for a long time.

I remember that at roughly the same time people were carrying around "Schlep" shopping bags. And wearing T-shirts and buttons that said "Don't bother me, I can't cope." But I think all the chaff made "Give a damn." all the more severely effective.

posted by william 6:43 AM
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I remember the Huntley-Brinkley report. From New York, this is Chet Huntley. And from Washington, this is David Brinkley. Huntley died of cancer; somehow this seemed related to Humphrey's dying of cancer as well (although I don't think it was the similarity in their names: they lookedso different).

posted by william 8:58 AM
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I remember the hurricane that came through New York when I was about six. My parents had been married the day before the hurricane of 1954, which was, I am told, a doozy, and my mother worried about hurricanes when they came through New York. She told me all about them -- this was the first time I'd heard the word -- and I stayed home waiting for it to come. I remember how dark it was, and looking out of my window onto 90th street (this is when we lived on the 2nd floor, in apartment 2-G) when it came through. I saw only one man on the street (though I was surprised to see any, because she'd warned me that people could be blown away), struggling East against the wind, holding his hat tight on to his head. It was clear that this weather was a serious anomaly, and yet somehow not as serious as I'd thought it was going to be. As with the total eclipse a while later (see earlier entry) it turned out that this major experience of the dangerously exoctic was less major than I'd been led to believe. I remember these things more because of my anticipation of them than because of the actual experience. But the actual experience was, in retrospect, quite important too: it somehow confirmed a sense of safety even in an interesting world. My room was my room, even as I wondered where that man had to go in that weather; my father was my father, even as I looked up into the blinding eclipse, which wasn't so blinding after all. The things that mattered stayed the same: at least that's what I felt (without having to think it) then.

posted by william 7:45 AM
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I remember my toy shaving kit. I used to watch my father shave in the mornings -- an elaborate ritual it seemed to me -- and he got me a shaving kit which had a toy safety razor, a plastic bowl, and a brush. I used to put on his shaving cream (always Noxema) and shave it off with the razor. (I had no idea that real razors were sharp.) I was puzzled by the brush and the bowl, although I didn't ever ask anybody about it. My cantankerous grandfather (downtown) urged me not to want to start shaving too early. He said that I would stimulate my beard's growth, and that once you start having to shave it quickly loses its luster, and you have to do it for the rest of your life. He regreted starting too early. A couple of times since I preferred a beard, but he was right about how old it gets. Still, I think he had a different sense of time than I do (mine seems to be the minority sense, judging from what other people say): he regreted time wasted on chores in the distant past, and as far as I'm concerned the regret seems empty: past is past, and the fact that I've beenshaving say six months longer than I needed to have been doesn't seem to have any importance to my attitude towards it now. I used to be puzzled about whether somehow I was missing some sense of duration -- some possession of the thread of my own life -- that it would be far better to have. I've since used a shaving bowl, though, on trips where I didn't want to take cans of shaving cream, and they are a pain.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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I remember Africa Addio, a book (by two authors: already interesting, and I think maybe I thought it would be like Nordoff and Hall's Mutiny on the Bountyseries) that for some reason was on a kitchen shelf in our apartment. Someone must have forgotten it there. It was a kind of documentary of pornographically obscene violence about the African wars of liberation and control in the early sixties. It was basically a compendium of unbelievably violent acts, mostly perpetrated against women, but not all of them sexualized. I think eventually my fascination was overwhelmed by my horror. Fascinating: one person -- a priest as I recall -- had his liver cut out and had to watch his murderer eat it, until he died forty-five minutes later. Fascinating because I had no real idea what this could mean, but it was interesting that you could survive at least 45 minutes without an essential organ. At the time I still had a theory that when you got sick things got better with the passage of time. So if you survived any trauma you ought to improve. (The death of Bobby Kennedy was maybe the first thing to disabuse me of this notion. I remember that the edition of the New York Times that we got reported in a banner headline that he his condition was "extremely critical." I found out he'd died when I got to school. So I expected the next day's Times to report his death, but they were already on to its consequences. In the same way, no edition of the Times in Ithaca New York carried Michel Foucault's obituary, which I eventually read on microfilm.) Now much else has disabused me of this notion as well. The horror of the book was too great for me to want to recollect it.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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I remember songs that my Uncle Willy (killed in action June 4, 1944) used to love (according to my uptown grandmother): "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," (although that might have been a combination of her wishes and my grandfather's return from the Great War in 1918: I think he walked for three weeks from Russia back to Vienna; there was also a TV show on at 4 o'clock on weekday afternoons whose credits contained that song, with shots of soldiers marching); "Those Caissons Keep Rolling Along" (although that might be my confusion: I think it was on one of the records I played on my little record player, along with Casey Jones, John Henry, and the Red Ball Express); and -- definitely -- songs from Oklahoma; especially "Oh What a Beautiful Morning:" I remember thinking about the elephants and their trunks (see earlier) at the line "The corn is as high as an elephant's eye." I didn't know whether this was very high for corn or not: when my grandmother told me how much he loved the song I remember that I was looking from their car window at some granite rocks in a park up on Haven Avenue near the George Washington Bridge and estimating how high that was against the rocks. He also loved "June is Busting Out All Over," because I guess his birthday was in June -- D-Day in fact. He was killed two days before his 19th birthday. I remember outliving him, which seemed strange since he was so much the figure of absent authority in the family.

I remember other songs from my record player: "Campdown Racetrack," "Oh Susanna," and "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah." I think I got these songs because I liked the song my father taught me: "Standing on the Corner, Watching all the Girls Go by." I remember I didn't know what it meand to "stand on a corner.," corners for me meaning the corner of a room. And I didn't know what an occupation was ("brother you don't know a nicer occupation--matter of fact [bum bum] neither do I--than standing on the corner, watching all the girls, watching all the girls, watching all the girls go by"), nor of course what giving all the girls the eye meant; but I did love the glammor of "matter of fact," a phrase that featured in my father's talk and which I didn't quite understand but which felt somehow very competent..

posted by william 6:27 AM
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I remember notes home from school. The teacher wrote a note on a canary slip of paper and put it in an envelope, and you had to get it signed by your parents. They were dreadful instances of forced confession. Once I threw the note out -- I remember seeing it at the bottom of the outside garbage pale, just before I replaced the bag of garbage over it. Everyday the teacher asked for the signed note, and every day I claimed to have forgotten it. I didn't know what would happen, but Easter vacation finally came, which was a big relief, and after vacation she forgot to ask me about it again.

posted by william 8:11 PM
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I remember Hi-Life or was it Hi Lite?which some kids subscribed to in my class, and which I would sometimes see at the dentist's office. I remember it had pointless cartoons with a bear and a penguin and I think a little kid. I think it made possible some resonance -- perhaps irrelevant -- with Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room."

posted by william 8:44 PM
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I remember Neopenephrine. I remember the bracing and almost bitter smell of it. It cleared your nose if you had a bad cold. I think it was eventually outlawed because of dangerous side-effects. I remember the little almost circular-disk plastic bottles it came in, and the feel of the plastic in my nose and then inhaling deeply. I'd seen my parents use it before I ever did, so I felt somehow adult the first time they gave it to me. After that it seemed like one of those odd indignities that children are made to undergo, since I think I vaguely preferred a stuffed nose to the experience of the nasal spray. But it also seemed like one of those indiginites getting over which actually made you more adult, so I was more ambivalent than opposed to it.

I remember the Time/Life series of science text books that my mother subscribed to. I particularly remember the math book, though I liked the book on machines and the one on biology as well. In the math book there was a lot of stuff on topology, and I remember the deformed coffee-cup/donut taurus, and also a wonderful series of photos of a man taking off his vest without taking off the jacket over it. This showed that in some topological way the vest could never be said to be under the jacket. I wasn't supposed to wear underpants under my pajama bottoms, so in imitation of the man in the book I used to take off my underpants afterputting on my pj bottoms, by stretching them down under the cuffs and over my feet. I remember also the photo of the back of a red-headed boy's head, with a whorl where you could see his scalp. Topology showed that there would always be one such point, and apparently by analogy that there would always be at least one point on the globe where the air was calm, no matter how windy the rest of the globe was. In the biology book I remember reading about reflexes, and seeing a photo of a pianist playing too fast for the playing to be governed by his brain alone: it required conditioned reflexes, and they'd drawn bright lines of neural interaction over a silhouette of the pianist. This actually may have been in the Mind volume which also had a series of paintings of a cat by a man becoming progressively more paranoid-schizophrenic. The cat looked more and more psychedelic as his malady increased. I think this volume may also have had the famous photos of a boy and a cat (?) switching sizes in a room that we read as rectangular though of course it wasn't. I tried making a shoebox sized version with a pinhole eye-sight for science fair but it didn't work.

I remember my chemistry set.

I remember home science experiments, one of which was about making a pinhole telescope out of the wooden spool from some thread. You somehow enlarged one end which I remember doing with a knife (I also remember how ugly pencils sharpened with a knife and not a pencil sharpener were; my downtown grandfather would use a knife; on the other hand he could cut paper perfectly with a table edge. I remember onion paper. And later: Corrasable Bond!) and the result was something that was basically a tool for squinting. I remember the experience of hollowing out the spool: scraping and testing and scraping and testing -- it went very slowly, but the spool did seem to become smoother -- less edged.

I remember being puzzled by the edges of things held up to my window: blue on one edge, red on the other. I was a little disturbed by this, but not very.

posted by william 11:02 PM
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I remember Bozo the Clown's flaring red hair, of obvious molded plastic. Boy was he scary.

posted by william 7:56 PM
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I remember Brach's candy. All the old ladies, including both my grandmothers, seemed to have a large blue tin of it, with a blue metal top, that later would be used for sewing supplies. I recall that there was a sort of dark pastel picture on the tin -- of flowers or trees or a garden, but also I seem to remember figures on it not unlike the very elongated women on the B. Altman's bags. I somehow thought that this candy belonged to the world of old ladies: I couldn't have imagined my mother buying it or finding it, since she didn't belong to that world.

posted by william 11:26 AM
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I remember thinking that anything that happened before my birth was in a past so remote as not to be connected with my world at all: my parents' youth for example, or their marriage before I was born.

I remember a hobbyhorse that I used to run around on. If it was a hobbyhorse -- a broomstick with a horses head. I remember riding around on it in Kathy Yerzely's apartment: she was the daughter of a neighbor of my grandparents in Washington Heights. She had an older sister who died before we were born. She was a few months older than I. Her mother smoked a lot. She had a play house and we would hide inside it from her mother who was doing the ironing, but she always found us. When we asked her how she knew, Mrs. Yerzley said, "Mothers have eyes in the back of their heads." She had scary beige cats-eye glasses, which helped make this seem true -- just that she would have a different and more penetrating relation to seeing than we did. I was always surprised by the fact that the layout of their apartment was so different from the layout of my grandparents'.

posted by william 12:22 PM
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I remember a record I had of Hans Christian Anderson stories. I'm certain that it was Danny Kaye reading them (who else would it have been?) -- I still remember the voice, and it was the voice of Danny Kaye. I remember one story on the record, about a cook who couldn't resist eating the two geese that he had prepared for his master; one was supposed to be served to a guest. What would he do? When the guest arrived he whispered to him that his master wanted to cut off one of his ears. (I wonder whether Van Gogh knew this story? It made Van Gogh's self-mutilation less surprising to me when I learned about it in school -- a normal thing for a crazy person to do.) The guest is skeptical, but then the master comes out sharpening his knife, and making remarks about how his mouth is already watering. The guest decides he might leave; the master returns with the sharp knife to find neither guest nor goose. The cook explains that the guest has grabbed both geese and taken off. The master runs after him crying "Not both, just one! Not both, just one!" The guest thinks he means ears, and runs away all the more terrified. So the cook deftly avoids trouble. Even then I sensed that there was something excessive about the story, or something odd about it that made it about more than ears.

I remember my grandmother reading me the story about the wolf tricked into ice-fishing with his tail, which then gets cut off. I was terrified by that story, and later found that it was a crystallizing tale in Freud's account of the Wold Man's malady.

I remember my mother telling me that you could get petrified with fear. I think she was explaining what the real experience behind the Medusa myth was. Either after this explanation or prompting it was a horror movie scene that I remember, where some good-looking cad has just been cruel to a young woman who turns out to be or to have been made into a monster. She starts transforming in the room by whose door he is just leaving, and he stands there unable to move. By the time he takes off, it's too late. That's all I remember about that movie.

I remember in my book of Myths and Legendsthe story of the Graiae and their single eye. There was a picture of one of them handing the eye to another: it looked up from her palm. I asked me my mother whether the eye could see -- just the eye, lying there. She said yes, which seemed right to me, although that raised the interesting question of just what this seeing was that wasn't any person seeing. It struck me (and still strikes me now) as similar to my worries and thoughts about whether my consciousness could really be extinguished: whether there wouldn't be "John" or someone (see an earlier entry) who wouldn't be me at all, but whose consciousness I would then have.

I remember Max und Moritz and Struwelpater and how scary I thought he was. My uptown grandmother owned these books, in German. I remember that Max und Moritz, after not learning their lesson, had their bones ground into flour. I didn't quite know what that would mean. But it was wild Struwelpater (I thought it was Strudelpater) who really terrified me.

I remember how much I hated strudel.

I remember a Golden Book Giant that I had that told a shockingly grim story about some kids who played with matches. I think it was the first story I ever heard about decent children (unlike Struwelpater and Max und Moritz) that didn't end happily. (They burned to death.)

I remember the same book answered the question how high the sky was by saying that we could all touch the sky. It showed a girl standing on top of a low hill with her hands up, and it said she was touching the sky. I thought this might be cheating -- it's not what I meant by the sky. But the book was asserting that what I meant was just wrong. This might not have been the same book: it might have been a fourth or fifth grade science book.

I remember first hearing the word skyscraperfrom my uptown grandmother, and thinking what a wonderful word it was.

posted by william 6:21 AM
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I remember Honey West.

I remember Romper Room.

posted by william 7:01 AM
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I remember Jock magazine. It was about sports in New York City. I think the cover of its original (and only) issue had the Knicks on it. I seem to remember that it had an article about Walt (Clyde) Frazier in it, about how fast his hands were. He was an extremely throughtful and introspective person. The interviewer (wherever the interview was) asked whether he was friends with all his teammates, and he responded with withering scorn that he took friendship very seriously. He thought most people didn't know what the word meant. He doubted that he could have five friends in the world, or that anyone could. I took this definition as my ideal, and used the word myself sparingly and with great respect. This made me liable to feeling very hurt if someone I thought of, and said I thought of, as a friend showed any coldness to me; and it also made me very chary of considering anyone a real friend. It fed into my natural secretivness, a quality I used to take a perverse pride in. I also took a perverse pride in seeing it criticized by others. Jock had a subscription blank, and I found the first issue so fetching that I immediately subscribed (we'll bill you later). No bill and no further copy came, and that was the end of that. I couldn't believe it though: it was like a restaurant or store closing: these things weren't supposed to happen. But it still had its influence on me -- both for benefit and for bane.

posted by william 4:19 PM
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I remember S&H Green Stamps. There was a booklet that showed you the amazing things that you could get: TVs and camping equipment and outboard motors. I think we once managed a toaster.

I remember amphibious cars. I saw them a couple of times. I remember seeing two drive right up to the edge of Lake Carmel and then into and through the lake. Can this have really happened? Or was I just seeing a boat rolling down off a trailer? But I remember it vividly.

posted by william 7:42 AM
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I remember the Automat.

posted by william 11:00 PM
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I remember the first time I saw a garden hose -- green and long -- in Stormville. I remember Lou Hering, the owner of the property where we rented our cottage mowing the lawn with a manual lawn-mower and then picking up what looked like a piece of hose. But it was a snake cut in two by the lawn mower. I remember being struck by his calling it a garden snake. It was very strange that the odd liveliness of a hose spraying water could be matched by the inert body of this surreptitious and scary creature, itself strangely defeated by the awkward arabesques of the friendly-looking big-wheeled mower.

posted by william 9:00 AM
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I remember the three-point stance (from Bruce Tegner) -- I think he called it the cat stance as well: the most stable way of positioning your feet.

posted by william 6:51 AM
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