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 another time that was pure fun: a pillow fight my father had with Hugh Cramer and me in his bedroom. The feathers flew -- not quite as much as in the movies (is there one in The Sound of Music?). We were screaming and panting and it must have lasted nearly an hour. The two beds came unhooked and we were falling between them, and jumping up and down on them like trampolines, a practice that in general my father discouraged. (He had strange ideas that one could "break" the bed by doing this, where it was obvious to me that you couldn't. Now of course I realize that this is the difference between your sense of what your body can do to the world when it weighs sixty-five pounds and when you are an adult: your body feels more or less the same, but the world seems different.) But my pleasure in this was somewhat vitiated when Hugh, who always boasted about his father by deprecating others', said that his father taught him real wrestling moves. Physical fighting like that would have been inconceivable with my father. This was one rare case where I discounted what Hugh said about the superiority of his father. The ways that his father had seemed cool at least included: his tolerance for and indeed example to Hugh's atheism; his family's cussing all the time even in front of the kids (I learned my four-letter words from Hugh); his allowing Hugh to go to bed at 11:00 pm or later, when I was sent to bed at 8; his allowing Hugh and Ben to watch a lot more TV than I was allowed to; and -- I think this may have been first and most impressive -- his allowing Hugh to go out alone and to cross streets alone, when I still had to hold hands crossing streets. Hugh also taught me about bowling -- we went to the bowling alley on 72nd Street -- and once for my birthday I got my father to take Hugh and me and some other friends there. But after I had burned with anticipation, it turner out that because it was a week night, there was league bowling, and no lanes available, none of which either of us had anticipated. Hugh said that hisfather wouldn't have made this mistake, and that he was surprised that my father hadn't made a reservation. I'd wanted to show Hugh that my father knew about bowling and such as well. My father offered to make it up to me by taking us on a weekend. I don't know whether he ever did or not: somehow that didn't matter.

posted by william 7:26 AM
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I remember more about Party Cake vs. Cake Masters. When Cake Masters tied up your box (from those brass string dispensers that hung from the ceiling at intervals corresponding to the stations of the counterstaff), they would attach a handle; a high quality cardboard cylinder surrounding a piece of metal hooked at both ends which attached onto the string. I thought of this as the technique of the higher class place. I remember also trying to open the box so as to sneak cookies out of it without anyone knowing. You'd have to slip the string to the side of the front flap, pulling hard against its the other back edge and other side, and then pry the front flap open enough to get a cookie out. Or you could try to lift the string up and towards the front and try to open the flap a little bit in the space you'd opened up, pressing its lip against the taut string (red and white candy-striped! Party Cake just used white string). This was a delicate operation, since it was very easy to pull too hard and have the string cut through the flap, leaving evidence of your attempted depradations. Sometimes I would just rip the flap through the string, on the theory that it couldhave happened accidentally; but I don't think I tried this much.

posted by william 10:01 PM
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I remember H O farina. The commercial in all its details comes back to me: a cartoon with a boy trudging home from school (his books held together by a rubber strap!) enters screen left and trips over a rock, witnessed by a girl (screen left); his books go flying. (I think this commercial prepared me for Peanuts.) Then, the boy: "Every day I trip over that same stone!" The girl: "Movie it, Willie!" Boy, shrugging, ashamed: "Too big!" Girl: "I can." Boy "Cannot! You're a giirrrl." She picks it up and moves it. Song: "Little Willhemina eats her farina, H O Farina, CREAM Farina, smooth and delicious, all boys and girls love it so. H O!"

I remember the early Peanuts, before Charlie Brown and co. grew up to be the slightly older kids they are in the classic Peanuts cartoons. In the earlier ones they're about two years younger. I remember when Charlie Brown's sister was born. ("I'm a father! I mean, my Dad's a father! I'm a brother!") But probably I read this in a collection.

I remember Hetty Galen. A neighbor in East Quogue, who did children's voices on commercials. She was very big -- very fat. Once I asked her to do kids' voices and she was amazing. She did all the voices on the Hang on Harvey (a game) commercial: "Hang on Harvey, hang on!" Later I got ludicrously obsessed with analyzing the subtleties of commercials in my head, especially of their voices. (In particular the amazing voices for some women's shoes that were also like sneakers -- "Looks like a pump! Feels like a sneaker!" -- which showed some women playing a strenuous game of basketball in pumps. At the end of the commercial, a female voice asks, "Where can I get 'em?" and another voice answers, "At Jordan Marsh!" The first voice is eager, anxious, sorry to be sounding selfish, but finally frank about really really wanting them. The second voice answers as though joyfully to absolve all sins, once you realize where you can get them and what it means about your desire that you can get them there: that your desire is ok.) Those days are over (I hope); I think they go back to my surprise at the carefulness of Hetty Galen's intonations in these kids' voices.

posted by william 12:52 AM
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I remember Morse Code. Either my mother or my oddly named friend Comrade (though I think now maybe his name was really Conrad), who frequently used the word Whatchamacallit, told me that SOS was dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash. I think Comrade might have told me what it was correctly, and when I told my mother about this and tried to remember the sequence she reversed it as above. (Since it's in fact ...---...) I remember that she told me that SOS wasn't Save Our Ship, as I thought it was, but Save Our Souls. I remember being disappointed when I heard that the U.S. emergency call was "Mayday." I remember that maydayis really "m'aidez," bad French for "aidez-moi."

posted by william 11:56 PM
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I remember trying to open mail to my parents that concerned me in one way or another without my father's noticing when I resealed it. Not an easy thing to do, unless it was only barely sealed. After all, he noticed The New Yorker! Steaming never worked.

posted by william 8:36 PM
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I remember Michael Hobin reading Candy,a book I knew was extreme. I never got my hands on a copy though.


I remember I am Curious (Yellow),the book, and also its sequel, I am Curious (Blue). They were on display at the candy store where I sometimes shop-lifted candy on 91st and Broadway. But we weren't allowed to buy them or look at them, and they were in full view of the counterperson. (I don't think I ever associated candy with Candy despite the middle term provided by the titillating books.) Later, I used to walk my dog Powell there, smoking, and buy a chocolate bar to disguise the stink of cigarettes from my father, who has a very acute sense of smell.

I remember the Green Lantern novel where a lightbulb explodes as a scientist is reading a paper at a lectern. (This was my first acquaintance with the word lectern.)The Green Lantern (or was it Green Hornet?) says, very authoritatively -- as a man with great savoir faire, a man who knows how the world works, "A normal light bulb won't just explode like that unless you put cold water on it." He's right, and it turns out that the villain has put some gas in the lightbulb and then set it up to explode in order to give the scientist amnesia. The next night in the bath I filled up my watergun and squirted the lightbulb over the sink, and it did explode. This was a very dumb thing to do.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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I remember Murray the K.

I remember that Tommy Hoge's dog was named Pewter, and that she was pewter-colored. That was when I learned the word pewter. I remember or seem to remember that the Herings had a poodle.

posted by william 10:18 PM
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I remember transistor radios. As with watches, their quality was measured in numbers of the relevant item: in this case transistors. I had one I used to listen to country music to when I was walking Powell, and also the other dogs I walked -- the toy poodle and the mutt. I also listened to ball games on it when I walked the dogs at night. It was black -- that is, metal covered with a kind of fake black leather whose smell I still remember. The smell mainly came out of the circular perforated panel over the speaker which I would hold up to my ear, its vinyl strap around my wrist. I think it smelled from the sweat I'd get on it on hot summer nights. I listened to Marv Albert, who was the Knicks and Rangers announced then. The smell and the static are very evocative for me now -- not involuntary memories but memories that would be involuntary if there were anything left like them to trigger them.

posted by william 6:53 PM
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I remember "Taste me, taste me / C'mon and taste me! / Take a puff / And let me do my stuff." Loral cigarettes.

posted by william 10:27 AM
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I remember that the secret to invisible ink was lemon juice. (I think this was in The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook.) You wrote with lemon juice, and to read it you held the paper over a candle. But this was all terribly disappointing, because 1) you could read the lemon juice writing just by looking at the paper; and 2) heating it up didn't boost the contrast very noticeably anyhow.

I remember that The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook urged you to increase this magical faculty: your "powers of observation." Chet couldn't tell you what someone who'd been in the store was wearing; Frank and Joe could. Chet couldn't tell whether the red or the green light was on top in a traffic light, without looking: Frank and Joe could. I could too! So I thought I might have some powers of observation. I tested my mother on the traffic light question. She guessed green was on top! I think it took my five years or so to realize she was just pretending not to know.

posted by william 12:45 AM
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I remember "Does she or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure."

posted by william 12:10 AM
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I remember how beautiful my mother looked when she dressed up for parties, and took off her cat's-eye glasses and put in her contact lenses (in the days of hard contacts).

posted by william 6:21 AM
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I remember Ellery Queen. How strange to think now that this was the name of a detective hero. My father really liked the Ellery Queen stories. There was some odd relationship between the name of the hero and the pseudonym of the author(s). I think that the stories were supposed to have been written by Ellery Queen, Sr. and Jr., or that they were framed by the two men discussing the case, and maybe (as with Poe's Dupin) EQ, Sr. figured out the case in armchair discussion with his son? I don't know, but I do remember there was something thrilling about the actual author, who belonged to the actual world, being the same person as the fictional detective. Yet I didn't read much Ellery Queen, but I did read the famous one (which my father loved): The Chinese Orange.In it the murdered man is found in a room in which everything is reversed -- the books on the shelf are upside down and backwards, the plates on the table, the tablecloth, the carpet, etc. The murdered man, whom no one can identify, is dressed backwards too, his pants and shirt and jacket pulled on so that they all close behind. Why? Ellery Queen notices the victim has no tie -- therefore the backwards shirt was in fact nor backwards for him: he is a priest, with reversed collar, and once you figure that out it's easy to figure out who murdered him. The murderer tried to distract attention from the missing tie by reversing everything else. I remember finding it interesting that priests reversed their shirts.

posted by william 6:57 AM
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I remember the stoppers that my grandparents, and sometimes my parents, used to seal opened soda bottles. You opened the bottles with a bottle-opener (no screw tops then: the soda industry didn't want you to be able to conserve its product), and couldn't close them again, so you used these strange little devices that I found quite ugly. They were rubber coated metal corks, with a plunger for your thumb on top and two curved finger loops for your fingers on the side, attached to the plunger with a kind of spring action. By depressing the plunger you lengthened the rubber-coated metal cylinder (I think it was probably two cylinders, one telescoping into the other), which made it slender enough to fit into the mouth of the bottle. It would sort of taper down to a point where the metal pulled the rubber thin, but you could see the seams where the two cylinders met -- I guess the inner one could have been a spiral spring of metal tape, since it seemed to taper more than the outer one -- so it always looked as though its mechanical guts were about to spill. When you let go, the cylinder thickened, and the two finger-loops clamped themselves onto the protruding lip of the bottle, sealing it tightly. I seem to recall how the rubber would go bad, and also that there were two sizes for these bottle-stoppers, like the two sizes of pencil that were available then. Only now does the obvious sexual meaning of my dislike of these stoppers occur to me -- their metallic inelegance, what with those loops, and the strange reversal of normal satisfactions because to lengthen was to loosen and to get a satisfying seal was to relax the tension you'd put on the stopper and to let the thing get stubby and short.

posted by william 7:05 AM
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I remember Up Periscope,one of the first adult novels I read. Although now I think it was probably written for teenagers. It made me want to live on a submarine, a desire I have since overcome. I remember other early adult novels, particularly a mystery called The Monkey's Paw,I think. I remember reading it in Stormville, and remembering that I remember a little bit more about the layout of the Hering's patio. They must have already put in flagstones (I remember when they did that -- got rid of the nice smooth concrete for the flagstones that made the rollercoaster vehicle jounce and stop and tip over). I seem to recall a barbecue outside the side door into the back area of their house. And I remember looking at the book, with a monkey shaped skull looming over its two running heros as I went out through that back door. Up Periscope had a blue cover, and was probably at the origin of my interest in Jack London. Later I remember reading the Nordoff and Hall Bounty series. And I remember that the Herings had a sulky, a sort of pedal version of the horsedrawn carriage, which also was baffled by the flagstones.

posted by william 10:56 AM
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I remember the American Basketball Association, with its tri-colored ball, and Rick Barry, the Nets superstar. I remember the first all-star game between the NBA and the ABA, and how much better then NBA was. Rick Barry was the ABA's greatest player. He shot fouls underhand, and always hit them. I think he never took a jump shot.

I remember Dick Young, of the Daily News' sport pages. There were always whimsical drawings in his columns. He was very crusty. I remember reading sports in the Daily News, because its coverage was so good, even though the rest of the paper was so conservative.

I remember when the New York Post was an afternoon paper. At the time it was highly liberal. I think they endorsed Bella Abzug. (I remember Bella Abzug.)

I remember people blaming Lindsay for the snow in Queens, and I couldn't really understand why that was hisfault.

I remember wondering what the star key and the pound key (we called it number-sign then) on the new touchtone phones could possibly be for.

I remember the introduction of the Princess Phone, and how odd that seemed. At the time you rented phones from the phone company, and they were virtually indestructible. I remember that my uptown grandmother had a phone you could plug into outlets in several rooms in her apartment. The plug was a large, unwieldy, four-pronged affair. (Until recently, at any rate, you could still find these plugs in the phone sections of hardware stores.) It was large and boxy and ugly and seemed in keeping with her large, boxy, ugly hearing aid, and most of her stuff: inelegant but she knew how to use it. It was like her camera too, and her sweaters, and everything about her. Ugly but comfortable, and unthreatening. Although I do have a false memory of her once bare-breasted, with one large breast hanging down in the middle of her chest. (A cyclopean memory, not the memory of a mastectomy.) Similarly I have a false memory of my mother and father both having penises -- from the first time I remember seeing my mother naked: they were naked together.

posted by william 7:46 AM
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I remember KEM cards -- the fancy double deck that my parents used for playing bridge. They came in a dark greem plastic holder. I recall the KEM logo was sort of egg-shaped, with an art-deco E in the middle.

posted by william 10:02 PM
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I remember The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace, I believe, who later did an almanac with his son and daughter. I often confused him with holocaust denier David Irving. The Seven Minutes was about a book of the same title (referring to the average length of the sexual act) put on trial for pornography. The book contained the pornographic work at its center -- that is you could read the pretty hot piece of porn that the trial was about. I learned a lot about sex, and about the first amendment -- just what a boy reading that kind of book wanted.

posted by william 9:33 AM
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I remember how much I liked the mysterious title "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds." The play alas turned out to be disappointing. I liked the equally thrilling title -- a sort of rhythmic and semantic rhyme of the first -- of Julian Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Proust in Jean Santeuil I later read describes a teacher of Jean's whose books have thrilling but then self-deflating titles, like Le sentiment de l'infini sur les bords du Lac du Tchad.)

posted by william 1:25 AM
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I remember two knife-sharpeners in the kitchen drawers. One was a cylindrical piece of metal on a standard wooden grip. I had no idea what it was used for, but I had no idea what a lot of kitchen implements were used for. The other was also on a standard grip, but it had a slotted wheel on a bearing that the knife set spinning. I remember that my mother would often whet a knife on the first -- the cylindrical -- sharpener before carving meat. I don't think I ever saw the second one -- which seemed dangerous to me, the way can-openers seem dangerous -- being used. Because at that time door-to-door knife-sharpeners still came, and I remember one coming with his machine and sharpening all our knives. You could also see knife-sharpeners on the street, with their carts, or one at least, whom I remember on 92nd street. I remember seeing sparks fly, but I don't know whether this was in our apartment or on the street.

posted by william 8:33 AM
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I remember when the word people used for "irritable" was nervous. My mother would snap at me, and then explain that she was "nervous." This was much to be preferred to her being angry at me, and I would just avoid bothering her, without feeling bad. One day I snapped at my grandmother (her mother), and then explained that I was nervous. This was one of the few times she ever got genuinely angry at me: she dressed me down saying that there was no reason for me to be nervous, since I hadn't experience what my parents and their parents had: escape, displacement, refugee-hood, incarceration in prison camp, the War. All of which made me feel a sort of awe about my parents' irritability or nervousness, as though I was in touch with something on a historical scale, and could experience a connection to it just by being a little bit irritating.

I remember that -- maybe the same day -- my downtown grandmother wouldn't allow me to dress all in black, and in particular refused to allow me to buy a black turtleneck shirt. Those were for the blackshirts -- the fascists.

I remember that my uptown grandfather refused ever to get into either a German or a Japanese car.

posted by william 12:11 AM
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I remember Chicken on the Run, a pizza place on Montauk Highway.

I remember malteds. You can still get them, but not often. I also remember real custard. Another thing that's very hard to get. For a while we called soft ice-cream custard, and then we stopped. And once, in Italy I think, I ordered custard and got a hideous adult version of the thing. Oh well.

I remember Yugo Cocta, the Tito-era Yugoslav monopoly on soft-drinks. It was terrible.

I remember when people tended to write Yugoslavia as "Jugoslavia." I always hated it, though I think that was the way Jugoslav National Airlines did it.

posted by william 12:58 AM
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