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 campaigns against crossing in the middle. I think there was a giraffe on a poster (though it's possible that I'm confusing this with Danny and the Dinosaur) who had three heads looking three ways. I remember the horrid jingle:
Don't cross in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle,
In the middle of the block.
Walk up to the corner;
Keep your eyes and ears up (?)
Don't something something (leave the pavement?)
Till the coast is clear!
And wait, and wait,
Until you see the light turn green!

I also remember:
Please, please don't be a litter bug,
Please, please don't be a litter bug,
Please, please don't be a litter big,
'Cause every litter bit hurts.

This was sung to the tune of "Oh dear, what can the matter be," a song I only learned latter and as a derivation from the litter bug song.

I remember how beautifully my mother sang "Somewhere, over the rainbow."

posted by william 11:11 PM
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I remember:

Whistle while you work;
Hitler was a jerk
Mussolini
Broke his penee;
Now it doesn't squirt.

I think this was a last residue from the Second World War.

posted by william 12:30 PM
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I remember that about a year after Kennedy's assassination -- but maybe it was 90 days -- Time published a cover painting of him that was representationally very odd. His face was made up of collops of paint, as though modeled in clay but not yet smoothed over. The maid (whose name I don't remember) said something very striking: "That's awful. It's what he looks like now underground." I think she took the magazine away from me to look at its cover, and after she said this I don't think she returned it. I jumped to the conclusion that what the cover showed was his face swarming with worms -- when I jumped to this conclusion I don't know -- maybe then, maybe years later when I learned (in ninth grade science) that not only were there more earthworms than people in New York (a fact which surprised me), but that there were maybe more rats than people, a fact which shocked me. I'd already read 1984 and couldn't figure out why the rat bothered Winston Smith so much. But suddenly I did, and began hating rats. So it may have been then that I realized (or thought I realized: could Time really publish a picture of wriggling worms as bearing the modelling of those familiar features?) what the cover showed. Years later I read Shelley on worms in "Adonais" and then years after that I met Joseph Leo Koerner, whose father was a very distinguished painter and had done many Time covers. Joseph had some of his paintings at his house, and the style seemed familiar. I know, from his obituary I believe, that he did Kennedy covers, and I think he may have done the cover that so struck me as a child.

posted by william 3:00 PM
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I remember reading Herman Wouk. Marjorie Morningstar might have been the first adult novel I read. I liked the title. But I didn't realize till maybe 80% of the way through that her name was Marjorie Morgenstern. I saw the "Mor..." and read it as "Morningstar" from the beginning. I think it was when she reflects that both she and Noel had changed their names (Noel Airman from Saul Ehrman) that I looked back and found my error. I think the passages about Noel Airman might have been when I first heard of Noel Coward (whom Airman is said to admire). Noel always hold his elbow, but at one point he bows to Marjorie and she sees that he has a crooked arm. Much later, she's considering some void in herself and she thinks that it's like something. "Or a crooked arm." I remember being in raptures about "a crooked arm." A little later I started reading Wouk's book about a guy who buys a hotel in hte Carribean, and decides he's going to try to read Ulysses, "that difficult novel." My father had Ulysses on his bookshelf, so of course I tried to read it. And it wasdifficult -- there were no quotation marks around reported speech. But I persisted: it took over a year, and only half-way through, I remember, I asked my father whether Leopold Bloom was Jewish. So I got nearly nothing out of it. But I was impressed by Molly's monologue, and her use of "fuck" and "shit" (words she wants to cry while kissing Stephen all over his "clean young cock"). I also liked the letter from Joyce to Bennet Cerf and Judge Woolsey's opinion at the head of the Random House book. I think I learned the word "leer" from that opinion ("not with the leer of the pornographer"). Previously I'd known Bennet Cerf as the compiler of 1001 Jokes, which my downtown grandmother gave me, along with The Wit and Wisdom of John F. Kennedy, edited by someone who made a specialty of those sorts of books (I think he had an Adlai Stevenson one as well).

posted by william 7:24 AM
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I remember change purses. There were the little feminine purses both my grandmothers had -- little pockets of vinyl with brass fasteners that snapped together to form what looked to me like a bow, a double loop at the top of the purse. These sometimes contained two compartments. In his very old age my uptown grandfather would carry a purse like this to take change to the store when my grandmother (who couldn't walk without a walker) would send him out to buy something. As with all her other assignments, he followed her instructions uncomplainingly, but to me it felt like dilapidation, this use of a feminine change purse. I remember the change purses sold in trinket shope in Italy, which I lover. They were of fake leather, often fringed, a shape square on one end and semi-circular on the other, and about a centimeter thick. You unfolded one and then shook the change out onto the flat area formed by the inside of the open cover. Sometimes there would be a kind of pull out drawer inside, which you could pull out into that edged cover area. The second comparment left room when shut for some paper money wedged behind it and the back of the purse. I guess I liked these because they didn't have the feminine decoration, and because they reminded me so much of Italy, which I loved so much -- they seemed so right for lire, and all the Italian boys had them.

I remember, thinking about shaking change out into the top of the purse, poker dice, which they had at the bar at the hotel in Bellagio, and which I loved to play. You rolled them out of a felt-lined leather cup (not unlike the backgammon cups that got me into some trouble later on). It was so easy to get four of a kind!

posted by william 1:05 PM
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I remember the ads on the busses for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (before I knew who they or Stoppard were). And at the same place on the busses were ads either for How Now Brown Cow? or How Now Dow Jones? The latter was a parody of the former, but I'm not sure which was a play.

I remember another in the set of novelty trading cards mentioned a while ago: "You're a real peach" -- flip! -- "All covered with fuzz."

posted by william 12:26 AM
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I remember the shirts I wore as a very little boy, with loops at the shoulders for the straps of my pants. They were the toddler version of dress shirts -- I seem to remember that they were smooth and often warm from the iron. The loops were interesting.

posted by william 7:28 AM
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I remember the last cobblestones in New York. I think there were some in Inwood, around Dykeman Street, and there were some near 180th street, and I think there was a large stretch of them on the gigantic hill up 165th street that we would take from Riverside Drive to go to my uptown grandparents' apartment. Eventually they paved over them, and now they may all be removed, but for a while in New York cobblestones would show through deteriorating macadam. (I remember how beautiful and somehow old-fashioned and friendly, with curves down from their crowns like a fifties car, the black streets looked in the rain.) When we learned about Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam, the cobblestones seemed a link to that past. Later, when I visited Stuyvesant Village, the modern high-rises seemed wrong. My Uncle went to Stuyvesant, and I remember visiting it once, in elementary school, but not finding the list of war dead with his name (my name) inscribed on it.

I remember that stoopis a Dutch word, used only in New York.

posted by william 10:03 AM
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I remember ABC gum. Someone offered it to you (to me), but the ABC meant Already Been Chewed!

posted by william 11:12 PM
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I remember that the garbage trucks of my youth -- pre-Helvetica, pre-"Sanitation" -- had compacters that went around in a circle, like a water-wheel. Only later did trucks come in that scooped the garbage up into the body of the container. I remember how fascinating garbage trucks were, and how scary. The scooping ones seemed less scary because they brought the garbage up into a container that obviously had room for it. Whereas the earlier ones pushed it down, where it seemed there was no room at all. I sort of knew that it went around, but what was so eerie was that each vain or catch basin of the garbage-wheel came out empty, after going down full. How did it make that garbage disappear?

I remember that my downtown grandmother's building at an incinerator shute. Later incineration became illegal, but some people would still dump their garbage down that way. It became a very attractive place for roaches.

I remember that in my downtown grandmother's building (one of the ILGWU Union co-ops in Chelsea, on 28th street) there were two elevators, one for even and one for odd floors, and that the Ground floor was distinguished from the 1st, which made G even, and the odd floor elevator anamolous (since it stopped on G). My grandmother lived on the 11th floor, but I would take whichever elevator came first, and walk down from the twelfth floor if the even came first. Her building had criss-crossing stairways, so that you could switchback back and forth between floors, in either of two ways. I thought this was pretty cool at the time.

posted by william 1:00 AM
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I remember reinforcements. And also self-sticking reinforcements. And also fabric reinforcements. And how easy it was to come home with a reinforcement stuck on you somewhere. I remember spending lots of boring time tracing the outside edges of reinforcements with my pen -- this almost always ended up with the pen-point prying the reinforcement from the paper and crumpling it -- and testing the inner edges, first by twirling my pen around and then by forcing it out on a radius against the reinforcement. I would also try to rip the paper under the reinforcement, almost always with success. I remember the huge frustration of trying to save a ripped-out piece of paper with reinforcements. One wouldn't do, and if you used two you could never get them just right. I remember the experience of trying to pierce reinforcements with the open rings when trying to replace a sheaf of paper. I also remember how hard it was to write in a loose-leaf notebook with the paper still in the binder. Your hand would be blocked by the rings. But it was also a real pain to take the paper out of the binder. There wasn't really room on your desk, and the gouges on the desk made writing hard anyhow (and if you used the binder as a backing, you were so tempted to pierce the vinyl). If you put the binder on the floor, you felt constrained everywhere. It was all very frustrating.

posted by william 7:35 AM
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I remember movies rated M (for mature audiences only). Straw Dogsmay have been the first M movie I saw, although I think some of the more risquee James Bond movies might have been rated M as well. I think that the neat and surprising movie Vanishing Pointmight have been rated M. The rating seemed so sophisticated. It wasn't a promise of nudity of the sort that (I was told) you got in R (Restricted) movies like Carnal Knowledge. (And how weird that Midnight Cowboywas rated X. It just gave it cachet, and made everyone want to claim they'd seen it.) The M seemed more like the M who headed MI-5 in the James Bond movies it adorned -- sophisticated, mysterious, superior. I remember the red M screen at the beginning of M rated movies. They had all the pizazz that foreign movies would have later.

posted by william 1:25 AM
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I remember these lunch snacks that I used to get at Merit Farms -- vile beyond belief. They were either two square apple pies or one turn-over shaped affair that came in a kind of waxed-paper package. They might have been made by Hostess, but I'm not sure; certainly they weren't wrapped in cellophane. I remember exactly how they tasted -- absurdly sweet with some more solid stuff that was supposed to be the fruit, and a hint of cinammon. What's interesting is that I doremember exactly what they tasted like, and the thought now appals me, but at the time the taste was good. The difference between something's tasting good and its tasting appaling has more to do with a cognitive response to the pure sensation than to the sensation itself. Charles Sanders Peirce says something similar, when analyzing what he calls "thirdness," which is at the heart of the semiotic structure of the world. But all you need do is repeat a taste that once seemed good, and does so no longer -- note the fact that it's the very same taste that now seems awful.

posted by william 2:13 PM
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I remember that The New Yorkerused to print passages from Ulyssesin the fine print of their Long Runs feature at the front of the book. The first and last long runs would be regular one line reviews; the others would be sentences from Joyce printed serially. I think they got to chapter 3 (Proteus: Stephen on the strand). Then the Times noticed this in an article and The New Yorkerstopped immediately. I think they stopped in the late sixties.

posted by william 1:14 AM
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I remember Checker Cabs! The jump seats! What could be more fun for a kid? For two kids?

posted by william 11:10 AM
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I remember where I used to get my hair cut on Broadway on 88th street. Haircuts were a dollar. I used to give the barber a quarter as tip. The barbers there were never talkative, and I didn't get the jokes in movies about talkative barbers -- I mean they didn't seem true-to-life. These barbers had a shaving-cream machine -- black with a chrome nozzle, and after they cut my hair they would shave my sideburns, unnecessarily. They'd sharpen the razor on a leather strop, very impressively. I remember the odd loud sound of the razor scraping near my ears. But I think they thought of themselves as one of the institutions that prepared you for adulthood. In the age of AIDS this preparation turned out to be useless. There was a sign in the window: "We cut hair only." I never quite understood as opposed to what. Ears? Cloth? I remember that as they hovered around me they would always be snipping the air very rapidly, as though ready to pounce on a wayward lock, a practice which when I idly did at home my mother told me was very bad for scissors.

posted by william 7:37 AM
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I remember how peeing in the ocean or the lake warmed you up when the water was icy. I hasten to record that I stopped peeing in pools pretty early, having a sense of the implicit social contract -- if I didn't others wouldn't. More fool me.

posted by william 1:36 PM
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I remember lipomas. Fatty fist-sized benign tumors that I associated with male adulthood. My downtown grandfather had one on his arm, my father on his underarm, my uncle Cico (pronounced Tsitso) on his back. They seemed one of those features of adulthood -- not relevant to my life or any life that I would call mine, but nevertheless relevant to adulthood, like shaving and going bald. Cico (my mother's blood-brother, but also a distant cousin) had his removed. I met him twice -- two years in a row when visiting Yugoslavia. The second year he'd just had it removed and had a bandage over the spot: I remember him diving into the ocean with the bandage on his spine. He was my mother's age -- mid-thirties, smoked like a chimney, and had lots of casual sex which he told me about in an indulgent and avuncular way. I was impressed with his athleticism when he told me about coming in from behind (a tergo, not anal), partly because I was slightly off about female anatomy. His athleticism wasimpressive; I was just in the mode of wanting to be a serious runner, and I would run every morning (I must have been twelve or so), but he was much faster than me with greater stamina, despite his smoking. He had red hair and seemed salty to me. He died of a sudden heart-attack a year or two later, to my mother's inexpressible grief. I don't think I know anyone in my generation with a lipoma, so maybe I was right that it belonged to the adulthood of a previous time, not our own.

posted by william 2:55 PM
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I remember The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong.The title, wittily, had the R in PETER reversed, like the R in Toys 'R' Us. Things always go wrong because people get promoted until the reach their "level of incompetence." My father and all his friends read this book. I read a bit of it. I remember one of Peter's example: the Astrodome, where the clouded-glass roof made it impossible for outfielders to see fly balls during the day. I think this was my first introduction to Darwinian theory, although of course what it was was a kind of dysgenic account of what happens when there aren't prices in survivability for the unfit to pay. It seemed a pretty interesting idea, though of course I didn't see why anyone would spend their time reading that book and not fiction.

posted by william 7:10 PM
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I remember Cuban-Chinese restaurants in New York. I'd see them a lot, and then my friend Andy Birsh took me to one, I think before we went to see a performance of Shakespeare in the Park. It might have been at that performance that we saw Clive Barnes sitting just below us taking notes (for the Times at the time). That was the Comedy of Errors, which was done in cosa nostra style (settings in Sicily, costumes, etc.), and I couldn't stop laughing, but he panned it the next day. Another time I saw a guy collapse. I was with a friend -- Doug Breitbart? -- whose mother was an MD. The guy who collapsed was in the top row, and we were near the bottom, so we just watched as some other physicians pounded on his chest. My friend's physician mother told us the guy would definitely die. The disturbance probably delayed the opening for ten minutes or so. An ambulance came and took the guy away, and then we watched the play -- me flatly disbelieving that she could know the guy would die, even though I also knew she was right. But that wasn't the Chinese-Cuban night. The Chinese-Cuban restaurants had some Chinese food with yellow Cuban rice. And there were lots of egg dishes -- Carribean style versions of more familiar Chinese food. I loved these places once I found out about them, and probably patronized them religiously till Empire opened up on 97th street and Tommy Fenerty introduced me to the sesame noodles they introduced to New York. (Before that Szechuan and Hunan restaurants had been the new craze, after lifetimes of Cantonese food. I think Hunan balcony still exists. I believe that it was the coverage of President Nixon's trip to China that made Americans interested in Hunan cuisine.) I miss the Cuban-Chinese restaurants; I took my mother and she liked it too. Another restaurant I went to with Andy I took my mother to later, and she told me it was all right to leave cash on the table after we got the bill. I thought they'd think we were walking out, but she told me that leaving the cash was an element of "savoir faire," the first I heard of the term. It meant to me a kind of "Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect" kind of whistling. (I knew that song from the same song-book that I knew Balai-Hai and Dites-moi from.) But I practised it, and today I can almost do it without self-consciousness.

posted by william 11:18 PM
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I remember Eclair, the Austrian bakery on 72nd street. There was an old Austrian couple that ran and I think owned it. I found it interesting that a New York institution could somehow be run by an old couple very like my grandparents. The surprise about Eclair was that there was a little restaurant in the back. We ate there one night -- I thought we were just going to the bakery, or just getting desert, and then we sat down to dinner and got knoedel and palaschinken and such. What made it seem like a real restaurant was that they gave us water in water glasses when we sat down. They closed from one day to the next about ten years ago. I think they'd since been bought out -- their food wasn't what it had been. They used to make wonderful opera cakes, with lots of rum and lots of pink decoration. But I wasn't eating opera cake in the period that I first remember it -- more pischingers and florentines and other chocolatey things.

posted by william 7:18 AM
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I remember that after Danny Kaye my uptown grandparents used to watch the Russian circus on TV. Could they have been on every Sunday? They were particularly taken with the Lipanzer Stallions.

I remember that my uptown grandparents used to love to go to Westbury Gardens in Old Westbury, Long Island. Now I want to go back myself. At the time I thought they were inoffensive: a larger version of the gardens in Fort Tryon Park

posted by william 11:28 PM
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I remember that there used to be 10 $10,000 bills. I forget who was on them. None of them were in circulation. We saw one on display at the U.S. mint in Washington. I remember that it was interesting that your fantasy of stealing it was self-balking since you couldn't use it. They explained that any bank would recognize the stolen bill immediately. And no store could give you change for it.

I remember not getting why recording the serial numbers of ransom money or money stolen from a bank would lead to the robbers.

posted by william 9:26 AM
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I remember the white meal worms I guess they were that I used to buy at fishing shacks in Bellagio. I particularly remember the smell of the worms, or the dirt that still clung to them. When they died they dried up and turned yellow. They would sometimes ooze when you put them on a hook, and sometimes not. Somehow if you put the worm on right the hook also went through your epidermis, which was somewhat comforting because that didn't hurt at all and the texture of the worm's skin was not so different from that of my own palm. I only actually caught a fish once, and that was through the gills -- no fish ever took my hook. Gian Carlo, the brother of my friend Daniella Bucher, did a lot of fishing, mainly on boats, and once I remember him coming back with a bunch of fish in a pail and killing them all with a blow to their heads. I watched in fascination and very slight horror as he beheaded and gutted them. Everybody seemed to know what they were doing, everybody was competent and expert in this routine, even the fish.

posted by william 9:27 AM
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I remember that when you got off an airplane on to the tarmac there was something odd and the reverse of evocative when you came to a place that was hot. The plane was so much about being radically inside, since outside was cold and death (I remember when I went sky-diving the first time the vividness of realizing that nothing was holding the plane up, and that there was therefore no reason to clutch the plane; the second time I no longer felt this way) that it was very strange to exit and find that there was no difference between inside and outside, or that outside was heated more than the inside was. I'd have this feeling particularly when we came back from Italy, since usually it would be a muggy August night, and New York was so much hotter than Zurich (whence we usually returned) and you would go from a heated interior to an even warmer exterior. Then when I finally went back to my bed, my mattress felt very hard compared to the beds I'd been sleeping on for the past few weeks. And the sound of the busses through the open window was very loud. Later I remembered some of this negative evocativeness when I went to Florida one March. I lit a cigarette as soon as I got off the plane, and the smoke which had been so noticeably hot in the cold of a New York winter now was hardly distinguishable from the air I was breathing. The cigarette was almost entirely unsatisfying -- not the nicotine but the smoke itself. It was a little like smoking blindfold: I had no sense of the pleasure I usually got from difference between normal breath and smoke.

posted by william 7:04 AM
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I remember how long an hour used to be. Having to wait an hour for something was intolerable. Having an hour to do something was to have as much time as you could possibly need. Once at home in apartment 2-G I remember asking the housekeeper how long it would be before my parents came home, and she said that it would be an hour. I think this was the first time I had a sense of how long that was. I stood next to the refrigerator in the darkening kitchen, sometimes peeping around it at the kitchen, sometimes stepping back to look at the clock above it. I strummed my fingers on the warm coils on its back. After I was sure an hour had passed, it turned out that only five minutes had gone by. Hours just seemed like currency too large to be trading in.

posted by william 6:15 AM
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I remember stale Topp's bubble gum, and how, because you couldn't really save it, if you bought more than one pack of baseball cards at a time you'd stick all the big sugary pieces in your mouth at once. They'd crumble where you'd manage to break them, but stay stiff until your jaw hurt and your mouth was full of what felt more like plywood than gum. With one piece eventually you could blow bubbles: with many you could never get it to that state. I remember Bazooka bubble gum as well, and how you could break it in half length-wise. And I remember the rumor that if you swallowed gum it could stick to your appendix and give you appendicitis.

posted by william 10:37 AM
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I remember that after the death of Mao the composition and policy of the government was announced by mysterious posters that went up on the walls of Beijing. (I remember that when Nixon went to China, newspapers started calling it Beijing and not Peking, and in general following the modern rules of transliteration, although I guess that can't technically be the word.) I thought at the time that the posters were somehow going up on the Great Wall in Beijing. I remember that the leadership of the Gang of Four was announced on those posters, and then so were its demise and the accusations against Madame Mao. I found it amazing that people in the night could govern China by putting up these posters, and I think I had a sense that to succeed in getting them up so that they would be there the next morning was to govern China for that day. So that anyone daring and stealthy enough (but I knew this would take near supernatural stealth) could rule the country, for a day at a time. This feels to me now like a sort of parable for the idea of being a writer that I most admire -- the idea of being a writer that you find in Proust and Blanchot: a strange creature who lives in the dark, as Proust's narrator says of himself, inhabits mysteriously not another world but what is other to all worlds, as Blanchot says about Kafka -- but I think the connection in my mind might only be a receptivity to a kind of anonymous uncanniness: it wouldn't be correct to say that the writingon the posters, as writing, meant that much to me. It was the power of their strange apparition that did.

posted by william 7:20 AM
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