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 learning the meanings of shitand fuck from Hugh Cramer one year. FuckI learned from him and his sister Gloria. Hugh and I were standing in his kitchen, and Gloria (his older sister) was sitting at the table, and I asked "What does `fuck' mean?" "You don't know what `fuck' means?" they both said with the kind of simultaneity that you only get in movies. Hugh then explained it to me, but I flatly disbelieved him until my father confirmed the story that evening. I spent a lot of time wondering how you got yourself to squirt in that situation -- I thought it must be like peeing, and couldn't imagine that I'd be able to pee in such a position. ("The pleasure momentary, the position ludicrous, the expense damnable," as Lord Chesterfield said.) My father told me with gentle amusement that when the time came it wouldn't be a problem. I imagined him trying to pee into my mother. I imagined you fucked standing up, and it all seemed very unwholesome to me. That summer in Bellagio I was hanging out with some Australian kids. (One of whom had a Mogen David on a neck-chain; I was pleased and made a joke in imitation of my father when some contretemps about a sand-castle came up: "These Jews are all alike." She told her parents, they told my unutterably mortified parents, I protested that I was just imitating my father which mortified them more, and then my father explained that it was ok if someone knew you were a Jew yourself when you made such a comment in jest: otherwise not. This was one of those rare and surprising occasions when adults seemed genuinely distrubed by something that I had to say.) The elder brother of the family heard me saying or teaching the four letter words to his younger sister (with the Mogen David), and rebuked me. I think I dared him to prove he knew what they meant. He did, and then he told me that there were far worse four-letter words, and that I had gone nowhere in my exploration of the depths of linguistic depravity. I was amazed by this and asked him what they were, but he refused to tell me -- he said I would have to wait until I was seventeen. (I must have been nine or ten, and subsequent summers he still refused.) I didn't learn the words cunt or twat until senior year in high school, somehow -- they weren't part of our vocabulary. I learned the latter from e. e. cummings:
Some like it shot,
And some like it hung,
And some like it in the twot [sic]
Nine months young.
(My father (again) defined "twot" for me and corrected the spelling. I wasn't expecting this at all.) But I don't think the brother, Alexander Downer, can have meant those words, and I still don't know what he meant. He's now Foreign Minister of Australia, and apparently extremely right wing. He was involved in some financial scandal a few years ago, but seems to have weathered it. I think he sent Australian troops to Afghanistan.

posted by william 12:21 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember when they were building Lincoln Center, near out apartment house. I remember when they tore down Penn Station, near my Chelsea grandparents' house. I remember the adults being upset about it. I remember when they redid the area around the Soldiers and Sailors monument on 89th street, which I liked thinking of as partly a monument to my Uncle. All these building projects and piles of rubble merge in my memory.

I remember another mother/father distinction. In our library my father always had a recliner (although I may remember when the first one was delivered -- black leather with buttons; I thought it was very neat) and my mother an armchair. And another: my mother drank alcohol, my father didn't (except Sangria at La Fonda del Sol).

I remember that at Tommy Hoge's house the equivalent room -- TV, books, desk -- was called a "den." Do people still have dens?

I remember when mail was misdelivered to us, and my father took me with him to ring on the bell next door (2-H) to give it to the Hoges. I wondered about this -- were we allowed to deliver mail? And couldn't we just leave it in front of their door, as the mail was left in front of ours? But Tom Hoge (the father) opened it, and they were both genial about it, and I saw some kids run to the door: Tommy and his younger brother Ken. I think they'd just taken baths. Tommy became my best friend for years, with many many consequences. I think it was a postcard that got misdelivered to us. I remember that the ring was different on their bell than on ours -- theirs was an unpleasant electric squawk, ours a higher pitched rapid ring, like a fast and continuous phone ringing. How does one describe this basic difference, like the basic difference in kinds of dial tone? Later when we moved to 7-F we also had the unpleasant electric squawk. I missed the old ring, which (since they always rang) was like the kind and loving voice of my mother or grandparents.

posted by william 7:54 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember "Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos."

I remember Tiajuana Smalls ("It's something new baby, for you baby; you know who you are. It's a little cigar.")

I remember "Brush your breath with Dentyne."

I remember "Double your pleasure, double your fun with doublefresh, doublegood, doublemint gum." The ads were about having sex with twins.

posted by william 3:02 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember how frustrating it was to go clothes shopping: trying on different versions of hugely uncomfortable clothes. I remember going down to Barney's on 17th street (when it was still a discount store and not the bankrupt upscale Madison Avenue institution it has since become) and being forced into uncomfortable wool outfits. I remember that after we decided on something, the dapper salesman gave way to a tailor who would chalk the clothing -- cuffs (both hand and foot), shoulders, waist, all of this increasing the frustration and claustrophobia and overheatedness of the whole thing. He worked with a cigarette in his mouth, and would drop ashes amid the chalk, but that was ok because like the chalk they would be gone from the finished suit.

posted by william 9:15 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that one of the standard meals we had was veal parmigiano. I remember when my mother first made it. I called it "pizza meat" from then on. That was when veal was no big deal in any sense.

I remember Accent. Pure MSG.

I remember Adolf's Meat Tenderizer. Adolf's.

posted by william 12:38 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my father listening to the news on the radio. He'd listen in the morning in the bathroom while he shaved. I remember him shaving and listening to news about the beginning of the Six Day War. I remember also riding in the car with him while the news reported, once, the death of John XXIII, and, another time, the death at 88 of Truman. If I'm not mistaken Truman outlived LBJ.

posted by william 12:03 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember a memo book of fake leather from which Brian Seeman and I unpasted the end paper. There we found newspaper backing in Chinese or Japanese. We assumed this was some secret document that was being smuggled in hidden in the memo book. But somehow I knew it wasn't, and I was really avoiding the disappointment of even a pristine memo book's actually being made up of used material, of detritus.

posted by william 12:32 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember when apples had worms in them. Macs, especially (there were only two kinds -- macs which actually tasted good, and Delicious which actually were firm and sweet. No longer). They had worm-holes, and you tried to dig the holes out. Sometimes you'd taste something bitter, and there would be a brown serpentine section in the apple that I thought (and still think) was the worm itself somehow digested and assimilated into the apple it was trying to eat. I remember that the only thing worse than finding a worm was finding half a worm. Each half was supposed to regenerate, and if you ate half, it was supposed to regenerate in your stomach. I don't think I ever really worried about this -- rather it was a fact one knew.

posted by william 1:59 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that I had a canary when I was very young named (I think) Hans. I mainly remember that he died. I remember talking about the canary that I used to have with my parents better than I remember the canary. I think I had him a year.

I remember a parakeet flying through our window into our apartment on Riverside Drive. I wanted to keep it, but of course we didn't. My father took it to the ASPCA. "We don't take birds," they said. "You do now," he said, and left it with them.

I remember that my uptown grandmother made me chocolate farina that she called papi-papi. I loved it. I even liked its occasional lumpiness, because you could never tell if a lump would be farinesque or intensely chocolatey.

posted by william 7:11 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my father and me going to the airport with my mother when she had to fly down to Washington -- maybe to argue before the SEC? This was before my sister was born, so I was younger five or younger. My father had me hold the door open for a kindly looking elderly gentleman just arriving; my father said hello to him and he smiled back and gave me a nice smile too. I thought I was supposed to know him, but didn't (unlike the Fuller Brush man!). Then, after we separated, my father told me he was Cardinal Spellman, though I didn't know what that meant either. I don't remember this, but apparently he offered his ring to kiss. But obviously I didn't know what the gesture meant, and didn't notice it. I think this was the first I heard of cardinals, though later I got interested in Church hierarchy, just like nuclear weapons hierarchy and pigeon pecking order. My mother must have left on a Monday or Tuesday -- on Friday we rented a car and drove down to Washington to meet her. My father took me to the White House: I remember being excited about going, and I remember seeing a man walking on the lawn under a portico. I told me father I thought that was President Kennedy, and he indulged me. So I already knew and admired Kennedy, which makes it hard for me to think I was really five or younger. Maybe my sister was staying with our grandparents.

posted by william 1:31 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember sitting outside the bathroom door when my mother went into it in the mornings. I remember how warm and bright it was in our apartment, and the bright daylight that came through the crack under the door, and how nice it was to have her voice and her presence right there on the other side.

posted by william 11:54 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the mourner's Kaddish during junior services at Congregation B'nai Jeshrun on 89th. Some people would stand up. They always knew they were supposed to, and I sort of knew -- maybe because the prayer book said it was the mourner's Kaddish -- that they must have been mourners. I felt jealous of them for being center stage, and looked forward to the time when I would stand for the mourner's Kaddish. I didn't know how close a relative you had to mourn, though. I think I imagined that some close relative whom I didn't know would suffice.

I remember my grandmothers lighting Yahrzeit candles in glass which burned all night -- I think for their parents and for my Uncle.

posted by william 7:23 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember Dyno label makers. They still have them. I remember that you cut the embossed plastic strip off by turning the wheel not to a letter but to a little scissors icon, and pressing then. The machine looked like the Starship Enterprise.

I remember being surprised in a Peanuts cartoon at the phrase "a scissors." How could the word be singular? Would you say "a pants?" But I tried it on for size and now I sometimes say it. It feels naturalized but not natural. But it also doesn't feel natural anymore to ask for "some scissors." I always look to some fence-sitting formulation like "the scissors." But I think I do ask "Where are the scissors?" not "Where is....?"

posted by william 1:07 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the Camel ad in Times Square with the ring of smoke being puffed out by the smoker. I think it later became a Winston ad, or vice versa, but the smoke kept coming. Later I learned to blow smoke rings, and I remember the holy grail of blowing one smoke ring through another, without dissipating it. No one I know ever succeeded.

I remember the cigarette pack painted on the side of the building on 35th and 8th. You could see it from the balcony at my downtown grandparents' apartment. The building countour was perfect for the enticing come-on of three cigarettes poking out from the top of the full pack. Now I think this building side is used for DKNY and Gap ads. But it was perfect and somehow comforting for cigarettes. The obvious phallic meaning of the cigarettes poking out was less interesting than the way the cigarettes somehow reminded one of fingers in a friendly hand offered in greeting and protection. The hand was so big and so friendly that it looked parental -- the cigarettes offered themselves to you as reassurance that everything was ok. From my grandparents' balcony you could see the Empire State Building not far to the right of the cigarette pack, itself grand but friendly. It stood there in its majesty, having long-since accepted its role as symbol of New York, displacing the slightly nervous, Chrysler building which seemed as though it felt shouldered and shunted into being slightly off-kilter. The Empire State Building accepted what it was, like a dignified and gentle and slightly aristocratic great ape (how perfect to make King Kong climb it). The cigarettes represented themselves as its peers, as belonging to that arboreal or masonic level of the city, living there too in that impure empyrean. But they were friendly, they took notice of you, they were like a favorite uncle come to delight you even as they belonged to the grandparental world that the Empire State Building also represented. I suppose part of the reason for these associations, for me, is that my grandfather worked in the Empire State Building, and it was very tall (in those pre-World Trade Center days, the tallest building in the world), and he was very old, so that they both were regally calm about the great height which they had reached and which they were completely without anxiety about having reached. I think that I always hoped my grandfather would reach a hundred because the Empire State Building reached a hundred (and slightly more) -- its storeys and his years seemed to go together. But the cigarettes seemed more interested in me -- and this might also be because the people in my family who smoked were the cousins and uncles and old-world friends seen fairly rarely, but always offered stale cigarettes from the slim airline ten-packs that my family kept in little lacquer and metal boxes on their coffee-tables.

posted by william 5:03 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my father's bathing suits, and the little change pocket that hung inside, just under the drawstringed waist. I remember how long his suit would stay wet. I remember him teaching me to dive. My mother could dive, but he couldn't (another division between them, as was her tennis playing); he couldn't go under water without holding his nose, and more to the point he couldn't get himself to go in head-first. So he taught me to dive while I was young before I developed a reflex against it. We would go out to the little wooden raft thirty feet or so out in Lake Como and I would stand at its edge and bend double at the waist and go in head first. This seemed to me graceless and pointless and much less fun than jumping off the huge diving board halfway out to the raft, or jumping off the two platforms on the raft, one three feet high, the other five. After a while I got okay at diving, and even dove off some high diving boards later on, till trying to impress a girl who'd done a wonderful swan dive I chickened out half way and did a belly flop. It stung a lot.

I remember that my mother's mother was a champion tennis player in her youth (which it turned out made her better than you'd think: she hadn't played for decades when I started playing seriously, but even in her sixties as she was then she could beat my thirteen year old self with much harder and faster ground-strokes); I found this hard to picture. What I understood even less was that she was said to have been famous as "a great beauty" in her youth, which I vaguely took to mean she'd had some official imprimatur as a great beauty. That was very hard to figure -- even looking at old photos or extrapolating backwards. I think I thought that old people must have always had strange and elderly tastes. But my mother said my grandmother was a great beauty, and my mother was beautiful -- this was the hard thing to understand.

I remember that my grandmother went and worked as a dress-maker in Paris for a year when my mother was a little girl, leaving her and her father in Sarajevo. They had a cousin there in whose shop my grandmother worked. Later my grandfather became a dressmaker in New York, and was a member of the ILGWU, which entitled them to own an apartment in Chelsea, in the union buildings. But they couldn't legate it to anyone, by the rules of the cooperative. There was a cooperative grocery store there too that had co-op milk and I recall muenster cheese. I remember my grandfather got some magazine as a union member and when I was searching for salacious material I found a promising copy that turned out, alas, to be about bras designed to be comfortable when worn with breast prostheses. When they came to the United States as DPs after the war, my grandmother sewed gloves for a while. I remember that she hated to be called "honey" or "dear" by clerks at department stores. I think I may remember these things together because someone at a glove counter might have called her "dear."

posted by william 12:10 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember a fireman coming to our school (P.S. 166) and telling us horrendous stories about stupid children who died because they didn't know what to do in a fire. (One nine-year-old girl, he said, got in the shower, but luckily her brother called the Operator and said, "My sister's on fire!" I remember that she was older than me, so I must have been seven or eight. Someone else dropped a cigarette in a couch and it caught fire in the middle of the night. And some kid blew his heel off stomping on an aeresol can.) I remember he warned us against false alarms, and said that some of them were under surveillance, because false alarms killed. I couldn't really figure out how they did, but then decided it must have been because a certain number of fire trucks moving through the streets at great speed crashed, and every time you set off a false alarm there was a chance of a useless crash. So everytime I saw a firetruck passing by, I hoped it wouldn't crash. I wonder whether I ever saw, then, some of the firefighters who later as upper management, in their fifties and sixties, were killed in the World Trade Center.

posted by william 5:08 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember when I had to get something at the Garden Market (the supermarket on the West side Broadway between 89th and 90th), I went to the produce section and asked a wiry bald middle-aged man who worked there where to find what I wanted. "What's that, son?" he asked. It was the first time, and maybe the last, that I was actually called son in ordinary conversation with a stranger. I asked my mother about it, and she said it was pretty typical. At the Garden (and at the slightly higher scale Key Foods on 92nd) you had your produce weighed in the produce section by the people working there. They tied it up in a plastic bag -- I feel that staplers were involved somehow -- and wrote the price large with a grease pencil. They calculated in their heads, never using the graphite pencil behind their ears. I liked the idea of using your ear as a pencil holder, but my mother detested it. Later retro-greaser types would keep cigarettes behind their ears (and packs in the sleeves of their t-shirts). I did both, but only rarely, and for convenience.

posted by william 12:12 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember a science kit that I got. One of the first (and easiest) experiments was siphoning with a hose. It was amazing that water could go upout of a pitcher on our dining room table, into a pink rubber hose (I still remember the taste in my mouth of the cool water through the clammy rubber) and into a glass on a chair. This was one of the first times science surprised me. My downtown grandfather was there, and he wasn't surprised, nor did he feign it. He never did. I once showed him a moibus strip and he just said, "That's because you twisted it." He was very good with cards and gambling and other tricks, but for some reason didn't appreciate my appreciation for any tricks that he didn't do.

posted by william 7:30 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember, now, that my Uncle Cico was a survivor of the camps. I don't know which one. He was a kid -- I think he was 14 when he was liberated. My father told me that he told him the Germans would give the prisoners solid food (as opposed to soup) once a week, and they would throw it into the gutters and then kick and march on the prisoners who rushed to get it. I thought this was terrible but not that terrible; but I didn't know that my father was basically trying to keep knowledge of the camps from me, and strongly disapproved of his mother for telling me about them (and about my Uncle killed in the Pacific). Cico certainly never told me anything about them.

I remember meeting my Uncle Raffo, who had been one ot Tito's partisans and lived in Yugoslavia, in Belgrade, and was an M.D.

I remember meeting another family member who had a heart condition and was lying in a couch during our visit. My mothers' parents were with us on one of these visits to Yugoslavia, and I think my grandmother was saying goodbye to family members she was unlikely ever to see again. She had five brothers, of whom I met two or three. I don't know how the others died. Two whom I met were Mico and Raffo. And I might have met someone named Shuitsa. The man lying on the couch seemed sweet and weak -- schwach. I heard about a year later that he'd died. I don't know how I knew it was him, since I don't know who he was and don't recall ever knowing who he was.

I remember visiting my fathers' parents in Austria when they had taken a trip there and we were in Italy. We went through Trieste. so long and violently disputed. I remember going to Vienna, and remember lamp-posts there. But my father says they never went with me, so I guess I've never been to Vienna.

I remember being confused as to whether Alan Shephard or John Glenn was the first American in space. And there was one between them -- like Adams (whom we knew nothing of) between Washington and Jefferson.

posted by william 1:14 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that my uptown grandparents had two friends named Vlado -- Vlado Hertz and Vlado Baum. Vlaudo Hertz was even older than my grandfather, and lived at the end in the Hebrew Home for the Aged on the Grand Concourse. He was a bachelor, the first (and maybe only) person I really knew under that description. He was an extremely good pianist, had a very cultivated slightly English Middle-European accent, and always had a twinkle in his eye. I always thought he looked the way someone named Vlado Baum should look, and I always tended to confuse them. Vlado Baum was younger and had a fedora as I recall, which made him look tough. One of them -- either Vlado Baum or the one who looked like Vlado Baum -- was once walking down the street when a baby fell from an upper-story window, and he caught the baby. When my father told me this story I couldn't believe how it ended: the baby died anyhow. I used to think about what would happen if I fell from our seventh story window -- there were bushes trimming our building, but I somehow knew I'd die anyhow.

posted by william 10:27 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember Kruschev. I called him Nikita after his visit to the United States when I was about five. He looked like my uptown grandfather, and had a twinkle in his eye. When the triumvirate of Gromyko, Kosygin and Breshnev deposed him, I was surprised. Why didn't he just order them stopped? Everyone was concerned about this, and I now see scared. We talked about it in school. I remember that Kruschev was sent to his dacha on the Black Sea. A year or so later Life Magazine had an article about how he was writing his memoirs there. I looked forward to them. I was glad he had projects. Then a little after that he died. So he wouldn't have run the USSR much longer anyhow.

I remember that my uptown grandparents, in the antique wooden desk with a glass-doored bookcase where I found the Bounty trilogy that I devoured so avidly later, had The Don Flows Home to the Sea and its sequel, And Quiet Flows the Don, Russian novels which later turned out to be plagiarized. (I'm blanking on who wrote them.) I loved the evocative titles -- I liked the idea that a lord -- a don like Don Quixote -- would somehow turn into a flowing thing, like a river, and flow home that way. And that he would do so with a dignified serenity. Whatever made this make sense must have been whatever innate mythography makes river gods and river-personifications in fertility myths make sense. When my ninth grade classmates, in a fit of generalized exuberant destructiveness at the end of ninth grade grabbed my copy of Ulysses, which I was still struggling with, still proud of, I got my uptown grandparents to get me Finnegans Wake, a book I knew (from my father who nevertheless misinformed me a bit about it) to be even more extreme than Ulysses. (I'm not sure about the sequence here, since my grandparents inscribed it to me for Hannukah of 57-something. But I think I may have prevailed upon them to get me my Hannukah gift months early. I believe we got this at the Brentano's now where B. Dalton is on Fifth Avenue. Or it might have been at Scribners, where my grandmother would sometimes get me sheet music.) Well, all those to say that much later, in the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake the rivers do come to life (as Anna Liffey does herself), and I may have been receptive to this because of the Don, or for the same reason as I was receptive to the idea of a Don turning into a river.

posted by william 7:50 AM
. . . 0 comments