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I remember / je me souviens
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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.
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But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
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
Thursday, October 31, 2002
I remember my father's partner Gus Casado. He was congenitally late, traveling in from New Jersey, so I had to call him every morning to be sure he was awake and getting ready to go. This was when I learned the 201 area code. I sort of thought this was a joke, but my father was dead serious, and unhappy if I forgot to make the call, which I often did between walking Powell and getting ready for school. I was supposed to call at ten to eight. Later Gus and his family were in a plane crash on their way to Florida. My father heard about a crash on the radio, and called just to be sure they were not on that plane. But they were. Gus and his wife and daughter survived. (The plane went down in the Everglades.) The people in the rows ahead of them and behind them died. I think half the passengers survived. There was a full page photo of Mrs. Casado with their infant daughter, both crying, on the front page of the next day's Daily News.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
I remember white tennis balls. Then the more visible green ones came in and they were pretty trendy. Then there was a vogue for fuschia. Fuschia! Luckily it passed. At the saddest moment of playing tennis, when it starts getting dark but you so want to keep playing, the fuschia ball tempted you to think it'll stay visible like a beacon in the gloaming. But it was more like a clown, and it got kind of bruised red and shadowy just as quickly as everything else. I'm glad they're gone. But I haven't seen a white tennis ball in a long time. I remember that Tretorn tennis balls were much too heavy and could give you tennis elbow.
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
I remember the dollar bills taped behind counters in bakeries. Cake Masters had one, and Lichtman's had one. I don't think Party Cake did. I remember somehow figuring out that this was the first dollar the business made. When silver certificates became valuable, I remember thinking that the silver certificate Cake Masters had taped up (you could tell it by its blue seal) was worth a lot. Like my grandmother's trove of silver coins.
Monday, October 28, 2002
I remember that if you manage to color in the whole screen of an Etch-a-Sketch you can see its workings. I remember that the stylus is controlled by two long crossed bars. I remember thinking that there was something slightly off about the fact that you cold turn the one-dimensional lines that the Etch-a-Sketch allowed you to draw into the two-dimensional, planar surface of the screen. I never worried about this with pencils, but I think that this was because my pencils were always so annoyingly thick. Plus you could tiltpencils and rub with the side of the lead. The Etch-a-Sketch was supposed to be a single, idealiziing point. No doubt for a lot of people the Etch-a-Sketch provided a kind of early introduction to the ideas of integration in calculus. I remember when I first started hearing jokes about etchings (come up and see my etchings) I sort of knew what they were -- visual representations of some sort -- because of Etch-a-Sketches. I think when I first heard the word sketch (now slang for "out-of-it"), maybe in the context of a sketch-pad, I also knew what the word was because of Etch-a-Sketches. They were always red in my day, and big, and, even to me then, surprisingly indestructible.
Sunday, October 27, 2002
I remember that in my bathroom there was just one spiggot in the sink, so that you could mix the hot and cold water together. In my parents' there were two, which made things much more difficult.
Saturday, October 26, 2002
I remember Grossinger's vs. The Concord. I liked Grossinger's and never went to the Concord -- always wondering what I was missing. I liked the huge meals there. We'd go there with the Schubins winter vacations to ski. I remember some day camp there, some child-care affair, and the counseller offering me (or anyone) a dime to drink from a horrendous mixture of water, salt, sugar, ketchup and God knows what else. I think I had a sip and won the dime.
Thursday, October 24, 2002
I remember the pitching rotation for the 1969 Mets. Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman (the only lefty, I believe), Gary Gentry, and Nolan Ryan. Sometimes there was a fifth starter, but I don't remember whom. The battery -- is that word still used in baseball? -- would usually feature Jerry Grote as catcher, but sometimes the marvellously named Duffy Dwyer, who pulled a shoe-polish trick in the 1969 World Series. Gil Hodges was manager. Cleon Jones and Tommy Agee were almost always in the outfield, and Ron Swoboda, slow but a great diver, was often the right-fielder. I just barely forget the shortstop's name -- he hit a homerun on his first at bat in the World Series? Or was it his first at-bat in the 1970 season? I think he only had two homeruns in his career. But he was a great fielder. I remember that the Mets always won their first game, from 1962 on. Then they'd lose plenty in a row.
I remember meeting Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra at Grossinger's. They were at a nearby table. I didn't really know who they were, but I got an autographed baseball from them. Later we played with the baseball in Riverside Park, and the autographs were obliterated.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
From Richard Moran:
"I remember how much my fingers used to pucker up in the bathtub. Why don't they do that anymore? Or do I just not notice it?"
Maybe this only happens to children for some reason. I remember noting this as a child, and my pet name for it at the time was that my fingers had become "blind". I would hold them up and show them to whoever was around, sometimes one of my brothers, saying "See? My fingers are blind!" The family got a kick out of that. --Richard Moran
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
I remember a nuclear fall-out warning commercial from my childhood. A man in a suit, holding his jacket over his shoulder, walks through the empty streets of a city, wondering where everyone is. You hear the wailing horn of the attack siren, but he doesn't know what it means. The announcer speaks with contemptuous regret of his ignorance. He doesn't have a clue, as the siren keeps wailing. The siren was exactly the noon siren that used to go off in New York and which we all set out watches by. So I didn't see what he was doing wrong, though it did seem odd that there was no one out and about at noon (which the siren indicated was what time it was).
Monday, October 21, 2002
I remember the first time I got a Chocolate Eclair from the Good Humour cart in Riverside Park, just north of the 91st street hill. Hugh Cramer told me how good they were. And they are. (Or were to my childish palate.) I was bugged, though, by the two domes on the bottom of the bar, on each side of the stick (as by the two black circles where the thermos glass was glued to the shell), and always hoped I'd find a perfect one. Still the eclair was worth it, and I overcame my fasitdiousness, as I never could do about the thermos. Later my downtown grandmother took me out to luch one day, and the waiter offered an "eclair" for desert. I leaped at it, but hated the chocolate covered pastry that he brought -- I felt cheated. It was as bad as strudel.
Sunday, October 20, 2002
I remember my elementary school French class. Mrs. Park would come in and say, "Bonjour, Classe!", to which we would reply in unison, "Bonjour, Madame." Then came "Comment allez-vous?" "Tres bien, merci, et vous?" "Tres bien, merci." Then names: "Comment tu t'appelle?" "Je m'appelle Guilluame." Then words: "Bouche," and she'd point to her mouth, and "fenetre." I rather think that was it. The cool kids would sometimes say "Comment vous vous appellez?" which we were informed was another way of saying "Comment tu t'appelle?" None of this was spelled out or broken down into individual words for us. These were ritual phrases. I didn't know how the kids who said "Comment vous vous appellez?" knew about this alternative sequence of phonemes. They were like the kids in music class who had recorders instead of the Tonettes the rest of us got. They knew things.
Saturday, October 19, 2002
I remember being car sick.
Friday, October 18, 2002
I remember my uptown grandmother's hearing aid. She'd been deaf from her twenties, and she carried a hearing aid the size of a transistor radio that hung from her neck, rather like David Lynch's in Twin Peaks or Truffaut's in Day for Night. Later, when I was about seven, she had an operation, and after that she could hear. I mainly remember her hearing, but I also remember her deaf.
Thursday, October 17, 2002
I remember the elevator in my uptown grandparents' building on Haven Avenue. Unlike our elevator its interior was stamped metal. It was yellowish -- although I think that might have been before it was replaced. I remember the porthole windows of both that elevator and our elevator at home, which was also replaced by a great blank door. I never used the elevator when my grandparents lived on the first floor -- you went up about five steps, turned a corner and went to the end of the tiled lobby. The mailboxes were there, and I remember once seeing the mailman opening them all up -- maybe fifty -- and filling them with mail from the top (diagonally). The only time I used the elevator was to go upstairs to see my friend Kathy Yerzley, who was a few months older than I. (See 5/9/2002) Later, my grandparents moved to the top floor, and so we always used the elevator. (Well, sometimes I used the stairs.) My piano teacher, Mrs. Jellinek also moved to the same building, and I took a couple of lessons from her there, I believe, after she stopped coming to my house to teach me (just as my pediatrician, Dr. Steffy eventually stopped coming with her car; I remember how strange it was to go to her office on Wadsworth rather than having her come to our house). I liked the airiness of the inner spaces of my grandparents' building. It was fusty and full of old people, but airy nonetheless. I liked the strange awning through the entrance court. I remember them also changing the doors of the lobby, adding a second set and buzzers (you used to be able to walk right in). I seem to dimly remember that the door had a wrought iron grill till replaced by the glass double-doors. My grandparents complained that the new doors were very heavy, which seemed an odd word to apply to a door -- you weren't trying to pick it up!
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
I remember the little fabric change pocket in my father's bathing suits -- of the same woven material as the under support. The pocket (it seems to me they still have them) was inside the corded waist, against the skin and held shut by the cord. It would sometimes hang outside the waist: grotesque and obscene, but in a mild and obvious and not at all troubling way. I remember that he once went swimming with a dollar bill in that pocket, and when I saw it I was sure he'd ruined the money. But it just dried out and was fine, and I was impressed by the quality of the linen in the bill. I place this memory in Bellagio, but why would he have been swimming with American money in his pocket in Bellagio?
I remember incessantly drawing with my pastels the view across the lake, a view I loved about all others. Years later, when I revisited Bellagio in a haze of intense surprise that all this should really exist, should have duration -- a visit like a return to some purely ideal time and space of childhood, like revisiting being able to fit under the bed or in the crib -- we climbed that opposing mountain which I had drawn over and over, and saw its contours and paths from up close. I didn't know you could do that. But nothing about doing it spoiled it.
Monday, October 14, 2002
I remember sherbert. With that second R. That's the way we spelled it in New York. I was surprised afterwards to find that everyone else spelled it sherbet. The et looked (and still looks) absurd to me. I thought I must have been mistaken, until once back in New York I found that it was still spelled with the second R in some diner I went to there. Rainbow sherbet? I think not.
I remember, I think, that Brach's had a dining counter, where one's grandmothers would eat downtown.
I remember that fingernails have little half-moons at their base.
I remember how much my fingers used to pucker up in the bathtub. Why don't they do that anymore? Or do I just not notice it?
Saturday, October 12, 2002
I remember going out one evening in Bellagio for pizza up on the square that you reached by climbing the winding cobblestone road behind the hotel. The square was typical Italian -- the only place in Bellagio that was generically picturesque. We sat down there and ordered pizza before bed (my parents always ate later, after my sister and I were in our room; I think my most recent memory of my yellow nappy footed pajamas was from Bellagio, so I must have been wearing them there when I was eight). The pizza had no tomato sauce! It had no cheese! It had strange grilled vegetables! And fish! Pizza, which was invented in Italy. What a terrible disappointment.
I remember also my parents' friend "the General," who with his wife had a villa up the lake from Bellagio. I went there once, and we had real pizza. Except that the General (I think he was a Second World War general) had a genuine and extreme phobia about cheese. He couldn't come near it. So the pizza we had was crust and wonderful tomato sauce -- no cheese. And I was surprised to find that I didn't miss the cheese a bit. Two different pizza surprises.
Friday, October 11, 2002
I remember the pre-Peter Graves Mission Impossible. The head of the Impossible Missions team then was dark haired and less cool (in the McLuhan sense); his sheer competence had far more energy to it. I missed him and missed those early shows. Probably one season's worth. No one else seemed to care. I suspect Peter Graves was far better, but for me it was like (later) when the star of Alias Smith and Jones shot himself, and they came up with an awful and uncharismatic double. Suddenly Jones was the last link with the original force that the show had contained. I see now that it was a TV spin-off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, so the Jones character was the last link with Newman and Redford. But this was not so disappointing as silver-haired Peter Graves.
Thursday, October 10, 2002
I remember when you opened beer cans with a can opener -- with the triangular end. My uptown grandfather did that. It seems very odd now. I also remember my father opening Canda Dry gingerale cans that way, and Sally Hoge opening large quart cans of Kool-Aid. I wondered why you had to open both ends. I wasn't allowed to open the cans myself then. When I did I discovered the air-pressure answer: the cans didn't pour unless air could come in. Why were the openings diametrically opposite to each other? I didn't think to ask -- it just seemed aesthetically right, as it seemed right that the non-pouring breach should be as small as you could make it -- small as you could make it while allowing the can to pour freely. Beer cans dropped out of my experience for many years (I stopped going to my grandparents' house in the afternoon, when my grandfather drank his beer), and when I started drinking beer, pull tops were long familiar. (We made rings out of them, worrying the tabs off the pulls.) So I remember soda cans opened with can-openers much more vividly than those old Rheingold beer cans. And I remember not quite understanding, when pull tops came in, why they didn't need that second friendly winking opening on the other side of the can.
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
I remember Tonettes. They gave them out in Music, in third grade. They still have them. I remember the cool kids who brought their recorders to Music, while the rest of us played Tonettes. I think Susan Steinmetz had a recorder. That was the first I knew of recorders, and the second thing I knew about them, years later, was that they were in Hamlet. It was cool that they had such a long pedigree -- that something I became acquainted with in third grade should reappear so glamorously in Shakespeare.
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
I remember how I used to stand watching Star Trek with my sister at the door of the bathroom which connected the library with my room. I would lock the door to my room in case anyone came in that way, so that I could claim to be in the bathroom; and I would duck into the bathroom if anyone tried to open the library door, so that they (my parents) wouldn't know I was watching TV when I was supposed to be doing homework. I watched a lot of Star Trek that way. It's not perfectly obvious to me why my sister was allowed to watch it every evening. Maybe school hadn't started yet for her. I remember the little lock twists that you used thumb and left side of right index finger on. They were like those purse hasps I've mentioned -- a kind of friendly bow-shaped affair. Also like my mother's double diamond ring. On the door to my room horizontal meant locked; on the door to the library vertical meant locked. I would also pretend to be bathing when I wanted to play, and so would lock the door to the library (vertical) leaving the door to the bathroom open from my room while I lolled around on the wall to wall carpet. I remember it as scratchy, which could be oddly pleasant when you were naked and getting ready for bed -- it sort of scratched a full-body itch. I think I actually might have liked lolling around on it most after a bath. I remember the carpet tacks and the soft rubbery foundation underneath it, and the peeling wall-paper near the radiators -- it was fun to pull it off since it was tough and didn't rip but peeled beautifully. I remember the bathroom tiles, and how pleasantly warm they would be if the radiator was on full tilt, the fact that its hear rolled over the floor captured by the warm tiles. I remember liking to sit on the warm tiles with my naked butt up against the bathroom door (to the library) reading, a warm and untouched bath drawn on the other side of the toilet. I could press my right toe up up against the fretwork on the radiator cage and feel how warm it was and how comfortable it was to press my toe into the arabesques and whorls. I miss that bathroom -- and bathrooms like it -- a lot.
Sunday, October 06, 2002
I remember U Thant.
Saturday, October 05, 2002
I remember thinking that everyone had a double. I got this idea from The Hardy Boys. The books had sentences like: "I saw either Frank or his double." The casual his seemed to mean we all had doubles. I wondered where mydouble was. For some reason I imagined him in India. I assumed he'd be just like me: friendly, thoughtful, anxious, shy. I wondered whether he'd be wondering about me at the same time. I could be reassuring to him: tell him I was just like him, which might make him feel more relaxed.
Friday, October 04, 2002
I remember, barely, and I'm only 90% sure that I remember it, T.H.E. Cat, starring Robert Loggia, which I came across the other day. I think it got almost entirely displaced in my mind by It Takes a Thief, which nevertheless it might have helped me follow. But it reminds me of how much I liked I Spy. I remember always wishing there were more tennis scenes in the show. I'm sure that I liked Bill Cosby so much because I liked Arthur Ashe so much, and I regreted that Robert Culp was the star and that they almost never played.
Thursday, October 03, 2002
I remember being very impressed when I saw my downtown grandparents rip some paper along a perfect straight-edge (a table edge) without scissors. I didn't know you could do that.
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
I remember Compoz. "Honey, take Compoz." "I don't have a headache!" "Compoz isn't a pain reliever. It will calm you down." Later: everyone is happy, since the mother/wife is her Stepford self again. I was impressed by her irritability though -- so different from the way commercials usually represented women, who so cheerfully did, and discussed, scut work. I imagine that Compoz was particularly intended for women with PMS. The FCC made them withdraw the ads, and I think the FDA the drug, when it turned out not to work.
I remember Geritol: "for iron-poor, tired blood." My uptown grandparents used it.
I remember how my uptown grandparents smelled of menthol. Ben-Gay, I found out in high school, where some of the athletes used it. It was very odd to find the same smell in the locker rooms.
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
I remember my globe. It stood up at waist height and spun under the metal latitude markers. It had a metal time-change indicator over the North Pole, and the South Pole was too close to the swivel, but otherwise it was fascinating. I puzzled over the ocean currents it marked: I didn't understand how currents could go thousands of miles in the empty ocean. I still don't. I also puzzled over the sizes of very small things. Could the currents really be as wide as the not-quite-one-dimensional line that indicated was? One day the globe got dented -- I think I was wrestling with a friend and we kicked it or knocked into it -- and I was deeply surprised to find that it was made of gray cardboard. It dented along a major latitutde/longitude intersection, since they were scored in the cardboard. That dent and the cardboard underneath always seemed like a rebuke to me afterwards, but I could never think of what: of the world? of my interest in the world? of the idea of representing the world in a little globe? Of the knowledge that I could know things -- see through things? -- a knowledge that I didn't want to have? Did my parents give me the globe? I think so. Was I too aware that it would be possible to see through their authority as well? I hope not.
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