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 eight-track tapes. "Eight-track, record, or cassette." I'm not sure what their point was. You couldn't record, as you could on a cassette, and it was hard to get where you wanted to be, as on a record. All four "sides" had to be the same length for any reasonable sense of continuity, so that songs would break in the middle as the eight-track switched from one side to the next. The only thing you could do was quickly reverse from side one to two to three to four, and so you were never more than 25% of the program away from where you wanted to be. But it wasn't worth it. I remember trying to figure out how they worked -- that is how you could essentially be at four places at once. I think we were led to believe that eight tracks meant greater fidelity and detail, not just four programs on one stretch of tape. I think I didn't really get how they worked until I saw cassette players with auto-reverse -- then it dawned on me, and eight-tracks seemed stupider than ever. I think I had two or three eight-track tapes, but I can't remember what they were now. Just possibly Grand Funk: Railroad.

posted by william 7:06 AM
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I remember splitting my pants. A lot. Especially after services or Sunday school, if I went to the park without going home, in my dressier pants. I remember walking around all day with split pants and trying to keep the split hidden. I remember trying to sew them up and not succeeding very well -- then they'd split without my hearing them go.

posted by william 10:52 PM
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I remember that when I was first learning to tie my shoes I would make just one loop, and pull the other lace straight through. I thought this was plenty good enough till I learned about double knots, which you can't do with one loop.

posted by william 12:05 AM
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I remember that when my parents went to Europe when I was seven (or possibly six), they agreed to send me a telegram saying that they'd arrived safely (in London). I think I had just learned about telegrams. I was staying with my uptown grandmother, and the next morning we got the telegram. I had never seen one before and was puzzled by the words taped to the paper, and by the STOPs. I remember that it said "ARRIVED SAFELY STOP MUMMY AND DADDY". I was very disturbed by the word MUMMY since I spelled it "Mommy." I entertained the paranoid idea that it was a mistake or forgery, but I think my grandmother figured out that it was the English spelling. At any rate, at some point I understood that the woman who transmitted the telegram (I think that they were all women at the time, but it could be that when my parents explained what happened they mentioned that they had dictated the telegram to a woman) had spelled the word in the English fashion. It somehow made England seem real to me, in a way that it never had before, and also it made me resent this woman, who did seem to be trying to come between my mother and me, the deviant British spelling proclaiming at once that from now on I would have a Mummy and not a Mommy and that any access to Mommy came through this Mummy who spelled the word that way and had the authority to do so, authority before which my own poor mother was helpless. I was glad when they came back home.

posted by william 12:58 AM
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I remember that multi-platter albums -- from Beethoven's symphonies to Tommy by The Who alternated sides, so that the first record had side one and side 2n, the second side two and side 2n-1, the third side 3 and 2n-2, until you got to the nth record which had sides n and n+1. The sides interleaved like a sestina. This was so you could stack them on a turntable. The mechanism was really neat -- I remember the first time I saw it on my father's new stereo. I was particularly captivated by the hooked arm that you brought down over the stack of records yawing on the catch that would allow one record at a time to fall onto the spinning drum. The arm forced them out of their yaw into perfect horizontality and pushed them down when it was time for the next record to drop. You could listen to a whole stack of records, and then grab them all and turn them over to get the second half of the album. The tone arm would lift up and move out of the way while the next record fell. I liked the way the records fit over the tall spindle; and the way the spindle itself fit into its socket with a twist. Of course this all turned out to be bad for the records -- the fall, the stacking -- but the turntable seemed so friendly, calm and competent and sunny, with its two strong and reliable arms taking care of the records for as long as was necessary. I liked also that the tone-arm knew when the last record had dropped (since the catch on the spindle wasn't compressed), and just lifted off and stopped.

posted by william 12:41 AM
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I remember that on my little record player, you played 45s by pulling up a little plastic semi-circle or three-quarters circle and latching it so it stayed up around the 33 spindle. At first I didn't get what it was for, till my father played a 45 on it; and then I liked the way it came up and also the way it stayed up. I liked 45s too, and the way their sleeves had a one-inch hole in the middle, so you could hold them easily with your thumb in the hole. But they were (by design!) harder to keep than 33s, since they didn't have the outer cardboard casing -- no spine, nothing protecting them. My record player had speeds ranging from 16 to 78. I don't know whether 16 rpm records were ever produced. I guess they thought that the technology would improve sufficiently that they could get records that slow. I wonder where these numbers come from -- what induced the original records to be recorded at 78 rpms? And then why 33, and not 39? 78 can be divided by 6, so perhaps they were anticipating scaling down eventually to 13 rpms. (But why not 72 and 12, or the intuitive 60 and 10 -- 60 would mean one rotation per second.) I remember that my uptown grandparents had albums full of 78s, including, I believe, Caruso. I sort of knew that this large collection of short records was an album; but I think I didn't put it together with the LPs that I got later. It made sense that the brown Crosby Stills Nash and Young album was an album, since it had two record in it and lots of evocative photos. I liked thinking that they all lived together in the house in the album. I didn't get what was so Long-Playing about LPs, though, since 78s seemed like ancient history to me.

I remember that older records (roughly the same vintage as the olive-wreath pennies that were replaced by the Lincoln memorial ones) were thick and brittle. If you dropped them, they shattered. They can't have been made of vinyl -- they were practically porcelain -- they were like plates. Ralph Meeker (as Mike Hammer) smashes -- wait: that too was Caruso; but I'm sure my grandparents had Caruso, although maybe not on their 78s -- a record in Kiss Me Deadly when he's trying to get information. What I liked about the older records was that they didn't warp, unlike the later vinyl. It also felt as though they might be harder to scratch, but I doubt this could be true.

posted by william 11:49 PM
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I remember smoking unfiltered cigarettes (Camels, Pall Malls, Luckies) with the label end out. This was the way spies did it. That way they wouldn't be able to tell what cigarettes you were smoking from the butts. Andy Birsh was against this -- he thought it wasn't a good idea to inhale the smoke from the printer's ink.

I remember Hugh Cramer saying that the bad chemicals in cigarettes were in the paper. This relieved me: it made it ok that my grandfather smoked cigars, which didn't have paper.

I remember my father bringing in some Cuban cigars from Italy. He didn't smoke but wanted to give them out to friends and clients. He gave me a gray plastic shopping bag containing them which I was supposed to bring through customs. As I walked past the officer searching our suitcases, I turned around and went back to ask him where I should wait. He shooed me forward, and the bag wasn't searched, but I certainly wasn't very spy-like in the way I handled that.

posted by william 12:06 PM
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I remember Lark cigarettes. Do they still exist? I didn't know what a lark was till much later. I think I knew what having a lark was before I knew about the bird. I must have learned about the bird from e. e. cummings poems. Or possibly from some junior high school production of Blithe Spirit. But I knew about the cigarette before any of that. It was sort of like the "sick" in MAD magazine. Later when I saw the Latin sic in verbatim quotations I thought it was a variant of "sick." I knew that when you told a dog to "sic him" it was spelled s-i-c, and I knew my friend Marc Bilgray, like Marc Chagall spelled "Mark" without the k. So I thought that the sic in quotations meant that the thing quoted was "sick" -- that is deviant, and that the quoter was just pointing this out, as MAD magazine would point out their own deviance. So that I got the meaning right, but for the wrong reason.

posted by william 9:09 PM
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I remember that a whistle used to come with Cap'n Crunch cereal. You didn't really need to keep buying it though, and I don't think I had more than one or two boxes. I remember that Post vs. Kellogs vs. General Mills made for the cereal dichotomies, and that we were a Kellogs family. I vaguely remember the Kellogs chicken, who signed the word "Kellogs" in some animated ad, and might have been (might still be?) on the Corn Flakes box. I didn't like this chicken for some reason -- something about the green and yellow colors, and something about its unintended obnoxiousness. I remember not quite getting how the cursive letters in "Kellogs" were the letters of "Kellogs" -- there was some odd nub on one of the gs, which I also didn't like.

posted by william 7:26 AM
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I remember sandwiches. Sally Hoge introduced me to bologna, as I think it was spelled in the version I ate, with mustard, which she gave to Tommy, Ken, Butch and me. I fixed it for myself from then on till one day I was suddenly and completely disgusted with it. I remember American cheese with iceberg lettuce. I liked that, even if the lettuce was often rusty. I remember tuna made with mustard rather than mayo. Very dry. I remember the pleasure of rolling white bread into balls and cylinders of crushed rubbery dough. They tasted ok, and you could dip them in water. I remember bread sculptures sold as trinkets in Italy, made the same way and then allowed to dry, after which they would be painted. I thought about doing this a lot, but somehow I never had enough consecutiveness to do it.

posted by william 1:13 AM
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I remember lining up for a hearing test, probably in fourth grade. Hugh Cramer and Dickie Fleischer were on line with me, as well as some other people. Brian Seeman? The person who tested us wrote down an N after each of our names. Hugh told us with great authority that N meant excellent. Later, in seventh grade, I remember hearing Larry Cohen and some other people talking at the other end of a long double class-room with asbestos tiles. I could hear them perfectly. Larry was asking, "Have you seen Billy?" and I responded -- but had to raise my voice -- "I'm right here." He was amazed by how good my hearing was. Clearly an N. But the word acousticssomehow entered my mind at that moment, and I thought of saying it but didn't. I knew that the room carried sound well. I was kind of proud that he was so impressed, and I thought that he wasn't entirely deceived: there wasan impressive thing, namely my knowing the word "acoustics." And if the acoustics were so good, then he should have been able to hear me think the word, anyhow. I had heard it. So maybe my hearing was great after all.

posted by william 12:37 AM
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I remember Willard and Ben. Which was which? Malevolent killer rats. The posters advertising the movies in the New Yorker City subway were very effectively placed.

posted by william 12:54 PM
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I remember Growing Up Absurd, by Paul Goodman, a book everybody seemed to be reading somewhat after they were reading Catch-22, and before Cat's Cradle, or maybe it was Mother Night. I assumed that like Catch-22 it was funny. This was when "absurd" seemed to be synonymous with "hilarious." I wonder, now, whether that was my misunderstanding -- did I take "That's absurd!" for "Too funny to be serious"? -- or the lingo of the time. I know that Beckett was supposed to be both funny and absurd, and I thought that the so-called "theater of the absurd" was supposed to be hysterically incongruous. I guess in my mind, and maybe at large, "absurd" and "hysterical" paralleled each other. I know that I made the same mistake about the word "famous," which I thought meant great. My father had told me (in the elevator, coming down from 7-F) that either FDR or Lincoln was the greatest president. "What about Washington?" I protested. "Wasn't he the most famous." Most famous, probably, but not the greatest. On the other hand this is not completely out of line with the British slang use of famous, as when you get along "famously." But I wouldn't, I don't think, have been affected by that.

posted by william 11:42 PM
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I remember a photo of Charles Manson when he was on trial, that appeared in Time. His lawyer was making an insanity plea. Manson appeared at trial with half of his head shaved. The other half was covered with a luxurious hair, beard, and even eyebrow. If you put your hand over half his face he looked like a new recruit. If you put your hand over the other half, he looked like a wild and aging hippy. (I remember how thrilling that word was -- "hippy." As thrilling as later "deconstruction" would be for a little while.) Manson's lawyer said that Manson did not want to make an insanity plea, and was trying to convince everyone he was sane by engaging in this transparent attempt to look insane. Wanting to look insane is what a sane person would do in his situation. But it was insane, said the lawyer, to want to look sane, and he was obviously doing that since he was so intent on appearing to want to look insane. I didn't think about it at the time, but the lawyer was making a Catch-22 argument. I was fascinated by the photo, and had no views on whether he was insane or not.

posted by william 6:53 AM
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I remember that you could unscrew the mouth piece and also the ear piece of old Bell telephones. The speaker and pick-up would just rest on a sort of soft base, and you could remove them -- at least this was true of the pick-up; I'm not as sure of the ear piece. You could mute your side of the connection this way, or eavesdrop without being heard. (In the Hardy Boys there was always "heavy breathing" on the line when it was bugged.) My father could always tell when I was eavesdropping (as I loved to do) when he called my mother at home. I tried this to fool him, though I don't think I ever managed to do it adroitly. The point about taking the ear piece off was to be able to leave the phone off the hook without the off-the-hook signal coming on. Otherwise you would have to bury the phone in pillows. I remember when if you left the phone of the hook a live operator came on and called for you, and if you were in a fire or being attacked she could hear it and summon the authorities. I think.

posted by william 12:50 AM
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I remember, it being my birthday, a birthday party I had in second grade I think. I remember it because a few days before I had been swinging my pencil around like a rocket ship and as I whirled in my seat at my school desk I poked a girl named Mira in the eye. She sobbed uncontrollably; I resented her for getting me into trouble, or for being the occasion of my being in trouble; we were forced to reconcile, both of us unwillingly, me apologizing and she accepting my apology. Then I had to invite her to my birthday party. I was surprised that she came, and that she had on a really beautiful dress. And that she had a present for me, gift-wrapped, game sized! I imagine it must have been a game: but all I remember is what it looked like in its wrapping as she gave it to me. The dining room was unusually brightly lit (although in fact that might have been another time) because it must be that my father was taking a home movie of the party. I don't recall ever seeing that movie, but there is one of an earlier birthday -- maybe I was two? -- and I remember thinking how different and bright the dining room looked in the movie, how white and impressive the walls: so unlike the more normal dim dingy light of the room.

posted by william 10:59 PM
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I remember in addition to Bat Masterson, who used a derringer (as Tom Wall mentioned in April), and who wore a black cape (or am I confusing him with Zoro?), Yancy Derringer. Only from a song, I think: Yancy -- Yancy Derringer. But then I confuse it with Samson, mighty Samson -- his mother, his mother made him swear, to serve the Lord, do know wrong, bow to God who made him strong, bow to God who made him strong and always use a derringer. I think maybe the phrase "always use a derringer" was in the song. This was a song I played on my little red record player. It was on the same album as John Henry (the steam drill only did nine, boys, the steam drill only did nine....) and Casey Jones (leading to shock when on Workingman's Dead, was it? "Driving that Train" has the same spot in the album -- last song on side two, as I think Casey Jones did on my record). I had another record -- who did the rainbow labels? -- with spirituals on it, and I really loved Swing Low. Again I was surprised when I saw other records with the same label (including possibly the Crosby Stills Nash and Young double album) but different songs. I remember falling in love with James Taylor, and being so pleased that there kept turning out to be pre-first album albums, including James Taylor and the Flying Machine, with "knockin' round the zoo" on it. The group explained the line in "Fire and Rain:" "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground." Later I liked Leonard Cohen, whom I listened to on WNEW-FM, and to bring it full circle, understood what Warren Beatty was up to in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, sound track consisting of Leonard Cohen songs, when he shoots Rene Auberjoins with a derringer thus disproving the latter's skepticism about McCabe's past: "That man? That man didn't shoot anybody."

posted by william 3:01 PM
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I remember going to the principal's office.

posted by william 12:43 AM
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I remember that when he was a little boy my Uncle Willy was playing with some nails at school. His teacher asked him what he had, and he popped them in his mouth. His teacher asked him to open his mouth, and he swallowed them. My uptown grandmother took him to the doctor, who made him eat mashed potatoes for three days. I imagined her as being my doctor, Dr. Steffy. I somehow always thought this happened in New York, but he was fifteen when they arrived in New York in 1940 (two days shy of nineteen when he died two days shy of D-Day), so this would have happened in Sisak, Yugoslavia. I think it is the only story she ever told about him where he was naughty. My father always complained, and still complains, that after his death all the family stories were applied to him -- his mother's incessant mourning (or melancholia I suppose in Freud's terminology: aggressive sadness, but not depression) poisoned his life. I remember his cigarette case, returned by the Army, among the curios my grandmother displayed (including letters from him), and that seemed always a slight disparity: if he was such a good boy, why had he smoked?

posted by william 7:32 AM
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