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, this cold winter, the winter that we rented a house in Westhampton Beach. It was incredibly cold and the bay froze solid. We went out on ice-skates, as in a 17th century Dutch painting, and skated for miles in one direction in the middle of the bay. I remember some people out in an ice-boat! Where did they get it from? It had a sail and runners and went scudding over the ice at an amazing rate. The bay was covered with people on skates. The idea of being able to go maybe 7 miles in one direction was fantastic. I promised myself I would do this when I got a little older. I had a naive idea of regularity, and thought that this winter was typical. The next winter was also very cold, cold enough to pretty much freeze the local pond, on which we played hockey, with goals and sticks -- though I fell through the rotten ice where, I now guess, decaying leaves must have been heating things up a bit, by the shore at the woodsy end of the pond. Not too scary in practice, even though very scary in theory. But the winter never got cold enough again to freeze the salt-water bay. It felt like an image of freedom whose return I've fruitlessly been awaiting. All those miles into the unknown.

posted by william 1:05 AM
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I remember that on 89th street they would also unload on to wheeled ramps and into the basement. But I never thought about what store they were unloading into. It didn't seem to me that what was outside a building, and entering it on ramps into the basement, could possibly have anything to do with the pristine product on the shelves of a store.

I remember skate keys.

posted by william 9:15 PM
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I remember that on Romper Room the teacher would ask "Mr. Music" to play. (Though I might be confusing this with Captain Kangaroo, but I strongly doubt that I am. Captain Kangaroo might have had something similar going on though. I hated him. And he was so -- I only realize this now somehow -- un-kangaroo like. The name was a pure signifier for him -- I mean the Kangaroo part -- like Reservoir Dogs.) Romper Room asked Mr. Music to play, the music struck up in the room. So to me he was an abstraction, a kind of personification of some abstract entity, like those stage directions in Shakespeare: "The Music Plays." I wonder if that was the way we were supposed to see him? Or was he just an offstage sound-guy? He was a sort of god of that world in my understanding of it. In Shakespeare, one of the times "the music plays," the soldiers in Alexandria comment on it: "`Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaves him." Goodbye to Mr. Music!

posted by william 2:58 PM
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I remember the thread of saliva that always strung my uptown grandmother's mouth when she talked. It glinted. I noticed it in some of her friends as well, and occasionally in my grandfather. This seemed to me another feature of her age, and like all its other features, intentional. She knew it was there, and she had her reasons -- reasons I wasn't even curious about, since they belonged to the vast world of adulthood. I do remember at some point becoming aware that it was saliva, maybe just as I became aware of the saliva always in my mouth. This latter fact I found quite interesting.

posted by william 11:59 PM
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I remember that it wasn't called "script" but "cursive." And not "printing" but "manuscript." My teachers told me script was a false antonym to manuscript. I wonder whether that's true. I remember as well that we didn't "carry" the one, but "exchanged" ten ones for one ten. (This was the new math, which I really liked, both then and now.) All of this precisianism had the effect of lending prestige to the anathematized script, print, and carry, and I carried ones with abandon.

posted by william 12:33 AM
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I remember El Exigente (a name I thought was some variation of El Excellente -- I was unclear on the concept).

posted by william 1:35 AM
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I remember, about my pop-gun, that as far as I can see there was no reason it should have worked. Nothing propelled the cork from the gun. So that this was the simulacrum of a simulacrum: it looked like a toy gun that would shoot a cork, but it was in fact the toy version of a toy gun that would shoot a cork. And I knew nothing of the things it was alluding to -- the cork (which didn't even fit snugly in the barrel, but just sat there as long as the gun was pointed up) was just like the sighting reference (whatever that thing is called at the end of the barrel of a gun that you use to aim so as to compensate for its recoil) or the tooling on the handle of my toy revolver: something that came with these things.

I remember this a little bit remembering when my father's friend Paul Marsala, who had plenty of know-how, unlike any of my family, took me out chuck-hunting with another kid and another adult. We left at 5:00 am and went away for the night. I learned to hit tin cans with a rifle, and also gun rules: never point at anyone else, etc. I'm glad to say that we never got a chuck. We spent the night in a cabin belonging to a friend of his. It was below zero outside, and I was surprised and delighted that the woodstove actually heated the place up and made it snug. All this American stuff: guns, pot-bellied stoves, cooking (soup) on the pot-bellied stove. It was like an interesting visit to the world of TV and movies, the America outside of New York City which I knew about but did not belong to. Later Marsala sold us a boat, with a 28hp outboard motor that you pull-started. It just missed being strong enough for water-skiing, but it was fun to go around in. Still, it was a bit ratty, a touch of a disappointment, and that I think began showing me the limits of the non-Jewish American know-how that I was so impressed by starting with Ben Cramer, Hugh's father of whom he was so proud, and including various other expert adults. But even so, that disappointment didn't lead to a return of deep respect for my father's talents. He was still a Kafkaesque embarrassment to me. It just meant that I had to find outlets for the family romance elsewhere.

posted by william 11:59 AM
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I remember my pop-gun, its cork attached by a string to the gun. It never really worked, and I'm not sure I even got that it was supposed to. It just seemed part of the toy, inscrutable as many toy parts are.

posted by william 1:26 AM
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I remember Daitch Shopwell. I can't quite remember its relation to the Garden Market -- it may have taken over the space later.

posted by william 7:20 AM
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I remember when I used to make free long distance phone calls by charging the calls to third parties. You gave the operator a number and a name. For a while I would charge them to my orthodontist. I used a made-up first name and his last name, as though I were his kid. But I thought they didn't really check. So once in Florida I was calling Linda Rausnitz, and I just gave the name G.V.L. Slingsby, which is James Joyce's pseudonym (in Our exagmination round his factification for incamination of Work in Progress), based on some Edward Lear characters in I think "The Dong with the Luminous Nose." Anyhow, the operator called back after I made my call, and asked me to spell the name. I did it again, and she told me to hang on. This was in a phone booth in the brightly lit lobby of the Miami Beach condo where my downtown grandmother lived in the winters. (I think my grandfather stayed in New York.) She challenged me again, so I hung up. The phone started ringing immediately. I picked it up and she started challenging me again, so I hung up again. The phone rang and rang. It was about 1 a.m. I kept waiting for it to stop. It was amazing how powerless I felt -- the only real life analogue to a Stephen King's Christine horror movie experience I've ever had. It wouldn't stop. I picked it up and hung up and it rang again. Finally I left it hanging off the hook. Some people saw me do this from across the lobby, but they didn't seem inclined to challenge me. I imagined the operator calling the cops and telling them where the phone was. But I got away. Later, Mrs. Rausnitz said that the phone company called them and asked who had called. Now that I think of it, it must have been more like 10 than 1, since I wouldn't have been calling that late. But in Florida -- in the senior citizens district of Miami Beach -- it felt like 1. They didn't give me away, but it felt like a very close shave. Still Linda and I broke into a pinball machine at the hotel where she was staying a couple of days later and took about $40 in quarters. The rec room guard called security. We saw them coming in and we left while they went up to examine the machine. We ran through the lobby and grabbed a cab. They chased us and tried to stop the cab, but he didn't pull over. "The airport!" she said, not knowing where else to go, and afraid the cab would give our destination away. But after a few minutes, he said that they hadn't got his number since he would have heard on the radio if they were trying to find him. Linda said something stupid about how they wanted to kidnap us, but it was obvious to me that the cab driver knew what was going on, and that she was insulting his intelligence. I gave him my grandmother's address, and we gave him $10 in quarters for the $3 ride. The hotel -- the Doral! -- was owned by my classmate Steve Schrages's father, it turned out (Steve Schragis or Schrages now owns Carroll books I think), and I think I told Lou Rosseman about this and he told Steve who made fun of us. He was a wry and mellow guy. I was stupid and self-destructive. But within reason.

posted by william 12:20 AM
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I remember that my uptown grandparents -- when they put out cold cuts for lunch or afternoon parties -- would always have tongue. I somehow imagined the word was a homonym: it certainly didn't look like tongue. And it didn't taste like it either, I think partly because the idea of tongue tasting of anything rather than being the neutral organ what tasted didn't make sense to me. But no: it turned out that it really was tongue, something which filled me with a very specific squeamishness. I just didn't see how you could enjoy its taste on your tongue.

posted by william 7:06 AM
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I remember the Neptune health club, on the roof of a building on 97th Street and West End. There was a pool there, which was really neat. Bill Dave After School would take us there when the weather was bad. (We might have gone only once.) It was I think in the same building that my Great Aunt Anna (Teta Anna) lived. We never really saw her except with her younger brother, my downtown Grandfather. I think she wasn't at all close to my mother. I liked her, but no more than that -- she was like the other old ladies associated with my grandparents, in particular the two (unrelated) Mrs. Rotkopfs. (Then there was only one.) I remember finding it slightly odd that here was this relative, who even gave me candy, who didn't seem any closer to me and whom I didn't love any more, than any other old lady. She represented the place where the nuclear family dropped off sharply and merged with the general population. It made a certain amount of sense that she would live in a building with a health club in it -- one of those other New York buildings, with their minor features and surprises, and not one of the buildings I knew.

posted by william 7:16 AM
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I remember how much I liked the word address. How much I liked having an address -- 175 Riverside Drive. It was the same as my parents', and it was so familiar -- well, homey really: what else? I felt as though I belonged to it, as though the address 175 Riverside Drive itself (not the place) was something in the world that took care of me. An address was something that I had, as intimately as I had my own name. But it wasn't private, particular to me. It was real, external, public, self-possessed, objective, calm, competent, and tender. Ah, those days.

posted by william 12:57 AM
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I remember that my uptown grandmother had a cousin who was involved in a suicide pact, as with Kleist and Henrietta Vogel. A Young Man talked her into it. They both shot themselves, if I'm not mistaken. Or he shot her and then himself. It turned out that a year earlier he had assiduously courted some other woman, but she turned down his suggestion of a double suicide. So then he went after my distant cousin. Had she known, what would have happened? This was my introduction to the genre of the double-suicide, which even as my grandmother told me this true story I somehow recognized as a genre. I wasn't surprised to read about Kleist, or about Chikamatsu, or countless articles in the newspaper (though the genre now seems a little dated, at least in real life). I'm not sure what fascinated me about the story -- or rather why I was interested in it when I wasn't fascinated. It seemed stupid to me, and I guess I regretted the fact that my grandmother's cousin didn't learn in time (since she never did learn it) that her lover was just looking for someone who would join him. It seemed one of those interesting cases of my dead relatives, who were not exempt from the strange European perils that surrounded them, from excessive romance to the death camps.

posted by william 12:26 AM
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I remember the school play. In third grade? All the teachers wrote it together. It was about the reconciliation of the fear and suspicion among the wolves and the rabbits. I was a wolf. There were five major parts, of which I remember Hugh Cramer got one: the boy who adventures among them and reconciles them. I ended up knowing the whole play by heart, and recited it to my poor uptown grandmother. But (like most of us) I only had one line. The leader of the wolves, played (I swear) by Daniel Wolf, incited us to the arts of peace. We crouched behind him in a row, and popped up one by one. The kid next to me stood and cued me with "We don't mean them any harm." Me: "We want to be their friends." Daniel: "Then we must...." what? Insist on making our good intentions known in some way. I remember being very impressed by the costumes the teachers made us out of the creamy drawing paper and crayons we used. I always missed my cue. On the matinee performance I hit it, and was very happy. But the later performance (after school?) I missed it again, and the teachers who were watching me in the front row made large prompting gestures, and I leaped up and said my line, averting disaster.

posted by william 7:07 AM
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I remember learning the word troop from F-Troop, a C-list sit com (for me) which I would watch only if the other possibilities were really bad. So a troop meant some reasonably large group of soldiers. When I started reading about the Viet Nam War and the number of American troops killed each day, I never knew what to multiply that number by to get the number of soldiers. I still don't know how large a number you need to use the word troop. You don't talk about one troop being killed, or two troops. But what about three or more? The word was subtly de-individualizing. "Five soldiers" would mean five separate people, but "five troops" made them faceless, interchangeable, fungible, through that odd plural word applied numerically to a collection of individuals.

posted by william 7:15 AM
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I remember that Tommy Hoge's father, Tom, was excited one day because he was going to appear in a magazine ad. I saw the ad the next day, taped up in their pantry. It was for liquor, and it was a bunch of young clean cut adults (I say "young" now: they didn't look so young then) at a party. They were all talking to each other, like in a New Yorker cartoon, except for Tom himself who was sitting in the middle ground, holding a drink and looking interested even though there was no one talking to him. He committed suicide, although I don't know why. I doubt it was loneliness. But the ad showed a different side of him: not that the party was real, but that the staging of the party was real, and he'd allowed himself to be staged in such a way that that look of interested awkwardness was his only recourse.

posted by william 12:36 AM
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I remember a reprint of an old Superman comic (or maybe Superman's Pal JIMMY OLSON) in which Lois Lane and Clark Kent are watching a movie about Superman. It might have been a newsreel. Lois sees herself on-screen and says, "THAT'S I !" That's I? But my mother confirmed this was grammatically correct -- my first encounter with the predicate nominative. I knew the contemporary Lois would have said, "That's me."

posted by william 12:30 AM
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I remember Silva Thins. Also Benson & Hedges 101's. "A silly millimeter longer -- One-oh-ones -- a silly millimeter longer." There was an ad in which some safe crackers get caught because they spend the extra moment afforded by the extra millimeter. Also an ad where someone gets in an elevator and the closing door clips his cigarette.

posted by william 12:17 AM
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I remember Levy's Real Jewish Rye. The subway ads showed people of all races grinning, faces alight, as they ate a slice. The copy was: "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's Real Jewish Rye." I think these were the prototypes of the later United Colors of Benneton ads. Every single one of these ads in the New York subways was defaced in some charming and essentially innocent way -- moustaches, missing teeth, and so on. But the luminous smiles of the people enjoying the bread shone through. Somehow the ads were designed to be defaced: it was part of the urban experience, and part of the very variety the ads were celebrating. I remember a lot of Asians in the ad, including a young girl. With a missing front tooth she looked even cuter and to be taking even more pleasure in her Levy's than she would have otherwise. I sort of liked Levy's, but not as much as the bakery rye bread from Cake Masters that my grandparents used to get.

I remember "Rat Fink means good bread." The trucks were everywhere. But I don't think I've ever seen Rat Fink bread.

posted by william 1:00 AM
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I remember being car-sick. I hated it. My sister got even sicker than I did. She'd actually throw up. I always wondered what drivers did when they got car-sick, but it turns out they don't.

posted by william 12:10 AM
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I remember my uptown grandparents taking me to the marionette theater in New York to see life-size marionettes perform The magic flute. From where I sat, they looked human, but through binoculars you could see they were marionettes. I thought this was interesting for about five minutes; then I got terribly bored again. But it was an adult experience. Later when I read Kleist I knew what he was talking about.
.

posted by william 12:32 AM
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I remember some TV show -- I'm sure it's well-known what it is, but it's slipped my mind -- that had a four act structure, with epilogue. Every fifteen minutes a title would go up saying it was the next act. It made it look profound and serious, though I'm pretty sure it was a police drama. The epilogue lasted one scene. I think this is where I learned the word "epilogue."

posted by william 7:30 AM
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I remember cigarette machines, with their dingy glass or plastic fronts and the cigarette packs piled up in slots. I forget when they went out, in some consent agreement between the manufacturers and the government. You put in your 55 cents (back then!) and pulled out a knob that was like the spring loaded pull start on a pinball machine. With the cigarette machine, if you didn't pull the knob out far enough it would spring back without dropping the pack and you were out your money. The knobs were of a translucent, semi-opaque plastic on a metal rod. I suppose they were vaguely phallic, comfortably so. There were always dead flies in the machines, and the brand names, in front of the stacks of cigarettes, cut out of cartons I think, were always faded. The technology seemed absurdly more primitive than that of soda machines or even juke boxes. I think they calmed you down about smoking: it was all so old and had been around for such a long time that it had to be benign. The general feeling was one of staleness. How could that be dangerous?

I remember that The New Yorker doesn't accept cigarette ads.

posted by william 12:47 AM
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I remember Cue Magazine. The Hoges got it. It was a disappointment, since it didn't really have everything. Time Out does a much better job now.

posted by william 12:17 AM
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I remember how much I hated getting soap under my nails. I always preferred a new bar of soap because it would be firm. Wet soap was slippery and just to hold it was to risk having to grab it if it started slipping out of my hands, and more often than not that would mean soap under my nails. It felt unpleasant in roughly the same way that silk and blackboard scratching did (on which see a former post): as though something were too close to my skin, too invasive, not through but edge-on. (I think maybe this helped me make sense of the odd horror of the combination when my uptown grandmother told me of the concentration camp victims' being turned into lampshades and soap. I didn't quite understand what that could mean, but I understood that the shades must have been skin, and I shuddered to think of the soap getting under my own.)

posted by william 7:10 AM
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I remember Fractured Fairy Tales.

posted by william 10:43 PM
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