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 Hebrew School. You could go Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday. I was in Mrs. Rustler's Tuesday/Thursday class. What I learned there, alas, was cutting class. We learned almost nothing in class, and then after school my friends Larry Sedgewick, Peter Rogers, and Michael Hobin would hang out, mainly at Larry's house which was very nearby, and go to the park and be sublimely unsupervised, and I'd go with them. They were a charismatic clique, and I was very proud one day when Peter said to Larry that they thought of me as "one of us," despite my not having their athletic ability. So that made me look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then one day my parents asked me what I was doing when I was supposed to be in Hebrew School. Dr. Greenberg, the kindly principal, had reported me. We'd driven to Long Island, and there was no hint that I was in trouble. I realized somehow that they'd known for a while -- more than the two hours of the drive, maybe several days or weeks -- that I'd been cutting. I was very impressed that they'd waited to say anything about it: to me it seemed as though they were oddly thoughtful about being parents. Odd, because parents were natural forces: this would be as though a rainstorm was being thoughtful about whether to break.

posted by william 7:22 AM
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I remember Officer Joe's last name! Officer Joe Bolton.

posted by william 11:41 PM
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I remember the Famous Writers' School, the Famous Artists' School and the Famous Photographers' School. They had lots of ads on match book covers as well as in magazines. Geoffrey Stern had a 35 mm slr, and I wanted one desperately and eventually got a Honeywell Pentax. I also filled out the card for the Famous Photographers' aptitude test, which I received a few weeks later. No obligation! But you had to be over eighteen. You looked at photos and were asked what emotion they reminded you of. It was multiple choice. I remember one photograph, of clouds, rolling away over a plain to a distant horizon. The choices were three ridiculous ones and "infinity." I nailed that one. As it happens, I think I got 16 out of twenty, which they keyed as the lowest passing grade. Then they called during dinner. I went to the phone in the pantry, my mother sitting in the dining room with my sister. When they told me who they were, I gulped. The guy calling me heard me gulp and asked how old I was. I didn't even think to lie, and just said, "fourteen." He was very polite (this must have happened all the time), thanked me, asked me to get in touch with them again when I was eighteen... and I was off the hook. My mother didn't even press me about who called. I'd never gotten out of such sudden serious trouble so easily and quickly. I fully intended to call them back when I was eighteen and master of my own fate, but somehow I never did.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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I remember, having yesterday heard of Maurice Blanchot's death last Thursday, that Blanchot begins his last work, L'instant de ma mort (1994), with the words "Je me souviens:" "I remember a young man -- a man still young -- prevented from dying by death itself -- and perhaps the error of injustice." Blanchot tells the story, in what is an exquisitely rare autobiographical moment -- of his hairsbreadth escape from being shot by a Nazi officer and his squad. For him that escape was also the instant of his death: all else, everything later, was posthumous, or at least written under the sign of the death that should have been his then. He describes the extraordinary lightness he experienced at the moment, a lightness which told him everything and nothing. Whatever else it did, it enabled the extraordinary body of literature which followed for the next fifty years, and which for me is among the most significant work I have ever read. I mourn him -- not lighthearted but lighter at heart for having read him.

posted by william 11:59 PM
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I remember what I guess are called pea-drop veils. (That's what they're called in French.) My uptown grandmother and some of her old lady friends had them. They were of black gauze dotted all over with small black cloth pea-shaped pea-sized pellets of fabric, which made it hard to see the face behind them. My grandmother wore them out when dressed at a slightly higher than casual level (what counted as casual to her), along with the nappy cloth coat that she had and that I pictured when hearing of Pat Nixon's cloth coat (from the Checkers speech, again). I didn't get the veil, and knew I didn't get it, when she or her friends wore them. (I think my downtown grandmother wore one once or twice, but I think for her it wasn't a natural accessory and it may have just been an experiment.) These veils, I am grateful to say, have disappeared completely. You can see one in a deleted scene from The Big Sleep, the 1945 version, where Lauren Bacall wears one in a badly judged scene with Humphry Bogart; the reshot version of the scene is sexy, the original grotesque. And you can see Faye Dunaway wearing such a veil in Chinatown, I suppose as an allusion to The Big Sleep. Neither wears it well. Who could?

posted by william 11:23 PM
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I remember that one day when we were driving down Riverside from Washington Heights I expressed some vague, practically pro-forma desire to grow up to be president, and my grandmother got very stern and spoke against it, saying no Jewish boy had any business wanting to be president. It would be a terrible thing for a Jew to be president. I was surprised by this -- not quite taken aback but still I found it odd, partly I think because I knew that I didn't mean it, and so I somehow realized, maybe for the first time, that she wasn't conceding enough to the fact that I was a kid. Still I think I found it interesting that she thought a Jewish president would be bad for the Jews: it made me start thinking. I think she was right.

posted by william 11:15 PM
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I remember that my father went to hear Dylan Thomas read or speak three days before he (Thomas) died. My father says he was very drunk. I remember also that I first knew about Dylan Thomas when my parents got an LP of Under Milk Wood. I don't remember ever listening to it, nor whether they did, but the packaging was as beautiful as the title, white letters on a black and mysterious background. It was a double album, and I certainly intended for a long time to listen to it. I did listen to some Shakespeare plays they had on records -- I specifically remember Julius Caesar -- and Under Milk Wood seemed to be a worthy successor to that serious and adult recreation, whose taste I was cultivating in myself. I didn't read Thomas's poetry until high school: I think I became aware of him again during my early adolescent passion with Joyce. Someone -- I think maybe one of Michael Clurman's sisters' boyfriends, who also introduced me to James Taylor -- compared A Child's Christmas in Wales to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I also first saw in their hands, and shortly thereafter I found out about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Then, probably in Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle, that famous and wonderful anthology, I must have read "Refusal to mourn the death of a child by fire" and maybe also the "Time held me green and dying" poem. Like everyone I loved their music. But not enough to listen to Under Milk Wood. This must have been when my father told me about seeing him just before his death.

posted by william 7:30 AM
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I remember that my uptown grandmother called "night sticks" what later (during the Chicago DNC riots) I heard referred to as "billy clubs." I wonder where the term -- where either term -- comes from. I remember that my favorite doorman at 175 -- Fred Kusk (who reminded me a lot of Lurch, or rather vice versa) -- had a baseball bat when he was on at night, which seemed to me strangely out-of-place since until then it hadn't really occured to me that a bat could be used as a weapon.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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I remember when mailboxes were red on top, and then the rest were blue. They somehow looked more like policemen then. Certainly they were more anthropomorphic: the red top was like a cheerful head, with a mouth that could open unthreateningly because the whole thing was so friendly, large, and squat. I remember when they started being replaced by the all-blue boxes, which were more impersonal. It was like a friendly doorman or fireman retiring, or like the old lighter-green busses disappearing.

posted by william 12:19 AM
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I remember when people used to say, "Incidentally." "I am going to the store to get some milk, which, incidentally, I'd asked you to get." I noticed that people didn't say it any more when I happened to watch a movie of Nixon's Checkers speech, which incidentally should have destroyed, not saved, his career. Whenever he wanted to break out of his self-imposed humility he'd attack someone, incidentally. Now people say, "By the way." I think incidentally must have lasted from the forties through 1970 or so. I wonder where it came from -- a military term perhaps? I feel as though there's a song that made use of it, "Oh, and incidentally, I love you." Or is it the title of a song? Johnny Matthis? It should have been.

posted by william 7:27 AM
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I remember a blizzard when I was about eight years old. My father and I walked I think to his office, through the powdery snow; I seem to recall walking on Broadway in the seventies. It was close to a total white-out, and hard to walk on the very granular powder. I thought it was wonderful. At that age, you didn't feel that warmth and interiors were any big deal or any great relief: that must have come at about twelve or thirteen. Yes, you could be cold, and then, yes, it was nice not to be cold any more. But there was no premium in the sense of warmth itself -- no grateful, luxurious relief from the cold. I think that was why I didn't like baths either. I had no sense yet of snuggling. So that the blizzard was something that I felt with a kind of purity: not a prelude to the wonderful return to some warm well-lit interior, but a surprisingly difficult, cold, new, and interesting experience. It was most surprising, I think, that powder should be so tiring to walk on, and that the sky-scrapers I would occasionally look up at should be so shrouded in white.

posted by william 6:42 PM
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I remember Beatles haircuts. Does the term still signify? It was the haircut that they all had on Revolver and Rubber Soul and Meet the Beatles. They were new to us (or to me), and we couldn't tell them apart. This was before John's bespectacled, scholarly look, Ringo's moustache, George's gauntness, Paul's baby-face. Those haircuts were what counted as long hair then. The Rolling Stones and the Monkees looked just like them. Then, in the late sixties and seventies, men used the length of their hair as a marker for when they'd started being hippies: the longer the hair.... Mick Jagger might have been the first of the longer-haired types. Then with Sergeant Pepper, the Beatles became real hippies too.

I remember Chubby Checker and the ads for fifties rock and roll compilation albums (which you could order and get COD).

posted by william 2:03 PM
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I remember "Up up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon." I liked it. A small part of why I iked the song was because that was always what Superman said before taking off in the TV show, and I think in the early comics.

I remember a Superman episode where he gets blast frozen and loses all his powers. I didn't quite get the logic. He is all white -- a man of ice. At one point he says, "Up, up, and away," and tries to fly but can't. Very embarrassing to him. As Clark Kent he puts on Lois's make-up, and people remark on how tanned and healthy he looks, and make catty insinuations about his being on vacation in Florida during a crisis. I remember another episode where he learns from some Yogi type to pass through a solid wall, in order to arrest a guy hidden in an impregnable -- even by Superman -- chamber who will be declared legally dead at noon after being in hiding for seven years, and will therefore escape his crimes. Superman ends up not using this ability, but getting the atomic clock agency to speed up their clocks slightly so that the callibrating signal the bad guy is using tells him it's noon when it's only ten to, and when he breaks out of his fortress, using his back-hoe, he's arrested. I wonder whether these weren't late episodes.

posted by william 7:18 AM
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I remember Run for your life, a show not unlike The Fugitive. The protagonist is dying of a brain tumor, as you are reminded by his occasional winces when his head hurts. Because he's dying he's fearless, and has undertaken some impossible mission -- whether to clear himself of a crime, or find the beast who committed some crime against him, or on behalf of the government, I don't remember. I do remember that there was a Mad Magazine parody of the show, where the protagonist smokes a pack of cigarettes all at once, because he doesn't have enough time left to smoke them serially. I think that in the opening credits he might be given two years to live. I don't know whether the show lasted that long.

posted by william 4:08 PM
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I remember sitting on phone books at restaurants. This was before they routinely provided booster seats. I remember sitting on a phone book at La Fonda del Sol, and also my sister and some of the younger Schubins, later, sitting on phonebooks at the White Plains Chinese restaurant we used to go to with them. (I always confused White Castle with White Plains, I now see: I think I thought that White Plains was where White Castle restaurants originated.) At some point we went to some other place, and went out to a restaurant, and my sister (I guess) needed a phone book to sit on. But we weren't in New York any more, and the phonebooks were slim flimsy things that did no good at all.

posted by william 3:22 PM
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I remember that in New York when you walk down the street -- if you're male at any rate -- you're actually supposed to jostle other people walking the other way -- males at any rate. There's a kind of pleasurable thunk of shoulders that is part of the city experience. Other people deny this, but I noticed after I went away to college that when I came back I was avoiding the thunk, as you do elsewhere, swerving to give the guy coming toward me space, and whenever I did this a look of unconscious puzzlement would appear on his face and he'd swerve towards me to try to make the shoulder-to-shoulder contact. When I stopped swerving, everything went on with the satisfying predictablity of before. My friend Deborah Gordon, who works on harvester ant colonies, is very interested in how the colony as a whole stores and conveys information. (See her Ants at work.) Part of it has to do with the contacts that ants make with each other, when they touch antennae. The greater the frequency of contact, the more that's going on, and each ant knows this. The systematic contact itself stores a kind of colony-wide attitude and posture. I think the same thing happens in New York (although the ants are female, and we thunkers are male. But maybe women jostle each other too). The number of times you thunk into someone determines how busy, how urban, and how dense with real and committed New Yorkers the streets are on a particular day. Jostling on the streets is good: it means that everyone has something urgent to do, but it's not all the same urgency, like running from the WTC, since you jostle people going the other way. And in the midst of it all we celebrate New York, because rushed as we are we still like that split-second slow-down that the contact causes and records.

posted by william 9:11 PM
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I remember my first post to "I remember / je me souviens," a year ago today, viz: "I remember that during the days of black and white TV, men who were to appear on TV were told to wear light blue shirts instead of white." I remembered this because we were told to wear blue when we went to the studio to see them shooting "To Tell the Truth," a great show. You always knew you'd guessed wrong when the person you guessed was the first one to start standing, after the m.c. said: "Would the real N.N. please stand up." But sometimes there'd be a double psych, and someone would start to stand, sit down, watch someone else start to stand, and then in fact stand up. This was rare though. I remember the real person when we went to see the show was kind of non-descript and awkward looking, and that he hitched his pants and smoothed them down as he stood up. The real what? I don't remember.

posted by william 12:49 AM
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I remember that my father and his family, escaping Croatia in 1939-40, went through Baghdad (also Istanbul, Calcutta, and the South Pacific).

posted by william 7:04 AM
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I remember that my uptown grandmother's mother died just after being liberated from Auschwitz. I think my father called her "black omama," while his father's mother was "white omama," just from the color of their hair. I called my uptown grandmother just "Omama" (which got me into the same kind of unfair trouble -- but more unfair -- that I got into with Rabbi William Berkowitz for saying "Hi, Billy, I'm Billy" to him: Marc Bilgray and I discovered a common feature when it turned out he called his grandmother "Ommy;" I met her once and liked her. One day I was accused by Marc, and by his father, and questioned by my parents whom Marc's father (Felix! -- an entertainment lawyer) had called, of calling her up and calling her "a stupid old Ommy" which is how she must have reported it. I vigorously denied this: it seemed obvious to me then, and still does now, that she had misheard something that someone said to her, being, well, being a stupid old woman. What I couldn't believe is that anyone would have gotten me so wrong -- that my own parents would have gotten me so wrong -- as to think I might do such a silly thing). So my Omama told me one day as we were driving up Broadway near City College -- an occasional alternate route we'd take between Washington Heights and Riverside Drive -- I liked tracking the brief elevation of the IRT and then its return underground as my grandfather drove -- that her mother had feasted on eggs after her liberation and died hours later of the excessive food she'd eaten. This seemed very odd to me -- and confirmed the distinction between me and the denizens of that world. What was also odd about it was that it had the sound of a story with a happy ending, a fairy-tale ending: how my great-grandmother survived Auschwitz to unimaginable bounty and generosity. But then the food killed her. The narrative surprise was a terrible shock. But it was also an interesting fact, one that I felt I had to file away for use at some emergent occasion: don't eat a lot of eggs after being systematically starved for years. Byron in Don Juan says "That famished people must be slowly nurst / And fed by spoonfuls, else they always burst." So the interesting fact turned out to be true!

Years later my grandmother showed me a letter from my great grandmother, postmarked, I remember, by the Red Cross, from Auschwitz, full of insipid no-news. It all looked normal and bland. (It was in German: my grandmother helped me read it.) It reaussered them in the U.S. It turned out, of course, that this was part of German defensive propaganda: nothing to complain about in Auschwitz. Only sanitized letters got through. But it was still very important to my grandmother -- this tenuous and mendacious contact. After all, that was her mother's writing on that slip of paper. I now recall that my parents own portraits of my great grandparents, inherited from my grandmother, done by some reasonably well-remembered portraitist of the twenties. I never really put together the woman in the portrait wearing pearls with the abject woman in the story. Nor with Omama Schwarze. But she did have dark hair.

posted by william 3:43 PM
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I remember candy my uptown grandmother had -- some kind of caramel, I think? -- that was wrapped very tightly in a very thin or flimsy cellophane. It was hard to get off or hard to know that you had gotten it off. You knew more by smell than by touch. Later I found the same kind of cellophane wrapped around the sticks of clay that came in packs of four (four different pastel colors, of which really I only remember the aquamarine). It was hard to get off and you'd get clay under your nails. It ripped down a little bit like fruit leather -- that combination of satisfaction and uncertainty because it just came apart too easily. You couldn't be sure you'd gotten it all. But as with the candy, you could smell the clay as it was exposed: this was part of the ephemeral satisfaction.

posted by william 5:54 AM
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I remember the little balls in whistles. Do they still work this way? Their rattling bothered me, and I never quite got the principle. At all, really. But if you immobilized the ball (which somehow I could do with my finger, but how?) the whistle wouldn't whistle.

posted by william 1:15 AM
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I remember, in the wake of the Columbia explosion, the deaths of White and Grissom by fire in a NASA mock-up. We'd only recently learned about pure oxygen and how it was easier to breathe that our mainly nitrogen air, and then they died because they were in a pure oxygen environment. To me it seemed ridiculous that they could die on the ground, so close to other people and to aid. But they did. I remember also the Russain cosmonauts who were found dead after splashdown. They went out of radio contact in the normal fashion of those times, and the next time they were seen they were dead. I found it odd that there was no record of the moment they died: all that vigilance, but all it tells is that at one moment they are alive and at another dead.

posted by william 12:36 AM
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I remember how shockingly bad marzipan is.

I remember first hearing about it on an episode of Lost in Space. Dr. Smith knows of a beautiful ageless alien princess, and somehow betrays the Robinsons into captivity while preparing to meet her. He might be releasing her from a planet where she is imprisoned. She turns out to be fat and middle aged, which sends him back to his friends in horror. Her explanation is that she's had nothing to do but eat marzipan for a thousand years.

posted by william 12:06 AM
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