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:

It's a fight to the finish, as you can see,
Between Johnny Quest and Chief Cherokee.

Also I remember "Rock 'em Sock 'em robots:" "You knocked my block off!"

posted by william 4:27 PM
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I remember in fifth grade or so we made the transition from Show and Tell to Current Events. We were supposed to bring in newspaper headlines and explain to the class what was going on in the world. I felt very adult about this and interested in the idea of cutting out and pasting those big black headlines. It was then -- maybe the very first day -- of Current Events that I learned about the Viet Nam War. I was shocked (though not shaken). I thought war was a thing of the past, a thing that ended in 1945. How could there be a war on right then? And I continue to wonder.

posted by william 7:16 AM
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I remember Flip Wilson.

posted by william 12:13 AM
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I remember my Lederhosen. My short leather overalls, with various designs tooled into it, especially the chest flap, and with leather thongs binding its pieces together. I rather think my parents bought them for me in Austria on one of their European trips. I had mixed feelings about them -- they were enticingly European, back when Europe was the most potent of names for me, but they were somewhat uncomfortable. (I remember thinking this, but I don't have any visceral sense of their discomfort, as I do of the socks that used to ensnare my ingrown toenails when I was three or four: I was told about the toenails later, but I remember that terrible frustrating pain of getting the nail snagged in the sock.) Although she didn't give them to me, they thrilled my uptown grandmother, because my Uncle Willy, her beloved first-born killed in 1944, had a pair when he was a child. She told me how he once fell into a pool (I now imagine: a pond, but I thought then a swimming pool) wearing them and she said they turned hard as concrete. I found this fascinating, and thought about the possible metamorphosis of my Lederhosen into their own stone monument. I think I expected this to one day happen, in that future in which all more adult things come to pass. But in the meantime I was obsessively careful about not spilling a single drop on to them, while at the same time being secretely disappointed that when they did get splashed the droplets didn't petrify the spots they hit. Then I drifted away from thinking about them, but I was reminded of them with pleasure when I was taken to see The Sound of Music. But after that they got put away in a closet, and then in a chest, and now for all I know they've turned to rock in some humid land-fill, but I never saw them again.

posted by william 9:43 PM
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I remember "Brighten up with Tetley, the tea-drinker's tea... Flavor oh so merry, you've just gotta be!"

I remember that I thought "Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea" was Texas T, ie the T in the name Texas. It came out looking like a T in the sequence (the credits to The Beverley Hillbillies). How much more important than I'd ever imagined did Texas tea turn out to be, especially for the Texans now running the world.

posted by william 5:45 AM
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I remember x-ray specs. The ad at the back of the comic book showed a guy with goggle-eyed spiral lenses looking at the bones in his hand. And also, as I recall, towards a big-bottomed girl in a skirt. It was obvious to me that this was a scam. No one I knew had ever fallen for it, until one day a boy came in with the specs. I assumed that what they did was to show silhouettes. He let a couple of other guys look through them, but no one else. They claimed that it worked, but even though I was a little wistful about not getting to have the experience of trying them on, I felt confident that they didn't.

I also remember the throw-your-voice device. The ad showed a man with a trunk on his back, and a voice from the trunk calling "Help! Let me out!" We were encouraged to fool our teachers with this device. I was willing to believe that this one worked though I couldn't really figure out how.

posted by william 11:08 PM
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I remember the beat-up paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye that my parents somehow had. I knew nothing at all about it then -- this must have been when I was in fifth grade or so -- but I was curious about it because it had a somewhat lurid cover (Holden looking panicked, intriguing people behind him looking at him with lascivious curiosity). The back-cover called it an "New York underground classic," or maybe "the underground classic of New York life," or even "the classic story of underground New York life." That made me think it was a spy or science fiction adventure story that took place in the subway system of New York. So I planned to read it, but I didn't, and I don't think I actually found out what it was until ninth grade, when it was assigned.

posted by william 7:01 AM
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I remember that my father had an autographed picture of Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. I knew he who was: he had thrown the pitch that Bobby Thompson hit into the three-run homer that gave the Giants the 1951 pennant: "the shot heard round the world." My father got the autograph in 1952. I was amazed that somehow Ralph Branca was able to continue to function in the world, giving autographs and such. It was a lesson to me in the fact that people do recover from disaster. But I had contempt for him for recovering. Somehow, I thought this historical moment had to be the end -- at least for the loser. Baseball and fiction didn't seem much different for me at the time: winners could go on living in the world of our knowledge, but losers got superseded. And yet Ralph Branca endured. (I think he endured until the nineties, in fact, though I'm not sure.)

posted by william 7:12 AM
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I remember "Roger, Wilco, Over and Out." What does wilco mean? Now as I type this I'm imagining it might be short for "Will copy," what the professionals now express by "Copy that." And I think I know what that means. I remember also first hearing "10-4," with my Heath-Cliff Jr., when we tuned in on a citizens' band frequency. (I liked this use of citizen -- I think it affected how I later thought about both Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve, and the Citizen -- the Cyclops character -- in Ulysses.) One guy we listened to would use "10-4" as an all purpose word: I remember him saying -- "Ok I'll 10-4 that down to the highway. 10-4." I also think I know what "10-4" means -- essentially: "Roger."

posted by william 5:05 PM
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I remember Lyndon Johnson announcing he wouldn't seek re-election. Those were the days. I was a McCarthy partisan -- partly because my mother hated Bobby Kennedy so much. I think this was because of his association with Roy Cohn, but it might have been because of the way he handled being attorney general. I liked Bobby on TV, but she said he was slimey and mendacious, and I believed her. I remember how he said "can't," with that broad Boston accent -- Kahn't. I remember the cut over his eye in an interview, caused in the rescue of his son who'd been carried away by a rip tide or undertow. A week or so later, he was dead.

I remember Six Crises by Richard Nixon. Like The God That Failed it seemed like it had to be an important adult book.

posted by william 11:39 PM
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I remember that Mr. Durocher used to throw chalk at us in seventh grade algebra. Everyone was terrified of him, I learned in sixth grade, when I found out that I'd be in his math class the next year. But I ended up really liking him -- I liked his energetically tough interaction with us. He was perpetually alert, and we couldn't put anything past him, which I really appreciated. How many people are alert to seventh graders? And he was a good teacher. He reminded me a little of my downtown grandfather. Later when I heard of Leo Durocher I assimilated the two of them in my mind -- I kind of had a soft spot for Leo despite his notorious visciousness, because I imagined him as being somewhat like my math teacher.

posted by william 2:41 PM
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I remember Eddie Giacomin coming within inches of being the first goalie ever to score in an NHL game. The other team had left their net empty in desperation to try and tie. Giacomin cleared the puck and it went ricochetting up-ice at a leasurely pace, just too fast to be chased down. It was so close -- and in the replays shown over and over it kept looking like it was going to go in.

I remember Giacomin didn't wear a mask, as most other goalies started doing so.

I remember Terry Sawchuck, and his last shut-out. It was his last season and he was Giacomin's back-up. I watched (on TV) the shutout.

I remember also the end of maybe the 1970 season, when the Rangers were tied with the Canadiens for points but behind in tie-breaking goals-for. Vachon and Dryden were the Canadiens goalies -- I think Sawchuck might have played his shutout against them. At any rate, with two games left in the season, the Rangers and Canadiens were battling for the fourth-place play-off spot. The Rangers lost the second to last game to the Red Wings, and would need to score at least five goals the next day -- and win -- in order to come out ahead of the Canadiens. The Red Wings made the playoffs -- or maybe clinched first place -- after winning that game. So apparently they all got massively drunk that night, and played terribly the next day. The Rangers were up 5-2 and pulled Giacomin, trying to score as much as possible. I remember Sawchuck and Giacomin sitting together on the bench, Sawchuck roaring with laughter Giacomin had been pulled when the Rangers were so far ahead. The Rangers won, and it all depended on what would happen that night; and then the Canadiens were creamed by the Black Hawks. They needed to score I think 5 goals to win in goals once it was clear that they would lose the game, and so they also pulled their goalie, when they were losing 5-2. But they ended up losing 10-2. They were very bitter about the Red Wings, and about their unprofessional hangovers. This was the first time since the forties the Canadiens hadn't made the playoffs. It might have been Vachon's last season.

I remember Rod Gilbert, and that he'd broken his back when he fell on some debris thrown on the ice by irate Ranger fans. I remember him saying in an interview that hockey was a much rougher game than football, but that people played it longer because it didn't damage your knees the way football did. (Which I knew about also from Joe Namath's famously fragile knees.)

I remember that Terry Sawchuck was killed in a fight with some other Rangers at a barbecue that summer.

posted by william 4:34 PM
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I remember that my father never forgave my grandmother for an incident during the 1947 World Series. Bill Bevins was pitching a no-hitter for the Yankees, although he was wild, and in the bottom of the ninth the Yankees were ahead of the Dodgers 2-1 with two on (by walks and maybe a wild pitch) and two out. My sixteen year old father was sitting motionless in the wing chair, listening to the game on the radio. My grandmother was ironing. She finished and then went to the open window and slammed it shut, just as -- and in his mind acting as the cause for what ensued, viz. that -- Cookie Lavajetto hit a double to break up the no-hitter and win the game for the Dodgers. Later I read about this game as well as about Bobby Thompson's shot heard round the world in 1951, in a compendium of baseball lore. The Yankee outfielder tried to preserve the no-hitter by attempting to catch the ball, allowing what would otherwise have been a game-tying hit become the game-winner. much as I'd hoped that Cleon Jones or Tommy Agee might have dived for Jimmy Qualls' one-out line-drive single in the ninth inning of Tommy Seaver's erstwhile perfect game.

posted by william 4:13 PM
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I remember "flaming filet of yak, Peking style" (from the Alka Seltzer commercial -- Alka Seltzer is for the man who orders flaming filet of yak, Peking style, simply because he's never had flaming filet of yak, Peking style. Very debonair.)

posted by william 12:14 AM
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I remember that my uptown grandparents moved from their first floor apartment to the top (sixth floor). This felt (after the fact) like the slow beginning of the erosion of what had seemed to me the perfectly stable structure of the world. (My downtown grandparents had also moved -- downtown -- and I remembered this but their move was more exciting: their building had a balcony! And they were considerably younger than my uptown grandparents, at least in the way I thought of them, since in reality my downtown grandfather was eleven years younger than his uptown counterpart, and my downtown grandmother five years younger than hers, although she claimed to be two years younger still.) The erosion continued when, I think after a couple of robberies in the building, my grandmother had a "police lock" installed: a heacy metal pole that you braced against a bracket in the door and another in the floor. It was hideous, and somehow corresponded to the growing grotesquery of her own advancing age (she had the twisted rheumatic fingers that you see in some Rembrandt paintings, and her whole body was starting to knot in on itself). I found both interesting (how could the police lock fail to be?) rather than off-putting. At the time, erosion, while perceptible, seemed a very slow process.

posted by william 6:48 AM
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I remember "There are books and things that they lend for free! It's the latest, it's the greatest, it's the Li-bery" -- kid's voices, followed by a male voice telling us why it was so great. Then he said, so go to the "Li-bery, er [chuckling]--LibRary."

I remember "Mail moves the country. Zip code moves the mail," and the little zip-code mascot with his hat and mail-bag.

posted by william 1:50 AM
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I remember my father telling me about heart-beats. I could hear the heart beating in his chest, and feel my own (which I can't do any more). He called it a "took-took." I think that's what his father had called it (I think he told me this). Even then he seemed to be wistfully anticipating when the beat would go wrong. I think it was just a very proleptic fear of death, and not heart disease in particular: when you're dead your heart no longer beats. But it's since become painful, after he had a heart attack, to think of the defections from the dog-like faithfulness of his took-took.

posted by william 11:56 PM
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I remember a TV show of some sort -- maybe puppet animation -- in which the theme song, naming the heroine, was "Marina! Aquamarina!" A haunting melody to my ten year old self. I used to sing it to "Como! Lago di Como!" which I missed so much all year long, when the summer was over.

posted by william 7:47 PM
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I remember that my friend Steve Lurie in junior high had juvenile diabetes. He couldn't eat cake, except when he was going into a diabetic coma, and then he could eat a lot of it. He had a bracelet. He was very interesting on the disease. He loved tennis and knew of a tennis champion with juvenile diabetes, but at the time I didn't know tennis-champions and so I didn't recognize the name and don't remember it. He was once mugged but showed the muggers his medical alert bracelet and convinced them that he was taboo or a contagious danger, and so they left him alone, which he thought was funny. I went to a birthday party for him on Fifth Avenue, on the East Side; I remember the awning, and how far down you had to walk from the 86th Street Crosstown bus to get to I think 937 Fifth -- how slowly the numbers descended (I must have been late), and that I liked his mother a great deal. She wasn't diabetic, just a mother. Steve I think couldn't eat the cake. He told me that he discovered that he had diabetes because his urine "stung." I thought this was odd. I think this was the first time I heard the word urine, though like Tom Wall on "stool" I immediately knew what it meant. I thought it was odd because I didn't tend to pee on my own hands, and so I didn't get how he happened to discover that his urine stung. Fearful innocence! The uretha was not a sensory surface for me back then. (Not I think till reading some gruesome accounts of masturbation with pins in Boys and Sex when I was thirteen.) I knew already at the time that he was very gallant.

posted by william 8:40 PM
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I remember how much idle time I spent conceiving perpetual motion machines. Then I think Mr. Reeves in chemistry (also our soccer coach) showed that you could get free work out of them and that they were therefore impossible. This was a very neat connection. I knew that Leonardo had tried to invent one, but he didn't have a Heath-Kit Jr. and so didn't know about photoelectric cells. My idea was that a light bulb surrounded by a parabolic mirror would get electricity going in a photovoltaic cell, while a pan of water placed above it would capture its heat, turning the water into steam to drive a turbine (as it did in my steam engine) that would also produce electricity, the two currents then joining to light the bulb. Alas, it was not to be.

posted by william 7:33 AM
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I remember that the lead article in the New York Times is always at the top right, and the second most important at the top left of the front page. I remember finding this puzzling when I learned it in elementary school. Why the top right when you read from left to right? But now it seems completely natural.

posted by william 7:40 AM
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I remember several times that I went to the circus. I'd seen it on TV, and was suspicious of it -- how good could it be? But my mother told me about the human canonball, and I have to say, that was pretty amazing. He was shot from one end of the hall to the other, where he landed in a net. I remember he had on a helmet -- in the old-fashioned football or motorcycle style. This was one of those very interesting moments when my mother had more expertise in a purely boyish thrill than I did -- this was very impressive of her.

posted by william 11:41 PM
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I remember that when we used to play dodge-ball in gym, once I was out I would root against whichever team had fewer players left so as to see the game end more quickly so we could get back in. I felt guilty about rooting against my own team half the time, but there it was.

I remember my technique of mingling among the out-players so that the other team would think I was out, then streaking across the gym to grab a ball and throw it at a surprised opponent.

I remember once being the last member of my team -- Ronnie Rogers then very pompously asked me to "sacrifice myself" -- and nearly single-handedly defeating the ten or so kids left on the other side. It was odd that I should come so close and still lose.

I remember how much it stings to get hit by a ball in the legs, and also how much it can sting your palms to catch the ball. Later, when I played goalie on the soccer team, the soccer ball never stung nearly so much, though it jammed my fingers a lot more.

posted by william 7:19 AM
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Dick Moran writes a propos of the entry about two Superman episodes, 2/15/03:

Boy, do I remember this one (or two)! The make-up he steals from Lois's purse, the pathetic attempt to fly. I can't remember if it was Lex Luthor or someone who somehow inflicted this on him. (Probably not, since as I recall Lex Luthor doesn't appear in the TV show, but I could be wrong.) But the other episode you mention probably made a bigger impression on me. I remember the scenes of Superman's failed attempt to pass through the thick wall to the bad guy's fortress, and how he gets half-way through and can't go any further (it's just TOO thick). I can't recall just how they filmed that part, but I remember my anxiety that, having only got half-way, he wouldn't be able to get back out. I think both those episodes create an anxiety about the nature of super-powers. I mean I could handle the fact that, although practically omnipotent, he did have an Achilles heel in the form of kryptonite. In fact, I welcomed this, and I think did all young fans of Superman. But these two episodes are disturbing in proposing new variations and limitations on his super-powers. I mean, nothing in his nature prepared us for the idea that getting too COLD could somehow render him impotent. (Especially since his only real home on Earth was the frozen Fortress of Solitude.) And then the other episode was even more disturbing, because it involved Superman trying to learn a new super-power that he didn't have by nature or by virtue of his Kryptonian birth. I didn't like the idea of him trying to do something he had no idea whether he could do, something he had to learn from a human being, something that nothing in his array of super-powers suggested he could do. It brought the whole world of effort, and training, and risk into the world of super-powers, which had heretofore been purely a world of natural possession or non-possession, like the ability to see or not.
--Dick Moran
------------------

I remember that my father told me that FDR got polio by going swimming after a hard morning gardening (or was it croquet)? He was hot and sweaty and then the cold water shocked his system into polio. Over the years I went from: fear of getting into a cold pool, to: realization that polio was caused by a germ, not cold water, so that what my father said was an old wives tale, to: realization that there was some truth to the swimming pool story since polio used to be passed along by fecal matter in public swimming pools, to: discovery in today's Times that when the body temperature is lowered humans become more susceptible to polio, so that the coldness of the water does make a difference.

posted by william 11:06 AM
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I remember another impressive Superman episode. A two-parter. I think some oil interests dug a drill that went down farther by far than any drill had done before, and the strange denizens of the center of the earth came to the surface. They were squat, Yoda-like, and very strong. But it turned out they were not malicious, and the story ends with an agreement to seal off the drill-shaft. I remember how they came out of the manhole covering the shaft -- they were strong enough to lift it off or to unscrew it or something. Very eerie. I wondered why no one was guarding the hole at night.

posted by william 4:20 PM
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I remember not knowing what the word "since" meant. For several months I would have interchanges with my grandparents of this form: I'd make some assertion about myself. "Since when?" they would ask with amused skepticism, and not wanting to give an inch to their skepticism, I'd always reply, "Since now." I don't know when I learned what the word did mean, though.

posted by william 5:18 PM
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