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 that when the lower level of the George Washington Bridge was built people called it the Martha Washington Bridge. They were in a very good mood when they talked about this. I thought everyone was just naturally in high spirits about the wonderful building that was going on. But I was always surprised that there weren't any signs to the Martha Washington Bridge: just lower and upper level. The lower level had been so normalized for me as the Martha Washington Bridge that it took decades before I realized that this was a joke. No one ever mentioned the Martha Washington Bridge, and I thought I had slightly arcane insider's knowlege, like knowing the Mets were actually the Metropolitans.

posted by william 6:01 AM
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I remember "the beer with the ten minute head." Was it Rheingold? Or Ballantine's? I remember it in association with my uptown grandfather's drinking Rheingold (I was amused later to find that this was the first opera in the Ring Cycle), but only perhaps because I then wondered how long the head on his beer would last. I had no idea of the obscenity of the ad at the time. Amazing that they got away with it. Especially since, as I remember, you can't show people drinking in a beer commercial. (Just as you couldn't show women wearing just bras -- Playtex pushed the limit with their cross-your-heart bra commercials in which they'd show a model with a bra on over her blouse.)

I remember being asked whether I was "a head," and having no idea what that meant. Later it was explained to me. Then I was at least on the verge of inclusion since I knew the lingo.

I remember head shops. They developed out of the discount cigarette shops that suddenly appeared all over Broadway in the early seventies, and that still persist today. It turned out you could go in and get: rolling papers, hash pipes, bongs.

posted by william 12:05 AM
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I remember that you could call NERVOUS for the time. "At the tone, the time will be...X:YZ and W seconds. Beep." The tone sounded at five second intervals. I think you could listen to a minute pass before you were cut off. Some people called NESTLES instead of NERVOUS, but I thought that was silly. It was one of those numbers in which only the first three digits counted, like 555-XXXX. WEATHER was the same: you could dial 932-1111 instead, though the phone company always gave the number out as 932-1212. So there was a thrill in dialing a different number from the one they told you.

I remember also that pay phones always had a 9 as their fourth digit. XXX-9XXX. So if you tried to give the Operator a fake number to charge to, say, you'd be caught out if the fourth digit was a 9. I think this knowledge (plus the 660--dial tone--9--dial tone--6 way of getting your own phone to ring) was the extent of my knowledge of specialized phone lore. But I remember "phone phreaks" and how cool they seemed.

posted by william 5:48 AM
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I remember a cartoon in which a large bearlike animal (but it might have been that annoying chicken with the Southern accent, also done by Mel Blanc) swept some dust under a rug, and I thought what a good idea that was. In fact, next time I had to clean up I tried it. I didn't then know that it was a visual pun: but an odd one since it actually returned you to the origin of the cliche. Slowly "sweeping something under the rug" came to lose its vividness and became the same standard figure of speech for me as for everyone else -- standard enough that I would use it in conversation without thinking about dust or rugs or cartoons. But it was so fresh when I first saw it done, as though the dust and dirt were fresh and clean too, with all that cartoon life, that animation in the fullest sense of the word.

posted by william 12:17 AM
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I remember that one of the things I loved about our new apartment, 7-F, when we moved there from 2-G (I was eight), was the fact that there were buttons that made the doorbell buzzer sound in every room. In the pantry there was a big indicator box over the door to the hallway which had little cards or vanes that would drop down to say which room had buzzed. (Like the old cash registers that pop up individuated prices -- I think they go up by nickels, and then by half-dollars.) Then you'd reset the box. It was so the servants could see who had buzzed. I wonder whether anyone in that apartment ever used it that way -- it must have been a relic from when the building was built, in the twenties. I seem to remember that when we first moved in my mother would occasionally use it to summon us (me? the housekeeper? my father?), but the box was erratic, we always forgot to reset it, running for the door or whatever room we thought the buzzing was coming from, and the front door was so near it anyhow that we'd always check. Besides the box indicated rooms by number, and the only obvious ones were 1 for front door and 2 for back. It was too temperamental (and I think one of the vanes never reset) for us to be sure what the numbers of the other rooms were, though I think my parents' was 3. The real pain in that apartment was that you'd go to the front door when the back door was buzzing, and that's what the box would have been useful for tracking. But it just wasn't accurate enough. But it was a gas when a friend came over to play with ringing the buzzer from various rooms -- especially if the friend didn't know about it, and we were playing hide and seek both inside and outside the apartment: you could flush your friend out by making him think you were outside. Later I think my sister and I would startle each other with the apparent arrival home of our mother at inopportune times. I'd ring the buzzer from my room, then look through the peephole and tell her that Mom was home, sending her into a panic.

posted by william 7:50 AM
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I remember that I liked the rhythmic rhyme of "175 Riverside Drive" (better than the building across the street: 180 Riverside Drive). I liked also the rhythm of New York 24, New York, where the first York had a kind of surprising emphasis, and the second was a kind of completing confirmation: New YORK twenty-FOUR, NEW York.

posted by william 12:42 AM
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I remember the word "yikes!" and that I learned it from reading comics. I think I learned it from Superman or Batman, but it's possible that I got it from Peanuts. Who in Peanuts says "Yikes"? It could have been Linus. The characters changed what they said from decade to decade. Still, I think it was some vaguely comic character from an adventure series. I also remember that I had a Linus doll, made of rubber, which I liked, and which I had well before I ever knew about Peanuts. In fact I didn't put the character of Linus together with my doll for quite a while after I started reading it (this may be because when I came to read the strip the doll was just sitting on a shelf; I may have noticed it again when my sister got interested in it when she was two or three and I was eight or so). My doll had a red and white stripped shirt, and sucked his thumb and carried around his molded rubber blanket. He was pretty faded -- the whole doll rather like the blanket in the strip.

posted by william 6:07 AM
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I remember that on rainy or snowy days they used to put down these long black grooved runners in the lobby of 175 Riverside Drive, One went from the door down the front hall to the two steps down into the lower lobby. Two would split off from there and lead to the elevator areas. In the winter they'd be rolled up in corners, waiting to be used. They were made of a black plastic, I think, although I thought of them as rubber. I have a bodily memory of the grooves affecting something wheeled. I can't think it was my bike, and I can't make it cohere with my sense of roller-skating through the lobby (if I ever did that). A scooter, maybe? Or some wheeled toy? A wagon? But I do remember both the way the grooves interfered with the smooth coriolus drifting down a bias of whatever the wheeled thing was, and also how strangely unpleasant they felt when you dragged your hand down them -- hard and unyielding. They looked, when covered with slush and melted snow, as though they ought to be soft, but they weren't. I think this was another one of those fingertip experiences like that of putting the papers flush under the glass top of my father's desk, and also like that of feeling the slats between the piano keys, which I would do a lot. I also liked the way the front of the white keys had a little ivory cliff-edge lip that you could push your fingertips into or push under your nails. But the grooves in the runners were another thing entirely -- part of the ambient and usually unnoticeable unpleasantness of life.

posted by william 4:14 PM
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I remember that some kids -- all boys I think -- had watches, which they'd show off. I associate this with my fifth grade class-room -- Mrs. Brenner's class. Watches then all seemed to have metal bands, and I was interested in how they worked -- the stretch bands especially, as opposed to the braced clasps (there must be some technical name for that). The villain in From Russia With Love had his garrot hidden in the winding stem of a watch with such a band. The boys with their watches had a much better idea of what time it was during the school day than the rest of us did. They knew how much time was left, and when it was getting close to the end of whatever boring thing we were doing. I guess there weren't any clocks in the classroom.

I remember that I did have a watch in junior high. I would notice the sections of the hour as class wore on, and especially that last five-minute region. I also remember being mugged on my way home from school once, by older kids -- teenagers (which didn't seem right to me) -- and how they asked whether I had a watch (after they'd taken my money), and when I said no pulled back my right sleeve, which was watchless -- the watch was on left wrist. I was glad that they weren't as infallible as they seemed, not only because it spared me a blow: it was one thing that I had over them, seeing the mistake they didn't know they were making. I think it was during this mugging that a police car drove by. We all stopped what we were doing -- they stopped mugging me, I stopped being mugged -- and waited for the police car to pass. (They were the ones who'd noticed it first, and put the whole thing on hold.) Then they finished up. The next day, I think, I saw them again, and complained about them to an older woman who knew them -- maybe someone's youngish grandmother. She accosted them and demanded to know whether they'd mugged me, but -- to my astonishment -- they utterly denied it. She couldn't do anything about it, and she didn't even express much displeasure, just a kind of bureaucratic helplessness. So that was something they had over me: their ability to fool an authority even when they'd been caught, or to be utterly immune to the authority's knowledge of their guilt.

posted by william 5:06 PM
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I remember Continental Trailways.

posted by william 11:12 PM
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I remember that cobras can't hear. They follow the movement of the snake-charmer's flute.

posted by william 8:28 AM
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I remember dissecting frogs in seventh grade. They were supposed to be dead, killed by formaldehyde, but they jerked their legs by reflex, and--, and--, and-- their hearts were still beating. Larry Sedgewick I think it was stabbed and stabbed at the heart of the one we were doing, till he destroyed the heart, at which time we finally regarded it as dead. He was also willing to flay the leg, so we could see the muscles underneath. I think Ronald Rogers said, "Boy, you could be a butcher." This impressed me, since it was clearly true that flaying the frog's leg was no different from whatever butchers at the supermarket did to prepare the meat they then put out through the sliding mirror panels above the meat display cases. (Do they still have these panels?) A year or two later we dissected fetal pigs, which looked more human -- all pink and mammalian -- but were easier because they really were dead, and they also looked (and felt) much more like dolls than living animals.

posted by william 2:17 PM
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I remember my father's theory and practice of breakfast. First the juice (which had been covered to keep the vitamin c in), then the cereal with milk, and then pouring the milk and the remnants of the cereal into the juice glass. I didn't like this last bit -- the juice tasted sour after cereal, so the idea of mixing them was awful, and I hated the debris in the cereal bowl. [Later:] I think I'm actually conflating a couple of different breakfasts. He'd drink the cereal milk from the bowl, which I thought faintly disgusting; and squeeze grapefuit juice, inevitably with pulp, pits, and all, into a glass.

posted by william 8:29 AM
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I remember my father used to fill a cereal bowl with broken matzoh for breakfast during Passover and pour very sweet hot coffee over it. This was called matzos caffe. It was delicious, especially as the matzoh soaked up the liquid. I think it was my introduction to coffee.

posted by william 5:49 AM
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I remember, "Hooray! Hurrah! It's Winchell-Mahoney time, it's Winchell-Mahoney time, it's time for fun! Hooray, Hurrah! We're glad everybody's here, come on let us give a cheer for e-very-one!" I think one was a ventriloquist and the other a puppet. Slightly later I made the association with Paul Winchell.

posted by william 7:29 AM
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I remember the marvelous, unbelievable day Belinda and I watched the football team practicing. How did she come to sit next to me and start up a conversation? It was springtime, I now recall: why was the football team practicing in the spring? It must have been a kind of warm-up for the next fall when they'd practice in earnest. I can date this! (If I want.) Ezra Pound had just died! Or maybe the New York Times Magazine had had an article about him and Olga Rudge living in their weird exile in Rappello, and he died shortly after. Out of some hazy discretion I won't check, except perhaps as a comment. I can date it by relating it to Pound because I remember Belinda remarking that he was an anti-semite, as we talked. He must have just died -- I remember noticing her dismissiveness, which I wouldn't have if she'd just expressed indifference to the weirdo in an article. The article must have still been on my mind though. It was one of those endless but rapid afternoons, a kind of "Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici" experience. We just sat and talked. What did she want? I was too shy to know or to consider. And maybe rightfully so. What did I want? What could be more obvious than what I wanted? But not entirely to me. It was because of Belinda that I kept a journal, and wrote awful poetry. She had red hair; I tried a sonnet: "The sun rises with her in humble praise. / The birds start to sing with love for my love. / Awakening innocence, she greets the days, / As the light from her soul shines in her eyes. / And from within her this sweet soul does sing / A fair melody, in an angel's voice. / A song such as that which is sung by spring. Through the world now grown young, my soul does swing." Luckily, all I remember from the ensuing sestet is the awful "Life is sweet love." And me thinking about Ezra Pound! Mr. Luke pointed out that "does sing" and "does swing" were very weak. ("While feeble expletives their aid do join....") But that day stands out. It was a Friday. How much can evaporate over a weekend! Brent, one of the players, said to me on Monday, "Rumour has it that you're going out with Belinda D______." (That I don't want her to search for this indicates something about the very rare items from those days that I can still imagine myself embarrassed by. And that I don't give Brent's last name indicates something similar.) I knew what the rumour was -- he'd noticed us watching the practice. But it was lovely to think that some remnant of the afternoon could survive the weekend. Belinda was cheerfully friendly to me after that, but started going out with one of the football players, also named Billy, also a grade behind her. Ah -- it was spring of tenth grade (eleventh for her) -- she went out with the other Billy when I was in eleventh grade. She would sometimes come into the lounge and if we were both there she'd call "Let's play football!" and we'd go out onto the field and toss the ball around. But the situation was all too clear. I saw her a couple of times in college (her brother was my best friend; I'd gotten to know him because of my crush on her.) But all was changed -- she remained too much the eleventh grader, although with considerably augmented poise and self-possession. Back then I felt I'd transcended those times. But obviously I still haven't, not entirely.

Ok -- what I got wrong: Pound died Wednesday November 1, 1972. The Times Magazine article had been January 9, ten months earlier. So we must have been talking about his death, and it must have been a fall football practice. And now I seem to recall that Halloween was in the air. We must have been talking Friday the 3rd. I think there were some Halloween parties going on in Westchester that weekend, where Belinda lived. But I was going back to Manhattan. I was in eleventh grade. I remember writing in my journal, on November 6th -- that would then have been the next Monday evening, after talking to Brent about "the rumour," "Sixteen tomorrow." It seemed an important age to turn. We'd been reading Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart in English class. The heroine, a young writer, keeps a journal, which her guardian shows to an established writer. He's impressed by the first sentence: "So I am with them, in London." He likes the comma. So did I. I also kept a journal because Stephen Dedalus did. In the "Sixteen tomorrow" entry I lamented, I recall, the melancholy of love. I must have heard about Pound the previous January when I read the Magazine article. (Although I'd known something about him before, because I was interested in all of Joyce's connections.) Anyhow, this all confirms that by Monday night when I wrote the "Sixteen tomorrow" entry I basically knew that whatever had happened Friday was over. I associate that entry with her going out with the other Billy. (Or was it Bill?) So I now see that of course we were watching football together because she was interested in him. Heigh ho.

posted by william 2:53 PM
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Thinking about elevators, I also remember touch operated capacitor (see 2/28/2002) elevator buttons. You just touched the panel and it would light up indicating the elevator was coming. But this was in the age of ambiguous light semiotics. Sometimes the light would go on when you punched a button, sometimes not. I remember being driven crazy by this in my downtown grandmother's building. You'd hit the button, the light would go on; then after a while it would go off. Why? Did its going on mean that it acknowledged that you'd hit it? Did its going off mean it had given you up? Or could you only get the elevator to register your request when the light was off? I never could make rhyme or reason out of the whole thing. But at least her elevator didn't have those touch panels. You'd see people jabbing panels that didn't register pressure when the illumination went off, or the elevator didn't come. Nothing more frustrating than not even feeling the button yield to your push. (Like those early push buttons on traffic lights that had no spring to them. It was like pushing on a blank pole. You never knew whether you'd pushed the button at all.) They got rid of touch panel buttons because in fires the elevator would go straight to the floor that was burning, the hear having registered on the panel as touch.

I thought of this September 11, just because I'd been surprised as a child by the stupidity of people using elevators in a fire at all, and then had noticed a bit later the appearance of the now ubiquitous panels warning against using elevators in a fire. That somehow made the use of elevators in a fire something that you would do only if you had no choice, and it seemed that anyone getting into an elevator in those circumstances was doing something very grim and dangerous indeed: like the people who tried to escape by elevator, and the fire fighters who used them to go up. I remember the elevators in the World Trade Center. They went very fast, but with great calmness. They were tactful elevators. They maintained a kind of polite aplomb about where you were going, and who you were with. They knew what they were doing. You felt their sheer competence. You walked down a long corridor to get to them, and it was a little like going down a receiving line to be announced to the serenely indifferent welcome of the host of the large gathering gathering there. I've been trying not to think about them since, but now I have.

I remember my various plans for surviving an elevator's plunging from its broken cable. I'd jump just before the car hit the ground. Then I would be ok. I remember sometimes jumping in the elevator at 175 Riverside Drive as it moved, testing my pre-Newtonian theory. You could make it shudder a little, which was slightly scary. I remember also perching on the handrail, or bracing myself with my ass on the handrail and my feet propped against the opposite wall. I think I thought that doing this would break my fall if the cable broke. I didn't have many other plans. Elevators these days don't seem to have handrails.

posted by william 11:19 AM
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I remember the fifteen cent subway tokens. They were very small, smaller than a dime. Then I remember they went up tp 20 cents -- but it was the same token (why shouldn't it have been)? But when they jumped to 35 cents, they went to a different token -- the larger more modern sizes. The old tokens lost their value if you didn't turn them in, just as the remaining tokens are about to lose value now. These tokens still had the Y of NYC punched out. I liked the swooping logo -- large Y in the middle, smaller N and C crowding it with their curved shoulders on the sides. I used to like the feel of pressing my finger into the Y. It made me think of Braille, back when I thought Braille letters were shaped like printed letters -- a notion I think I was disabused of only when elevators started putting in Braille buttons. I was sorry to see the Y go, and the token turn into something more like a fake nickel or quarter.

posted by william 12:45 AM
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I remember color guards. In assembly at the beginning one kid would carry the flag, or maybe there were two kids carrying two flags (which was the other? the U.N.? the State of New York?) and there was a color guard of two more kids walking with them down the aisle. I never knew how you got to be part of the color guard. It seemed an honor, although I didn't quite know how or why. I was surprised to find out later that color guards were part of the military flag rituals -- I think I realized this watching some funeral on TV: Bobby's maybe? Or maybe a fictional funeral.

posted by william 3:24 PM
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I remember that Patty Hearst hid out for nearly a year across the street from my building, on the North side of 90th between West End and Riverside. I only found this out later, when she'd surrendered. This was mildly interesting, because the building in whose basement apartment she'd been living was a building I only noticed when I walked the dog -- you spend a lot of time looking at the bases of buildings when dog-walking, since they sniff and pee there. I don't know why I didn't find this more interesting than I did, though -- maybe because it was (for me) ancient history when it became known.

posted by william 11:46 PM
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I remember that Linda Rausnitz's phone number was SU7-7559. And mine was TR3-7595. In digits: 787-3559 and 873-7595. They were permutations of each other! What were the odds? (A question not quite as straightforward as it might seem: Neither the first, second or third digits of phone numbers then could be 0 or 1. I believe that AT&T caved first on the third digit and then on the second. The first digit still has to be 2-9. And also, at that time, you couldn't end a number with four zeros, as you can now. The first three digits -- before the hyphen -- were called "exchanges" at the time, since they were associated with neighborhoods. I also remember "message units," which were calculated according to what exchange you were calling. At any rate, the odds are at least 1544/1 against any two persons having the same phone number, and actually higher, but in a way I can't calculate, once you take into account that phone numbers repeat digits. I'd have to figure out how many digits the average phone number repeats. Watch this space.) This seemed to me significant. Alas, she wasn't impressed.

I remember also that I had an ID number during a Cornell-NSF summer program for high school students -- "Topics in Modern Physics" -- that was an 8 digit palindrome. What were the odds? 9999 to 1. That didn't turn out to be significant either.

posted by william 2:42 PM
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I remember more about my relationship to the glass top of my father's desk. I guess in order to pull out easily reachable slips I would use my nails. This required that their edges of the slips be not more than a millimeter or two beyond the edge of the glass. So I have a kind of visceral (or ongular) memory of pressing my fingers into the front of the desk and extending my nails those couple of mms. under the glass. It felt good to press down the two edges of each nail (I guess this would be those on the index and middle finger of my right hand) to flatten it out. (And I'd do the nails on my other hand for symmetry.) I've just tried it and it doesn't feel good now. I think the cool glass on top of the nail added to the experience. An odd erogenous zone. But it was that -- I remember thinking once as I was doing this that I didn't get what the deal with bamboo shoots under the nails was as a mode of torture. How bad could it be? And all this flattening and settling and aligning was what I was trying to do: get the sheets offset by a millimeter or two perfectly in sync with the edge of the desk and the edge of the glass. Although I remember as well that somehow I could never make all four edges of the glass line up with the edges of the desk. It might be that if I'd taken all the stuff he had on the desk -- old mail, adding machine, financial books, clunky phone, manuals, stapler, electric pencil-sharpener, clock -- off I could have. But I didn't see why this should be or how it could make a difference.

posted by william 6:36 AM
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I remember Mrs. Kahn. I think she was my teacher in the second half of fourth grade. I can't quite place when she was -- Mrs Brenner was my fifth grade teacher, and I remember a platinum blonde teacher I had in fourth grade (I thought her hair was gray, but my mother told me it was platinum blonde: an odd oxymoron, like white gold), whose name I just can't quite recall. Mrs. Park? Except that was the name of our French teacher. Miss Luberg was my great third grade teacher. Miss Comiskey my terrible second grade teacher who got upset when I answered "What's 3-5?" with the the result "negative 2." "No! If you have three pencils and I take five away, how many will you have?" I'd already considered this: "I'd owe you two." It must have been a cold winter, because when I told my father about all this, and he asked (very impressed with me) how I knew about negative numbers I told him that I knew that there were temperatures on the thermometer below zero. Mrs. Nichol (hah! until typing it now I always thought it was Mrs Nickle) was my superstar first grade teacher. She was wonderful. But Mrs. Kahn. I was always in trouble with her. One day my father said he was going to see her. I didn't realize it was parent-teachers night. He asked whether there was anything I wanted to tell him before he went. I didn't. This was a mistake I always made, not 'fessing up when a pardon was offered in advance. He left. I said to myself: he'll never find her. He probably looked up her name in the phone book. But he won't know how to spell it: Caan, Kahn, Kaan, Cahn: there must be a lot of them. He'll give up. Unfortunately for me it wasn't my bedtime yet when he returned. I remember hoping against hope (I guess I knew he'd find her) that the minute hand would make it to the 12 before he made it home, and that I'd be safe asleep. But no, there was his key in the door, and his long dark navy coat: and there he was, shaking his head at me. He'd found her.

posted by william 8:13 PM
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I remember that my father used to have a big glass top on his desk, with notes and some pictures underneath. I remember that I would sometimes hide notes from teachers or report cards under other slips of paper under the glass. Then they would be there if I was challenged about them, but not noticeable if I could get away with it. I remember the odd way paper had of slipping and sliding smoothly under the glass, which I guess it was drawn to by static. It was a kind of upside down two-dimensional aquarium world that these papers lived in. It all made it all the more plausible if paper slid under other papers. I have also a kind of physical memory of trying to align certain sheets under the glass with its edge. You could push but not really pull, so it wasn't an entirely easy thing to do. I'd use hard cardboard or junk mail to retrieve sheets that went in too far.

posted by william 11:22 PM
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I remember a paperweight that I had which had a ticket stub from Superbowl III (the famous one, Jets vs. Colts) encased in glass. I liked it. I forget where they played -- maybe the Astrodome? I want to say the New Orleans Superdome, but I know it hadn't been built yet, since later I walked by it abuilding with Michael Kelley and Andy Apter. Some kids threw rocks at us. But I remember the heavy feel and the relatively sharp corners of the glass brick. I remember another (I think it was another) paperweight I had that had money in it, shreded I think, but I somehow knew there was a hundred or a thousand dollars inside. I had various low-energy fantasies about getting the money, but nothing seemed worth following through as a fantasy in my mind. I think I got bored and somewhat contemptuous of the Superbowl paperweight when I went off to college.

posted by william 10:55 PM
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I remember that when she was five my mother's shoulders were dislocated when my grandfather swung her around in a centrifugal circle. I wasn't allowed to swing my sister around (though I did anyway, though not much), and I think I wasn't swung around myself.

I remember "being ridden" on bikes. "I'll ride you." You sit on the cross-bar in front of the seat. It's difficult and oddly proto-sexual. All that violent pumping and weaving around you, and you're jogged up and down a little and moved forward at a scary speed. But there's no pleasure or climax to it -- it's all just vaguely disturbing. I remember also being ridden on a motorcycle by some sibling of a friend. I think this was in Italy. I thought it would be like a bike only much more so. Instead: you sit behind the rider; you go very fast; and it's all smooth and stable. It wasn't exactly a disappointment, but it wasn't exactly not a disappointment either.

posted by william 5:54 AM
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I remember Liptauer Cheese, a heavy and delicious concoction my uptown grandmother made. It turned out to be equal parts butter and cream cheese, with a lot of paprika mixed in. Just remembering its odd pungency brings it all back. Where is Liptauer?

posted by william 5:43 AM
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I remember the origami fortune-telling devices we made in elementary school -- like fifth grade I guess. You fold down the top of an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper into a right triangle and sheer off the triangular part (with a ruler, like my grandparents, if you're good at it), which leaves you with a square (8.5 by 8.5). You fold its corners toward the middle, and then the next set of corners towards the middle, and then somehow (but how? I can't bring the trick to mind) you get a kind of pyramidal shape with slots for four fingers underneath. Written on the outside are a set of choices which the person whose fortunes you're telling gets to select from. Then you open up to one of two configurations on the inside (depending on whether the original choice led to an odd or an even number), which again presents a set of choices. I think they pick one here (color maybe?) and you unfold the triangle (or square?) they've picked and...there's their fortune! I wonder could I do it now if I tried.

[Five minutes later:] Well, my hands basically remembered how to do it! Although with some fumbling. First of all, the triangle you form is part of the square that remains: you sheer off the rectangular remainder. And then the infolding of the corners is separated by flipping the folded square, so that the second set of folds is on the other side from the first. Then the first set of folds is where you put your fingers, and the second is where the choices and fortunes are written. I was amazed at how small the device is -- I suppose this is the first time since I was my fifth-grade size that I've made one. Back then these things were hand-sized. They were a kind of paper glove into which thumbs and fore-fingers and even the knuckles at the back of one's hand disappeared. Now my hand dwarfs it.

posted by william 8:30 PM
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I remember my parents but especially my grandparents talking about sending "regards" to people. "Give my regards to Mrs. Rotkopf." "Send him my regards." I knew that regards weren't real things in the world (any more than a "sake" is, as in Tom Hoge, Sr.'s reiterated "For Christ's sake!"), but I was still impressed by the way adults could handle, wield, manage, direct, and convey these insubstantial and inchoate entities. Imagine being able to control the fate of one's regards. Imagine having regards. I was very impressed.

posted by william 4:57 PM
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