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 my uptown grandmother used to wear a large golden brooch on the left lapel of her coat (is it a brooch if it's as oblong as a pilots' wings?); the unwieldy pin made the coat seem unwieldy too. I think this was the style among European women of a certain age, like her pea drop veils. But I don't remember my other grandmother ever doing this -- I think it felt to me like a middle-European or Ashkenazi practice, so that my Sephardic downtown grandmother wouldn't be wearing one. I was put in mind of this a few weeks ago in New York when I saw an elderly and supercilious French woman with her eleven year old American grandson (they were speaking French to each other, English to the waiter) also wearing such a pin. The juxtaposition was striking: the pin still looked Vienese and heavy, with an awkward dumb friendliness about it, but its wearer was very different from all that -- not like either of my grandmothers, nor of any grandmother I knew (although not unlike the mothers of some friends of mine: but they wouldn't have been caught dead with such a pin on their coats).

posted by william 7:34 AM
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I remember Seth Baumrin, who sometimes sat in on harmonica with our high school rock band (which also had Mark Tramo, who sang, and Lou Rosseman, on drums. Mark and Lou were also on the football team. Mark broke the league record for tackles that year.) David Heilbroner was not in the band, as I recall. He was a fantastic classical guitarist, and studied with Segovia (which was the first time I'd heard of Segovia). Jonathan Easton wasn't in the band either; he played exclusively jazz, and studied with Lennie Tristano (which was the first time I'd heard of Lennie Tristano. I often thought of him later when thinking about the Tristero system in Pynchon.) People complained mightily about what a bad drummer Lou was -- loud and off-beat, I guess, though I couldn't tell. I'd known Seth from years before, from Riverside Park. He was a friend of the kid with the baseball team windbreaker (2/22/2002)). I was amazed by what a good harmonica player he was, and also by the fact that he hung out with the musicians and druggies, and was very good with girls. I didn't know that William Galison, a year or two behind me, was on his way to becoming a world class harmonica player (now to be heard in many a movie and on many a cd), and I regret that I never heard him (I think), although there was some mention of him made in some graduation program or homecoming or something. Fairly recently I ran into Mark Tramo, who now studies neurophysiology of music as a research MD. He told me, to my considerable surprise, that Lou Rosseman was a great drummer -- seriously good. (Luckily I'd outgrown my reflex parroting of other people's opinions when it came to things I wasn't really competent to judge and I hadn't filled in the conversational segue with knowing disparagement of Lou's drumming.) So I missed a lot. But I still loved watching Seth get up on stage and wail on the harmonica.

posted by william 7:09 AM
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I remember when I first heard about Silly Putty (on TV) and the toy store in Washington Heights where I got some hanging off a rack (while visiting my uptown grandparents), and the fact that it picked up comic strips (but not the waxy Bazooka Joe where I first tried it), but reversed the letters (which the ads didn't mention), and the way you could pull it long and tenuous, but also jerk it hard leaving a solidly thick, ragged, almost jagged edge.

posted by william 12:42 AM
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I remember my surprise and disappointment that words that rhymed in English didn't rhyme in other languages. (I was realizing, I think, that mother and brother didn't rhyme in Yugoslav: at any rate I'm pretty sure "mother" was one of the words.) This felt like a dereliction on the part of the authorities, an inexcusable laxness in the way they structured language. It might have been my first inkling of the fact that languages were unsponsered.

posted by william 1:05 AM
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I remember that after the first moon landing, Pan Am started taking passenger reservations for shuttles to the moon. My eighth grade teacher Mr. Donahue (or maybe it was Mr. Baruch) told us that he'd made a reservation for himself and his wife. Peter Rogers pointed out that he wasn't married. Mr. Donahue said that the reservation agent (I think we called them operators then) had asked him the same question and that he'd replied, "I plan to be by the time this ever happens." We were shocked that he'd committed himself to this expensive and demanding undertaking. There was an incompatibility between authorities: Pan Am's booking offer and Mr. Donahue's skepticism. He was amused by our shock, and his amusement impressed me. I think it was the first time I was consciously aware of savoir faire, of the fact that someone could know that the world worked differently from its official institutions (like Pan Am's reservations office).

posted by william 7:29 AM
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I remember that I liked the water cooler in my father's office when we'd go there Saturday mornings during "tax season." I liked the conical cups, and the way they only got soggy slowly. But what I was particularly interested in were the bubbles that would pop up every fifth or sixth drink (roughly when the cup got too soggy to use). I didn't -- and probably still don't -- understand why the air would build up, and then only suddenly and intermmitently burst out in bubbles: why wasn't there just a stream of bubbles, as when you pour water out of a bottle. (I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the cooler is pointed straight down, so that the water forms a seal which air only breaks through when pressure of the air trapped over the water is sufficiently reduced.) Water coolers now -- Poland Spring coolers, mostly -- tend to bubble up with much more frequency: pretty much every cup, which seems reasonable. Even so, though, the bubbles are sudden, and not a stream. I remember how much I liked experimenting with the water cooler, wondering whether the bubbles came more or less frequently as you got near the bottom, wondering whether they came at absolutely regular intervals. (But of course I couldn't keep track well enough to tell.) There was something comfortably authoritative, something pleasantly competent, about the sudden burst of bubbles, as though the cooler knew what it was doing. It was at ease in the office, just as my uptown grandfather was when I went to see him at his office (where I don't remember a water cooler) at Tricoma in the Empire State Building, though I have a vague memory of an outside hallway with a cooler at the end. It was rounded like him and its bursts of bubbles communicated a kind of jolly imperturbability like his.

posted by william 7:02 AM
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I remember that Lassie was male -- in fact a series of males down the years of the movies and TV shows. They had nicer coats. I had originally thought that Lassie was male: me a boy, Lassie a hero. And a dog, not a cat. And then my parents, and I think Tommy Hoge, told me she was female, and that Lassie meant "the girl." I hated the idea that if she were a boy her name would be "Laddie." So I managed to make the gender transition. But her bark still sounded too low to be a female's. When I found out that the Lassies were in fact male it wasn't a reversion to what I originally thought -- it was just a further disappointment (though some of that might have been the fact that there was more than one). I think the question of Lassie's sex had some relation to the consistent sense I had on black and white TVs (and shows) that they were translating colors. It was as though Lassie's coat -- that collie orange yellow -- and sex were being translated and altered through the TV show. The discovery that she was in fact male was maybe a little bit like finding out that Superman's cape was the rich black it looked like on TV and not the rich red that the black seemed to signify. I never had this sense -- or this trouble -- with black and white movies: I think they belonged to a black and white world. But TV shows were just starting to be broadcast ("in living color"), thought almost everyone had a black and white set. (Either the Cramers or the Hoges were the first people we knew with a color one.) So we felt that the sets were translating something that was there in the proper version of the show, whereas there was no canonical color version of a movie. I think it must have been the constant question of shows in color that made me think -- very consciously -- about how well the black and white made you feel that you knew what colors you were seeing. And Lassie may have been the final challenge to all that.

posted by william 12:22 AM
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I remember "You've got a lot to live, and Pepsi's got a lot to give."

posted by william 6:32 AM
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I remember that my friend Brock (D.) had an embarrassing hobby -- embarrassing to him. He was one of a number of people in my life that I have gotten involved with because I liked their names like Belinda (see the post of 4/15/2003 here) and Margot (see 4/27/2002 here and 3/14/2002 here). He was also one of the two kids in my class who really knew computers, specifically RSTS, the great system on DEC's PDP-11. (I got him to tell me the password for the 1,2 account -- that is the manager's account, and then created my own 1,100 or something: the first 1 gave you managerial privileges. But I got caught by the manager, George Koul-something -- the password was Koul -- who happened to do a Systat on me the first time I logged in.) But I liked him too: he was handsome and winningly shy and attractively quirky. It turned out his secret hobby -- not a hobby really, but lessons that I think his mother encouraged or maybe forced him to take -- was lock-smithing. What a wonderful thing to understand. (I had a theory about how locks worked, but Brock basically told me I was wrong.) I remember that his mother named him after some movie star she liked -- I think the movie star's last name was Brock. A little later when I read all that Stranger in a Strange Land stuff about "grocking" ("I grock you") I was unfortunately reminded of Brock. Whatever our relationship was, we didn't grock each other.

posted by william 12:32 AM
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I remember that Bob Barker on Truth or Consequences would sometimes (always?) introduce an interesting personnage, before the game got started. The one I remember was a very old black man, who turned out to have been born a slave, in 1864. Obviously he didn't remember slavery, but he did remember his parents who were adult slaves when he was born, and, in the 1870's and 80's, told him about slavery. There he was, stooped but caneless, linked back to that world which I just couldn't comprehend as ever having been real. I thought about my grandparents when he spoke of his (and I suppose their pasts in Hitler's Europe were as unbelievable as his was). He seemed to come out of a time machine. He seemed also to fulfill that fantasy I often had of being a visitor from the future to a past that doesn't yet know the amazing things to come -- airplanes, adding machines, flashlights, cameras, telephones, etc. He belonged to the present day of 1960's nightly TV game shows (7:30-8:00! that's what would sometimes keep the TV unnecessarily warm!), he was posed there for the cameras and the screen; and yet he could go back in time -- he went back in time -- all those decades to the 1870's when in some sense he informed his parents that he was free, that he belonged to a future (our present) of freedom. (Did he really? So I thought when I saw him then, at any rate.)

posted by william 5:50 AM
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I remember June Lockhart, the mother on Lost in Space, -- Mrs. Robinson. (I made the connection with The Swiss Family Robinson of course; and not with Simon and Garfunkle, if there was a connection there. I remember in the movie version of The Swiss Family Robinson one of the kids, I think, goes through a gigantic spider's web and is bitten by a spider. The father takes a knife and gouges the wound out, saving his life. This was very impressive, and the first time I saw lethal poison -- venom -- thought of as physically isolable. I must remember this because it complicated my idea of the relation between what was in the body and what was outside of it.) I remember that she died young, so that every time I was watching Lost in Space I thought of her as dead. But I'm not confident, now, that she really had died.

posted by william 12:26 AM
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I remember "TOA CAH SOH." That's how, we were told in tenth grade, you would show someone how to tow a car in Boston. Tow a car so. But TOA CAH SOH was the mnemonic for: Tangent=Opposite over Adjacent; Cosine=Adjacent over Hypotenuse; Sine=Opposite over Hypotenuse.

posted by william 12:19 AM
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I remember that my mother told me how great Kafka was and described the opening of The Metamorphosis. I wanted to read Kafka, and not finding The Metamorphosis, I got the yellow Schocken copy of his stories -- I think In the Penal Colony and other Stories. This was at a time in my life when I tended to take all fiction as, in essence, contextually accurate and therefore informative to a young person learning about the world. After all, I learned about ships from Jules Verne, and the speed of light from Flash and Superman comics. So I thought that there were hunger artists and penal colonies with exquisitely calibrated execution machines. I don't think that it was until recently that I realized that the very idea of a hunger artist was Kafka's, and that it was a great idea indeed. I remember the ending, when he gets replaced by I think a lion, and I remember his quirky explanation for why he became a hunger artist: he never found a food he liked. But I thought that this was like the autobiography of a fictional clown, a fiction that depended on your knowing what a real clown was. So for a long time part of my vague sense of middle and eastern European culture at the end of the nineteenth century is that hunger artists performed in fairs. It always seemed to me that the performance would take a long time. I never really considered the question whether he would then perform in other fairs afterwards, since in Kafka's story there is no afterwards.

posted by william 12:23 AM
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I remember Dave DeBuschere, whose death was announced today. I remember that he didn't look like what I thought he did from just hearing Marv Albert call the games on my little transistor radio when I was walking the dog. He was younger and slimmer and more graceful than his vaguely French sounding (though I guess maybe in fact it's more Dutch) vaguely arostocratic name made him sound. Now all is changed.

I remember someone else whose death was reported today: Robert Stack who was the star of The Untouchables (with the Walter Winchell narrator). I had sort of thought that the Untouchables were criminals, maybe because we'd learned about the Hindu caste system in Social Studies. I don't think there was much in any particular episode making it clear that the good guys were the Untouchables, and not Frank Nitti and his crew. And I don't think it was absoultely clear to me at the time that Robert Stack was a good guy. Maybe I had more insight than I knew. It was a show I loved, without particularly needing to watch it or feeling deprived if I didn't (as opposed to Star Trek, Batman or Time Tunnel. It was more like gravy. If I was looking for something to watch, and The Untouchables was on....bingo!

posted by william 12:49 PM
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I remember that I could hear the foreign accents of my grandparents and of those of my friends' parents who were foreign (all of them more or less refugees from Hitler). But I couldn't hear my parents' accents, which my friends all could, though they were always surprised when I could hear their parents'. But I do remember that I hated how my father pronounced whore "hoor," which was a most embarrassing lapse on his part. Or so I thought till seeing The Sopranos, in which Ralphie pronounces it the same way.

posted by william 4:59 PM
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I remember when I was just learning to swim, my parents and the Herings had to leave Stormville for the day one Saturday. My father made me "solemnly swear" not to go swimming while they were gone. I remember swearing to him in their bedroom, and then reaffirming it as they drove away downhill on the gravel driveway. I was the oldest of five (or maybe then just four) kids there: my sister and the Hering's kids being the others. The housekeeper/nanny, who spoke mainly German, suggested we go swimming in the pool. I told her we weren't allowed to. She said that my mother had said it was all right. I remember our colloquy: "Aber mein Vater!" I said; "Aber deine Mutter!" she replied (I don't know whether I'm spelling any better than I spoke at the time). So finally we went swimming, and I even took off my orange life preserver since I could now do a side kick. When my parents got home my father asked whether I'd gone swimming. I told him I had, but he thought I was joking. It took a while to convince him that I wasn't. Then I was in big trouble. He couldn't believe it. I tried to explain it, but he wasn't interested. I was sent to my room to think! I had no idea what that meant. But I tried. I lay in the musty dark room on the nappy woven bed-spread. Everyone else went out. I talked to my mother later. I think we were walking through the "big field" which the back porch looked out on. She told me that my father was very upset. "But he's not crying," I said. She said he was "crying inside." (Though maybe that was another occasion.) I tried to imagine the tears flowing down the inside of his face.

The next day she prevailed upon me to apologize again. It was his thirtieth birthday, so I must have been not quite five. (I find this hard to believe: maybe I thought it was his thirtieth birthday but it was actually his thirty-third. That would have made me nearly seven: much more likely.) I did apologize, and he forgave me, but with great seriousness and gravity. He never lost his temper: a very rare thing for him when he was angry, or "crying inside." I was never spanked for this, also a rarity.

I remember coming up, then, with a hierarchy of sworn commitments (like all those other hierarchies: nuclear devices, karate belts, and pigeons -- see 5/23/2002 archived here): promising, swearing, "solemnly swearing," and then I think "swearing upon your life, etc." "Cross your heart and hope to die," a phrase I learned from Hugh Cramer and one which seemed bizarre and empty to me, was I think between swearing and solemnly swearing. I don't know when I gave up this notion of solemnity.

posted by william 5:55 AM
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I remember that my parents used to tell the doctor that I had a "temperature" instead of a fever. This was another one of those things that I had a double response to later on: first I thought it was an ignorant idiosyncrasy on their part; then I found out, somehow, probably through reading or the movies or cartoons, that this was standard parlance in their generation. One thing they were wrong about, though: my father thought that pi was exactly 22/7. I was amazed to discover that there could be endless decimal expansions, and tried to prove this wasn't true (although I accepted it about 1/3); and even more amazed when I found out that pi didn't repeat (I think at first I thought 22/7 didn't repeat). But he didn't know the definition of irrational numbers.

posted by william 5:58 AM
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I remember the smell of Ben-Gay at my uptown grandparents' house. I think I didn't know it was Ben-Gay till high school, where some of the athletes used it. It was very odd to have that grandparently smell wafting through the high school locker room. I liked the smell, although it seemed somehow illicit, associated with my grandparents undressing for bed. It wasn't that it was the smell of their bodies: I knew that it was some product they used, like their odd tasting toothpaste (what was it? Topal! I seem to think. Something like that.) But it was a product associated with going to bed, associated too with infinite more competence than their false teeth in their water glasses (see post for 3/5/2002), so that they were going to bed in a way in which they seemed in adult command of things.

posted by william 12:55 AM
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I remember the bright point of light that persisted on a TV screen when you turned it off. On the older TVs, my uptown grandmother's for instance, it could last for five minutes. This was the opposite of the tubes warming up. It was a pain for clandestine TV watching, since just turning off the TV didn't get rid of the evidence. On our TV, I'd snap it off immediately if I heard the elevator coming. Since the point disappeared faster at our house (especially if the light was on, dimming the contrast) that would give me just enough time. If my parents suspected we'd been watching though, they'd feel the TV to see whether it was still warm. So the evidence was still there, only not quite so obvious. The perfect situation was one in which they'd tell us that they wouldn't be home till 7:30. Star Trek was on 6-7, so there'd be a half hour for cool down, and we'd be ok. But of course it was hard to turn the TV off, and I remember the temptation to watch minute by minute into the danger zone which should have been reserved for dissipating the evidence.

posted by william 9:36 AM
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I remember that when you sneeze your heart skips a beat. I doubt -- with a doubt verging on pure denial -- that this is true. I learned it from some teacher, maybe a science teacher, in junior high. It seemed so interesting that it had to be true. As I try to remember who I heard this from, I narrow it down to Mr. Weinberg, Mr. Baruch, and Mr. Donahue. It was one of them, I feel pretty sure, and yet it wasn't Mr. Weinberg, and it wasn't Mr. Baruch, and it wasn't Mr. Donahue. It was a nearly lost figure: whoever it was is now a kind of hazy holographic projection of the set of all three. I'm not sure it was one of them, and yet it seems as though it was. How could whoever it was spread this misinformation? -- misinformation some part of me still believes when I sneeze.

posted by william 12:55 AM
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I remember how hard and frustrating it is to cut a seam, like when you're cutting dungarees (do people still call them that? my mother always did) to make cut-offs. I remember how the seam could transfer its revenge up the scissors onto your fingers and the webbing between thumb and index finger by making the scissors torque and slip sideways, pressing hard into the seam-like flesh. I remember first seeing the phrase "a scissors," in Peanuts, I think, and thinking that was weird, like "a pants" (or "a jeans"). But I tried using the phrase for a while, and eventually it seemed pretty natural. I still don't use it without self-consciousness though. I remember my jeans jacket. I remember tapping the ash from my cigarettes onto my jeans and rubbing it in to make them softer and suppler.

posted by william 5:00 AM
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I remember the ribbed sleeveless undershirts I used to wear as a child. Do they still have them? I never liked them. My father wore the same kind -- the kind that Clark Gable ostentatiously didn't wear in It Happened One Night. I didn't like the way they clung to your body, or stretched, and sometimes became shapeless and sometimes didn't. I didn't like the thick heavy seamlike borders. I didn't like the way the felt on my shoulders, or bunched up under my clothes or rolled into a ridge over my pants waist In high school the other kids wore T-shirts. I didn't know you could do that. It seemed a real improvement.

posted by william 6:08 AM
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I remember that I first saw a styrofoam cup at a Happening we went to in Central Park. I seem to recall we were impaling balls on sticks for some reason. And there was water in styrofoam cups. Or we might have been impaling the cups. At any rate I was amazed -- in a low key way -- by styrofoam. It was so light. And then it turned out it could hold hot liquids too. It seemed part of the inexhaustible array of things the future was offering. Like the Happening itself -- an example of strange and surprising adult activities (there were lots of kids there, but it just wasn't part of what kids did) that nothing in childhood would lead you to predict about adulthood. How deceptive both were.

posted by william 6:42 AM
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I remember that my father got me some puppets and put on puppet shows from behind a chair. They were animals with long limp hollow bodies and rigid heads. There was fabric inside and outside the head cavity, and you put two fingers inside the head and two in the arms or fins or wings or whatever. I remember the surprise I felt about the rigid material in the heads -- you could feel through the fabric that it was hard but crumbly. I don't know whether it actually crumbled -- the dust would have been caught by the fabric -- but it felt as though it did. It was a very disturbing feeling, and a tempting one as well. The roughness of whatever it was made of asked you to smooth it out, and you ran your finger hard around inside the rim at the base of the puppet skull, and felt, not heard, the sound of that crumbly stuff, but every effort to smooth it out seemed just to reproduce its roughness. Puppets today seem to be made of hard plastic and are neither as tempting nor as disturbing.

posted by william 7:12 AM
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I remember my mother warning me about toadstools in Stormville. She told me that certain mushrooms were poisonous, and that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the poisonous and the innocuous ones. I think I was a bit shocked by this -- that the same kind of thing could be poison or food. I was only to eat store-bought mushrooms. I asked her how farmers knew the difference. I think she worried that I might think there was a difference I could tell myself, so she just said she didn't know. I resolved never to eat mushrooms at all -- what if the farmers had made a mistake? My mother didn't tell me they were called toadstools -- I think it was Lem Herring who told me that. I loved that I immediately saw why -- because they looked like stools for toads! Now, post cartoons, it's even hard to visualize a toad sitting on a toadstool anymore -- I think of them rather as shelters from rain. Despite my vow I have come to like wild mushrooms -- and have even eaten them when picked by amateurs. The most reckless (I wonder how reckless) mushroom-comsumption I did was in college. You were supposed to be able to tell psyllocibin mushrooms on the basis of the purple flecks on their gills, and I made sure that the mushrooms purveyed to us in baggies were indeed flecked purple. But how would I know?

posted by william 6:40 AM
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I remember that Mrs. Eben, the terrifying principal of P.S. 166, wore vivid blue eye-shadow. And she was short. All of this had the effect of making short seem scary and blue eye-shadow deceptive. Someone could want to look like a person who wore blue eye-shadow, and still be terrifying. I remember the Assistant Principal, who also sometimes subbed, and how much everyone liked her. She was a principal too, which was frightening, except that she wasn't -- she set you at your ease immediately. But I thought of her as not at all scared by Mrs. Eben (unlike the teachers) -- she belonged Platonically and eternally to her role, as Mrs. Eben did to hers. I guess they felt a little like a parental couple, one nice, one not.

posted by william 12:43 AM
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I remember that the letter Z in a license plate meant that the car was a rental.

posted by william 8:13 AM
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I remember that we almost never ever played a Monopoly game to the end. And I remember that we actually never ever played a game of Diplomacy even, I imagine, half way through.

I remember Broadside. (A board game with Revolutionary era sailing ships which had to go broadside to each other to attack and fire. Hugh Cramer and I used to play it.)

posted by william 10:14 PM
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