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 when George Wallace was shot. We were playing soccer on the field next to Manhattan College at my high school, the so-called upper fields. (When walking to school from the subway I'd cut through Manhattan College and scramble through some bushes to go through a hole in the fence to this field and so to school. One day, I was trying to remember a line from Shakespeare, from 1 Henry IV, "You are too --something thing --, my lord." Just as I went through the hole I remembered, and made it the last line of a chapter of a novel I was then writing: the narrator suddenly remembers the line that's been nagging at him: "You are too willful blame, my lord." It's someone to Northumberland. It sounded good as a chapter-ending line. It had the character of revelation, but at the time I didn't have the wit to see that revelation should reveal something about someone. But maybe that's because I had a purer relation to literature then, to my writing, to Shakespeare. It was just the line and the way it filled its own rhythm perfectly that mattered. And I loved knowing what that adjectival phrase meant, just by reading it for the first time. And I loved suddenly remembering what it was.) Someone reported that Wallace had been shot, and I expressed glee. A beautiful, long-haired boy -- Wayne Barrett? -- from the year ahead of me rebuked me: we didn't want anyone shot, even evil Wallace. I was very impressed by this, his longer hair and self-possession seeming to me to mean that he'd be even more radically revolutionary in his (imagined) commitments than I was. (This was somewhat congruent to the surprise of his being such a good soccer player: he looked the opposite of the jocks he was as good as). It felt like a lesson. True: we didn't want anyone shot. But Wallace was Hitler! Or almost. And then he survived. I thought of him as the person who caused Humphrey to lose in 1968. Now it looked like he was going to throw the election to Nixon in 1972, when it was clear that McGovern should win. But none of this was personal, and Wayne's unexpected evocation of Wallace as a human being was of an odd, mid-level importance to me. It didn't have the character of a revelation: Nothing human is alien to me! It was much more banal than that. It rather served as the template for a somewhat important reminder for the future. Wallace's humanity was banal, but we had to remember that to be banal was to be human too, and that to be human might be to be banal, and that humanity was often banal, and that nevertheless we had to defend the banal against our justice and anger as well as the wretched of the earth, because to be only insipidly human as Wallace was was still to be human.

posted by william 11:34 AM
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I remember Katharine Hepburn, oh so well. The movie actress I most loved, maybe, without ever being in love with her. Perhaps that was displaced onto Margot (or vice versa), who looked and sounded (looks and sounds) just like her, and hated that fact to be remarked or asserted. I loved her athleticism, which only Cary Grant could match, and I loved the chemistry between them. There's a great spirit gone.

posted by william 10:25 PM
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I remember Divorce Court. I think that it essentially depicted condensed versions of actual trials, performed by actors, but now that I consider it, the script was probably original and just based on stories that came out in divorce cases. I only remember it vaguely: in particular I remember one distraught woman, tears streaming, who looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor and (therefore) a bit like my mother. I remember that my father didn't want me watching it, although to me it just seemed like the soaps: what you watched only if there was absolutely no alternative. The housekeeper we had at the time liked it: I think she was the one who also liked soap operas. When I asked her why (why she liked soap operas), when they were so ridiculous, she told me, "No: these things are real. This is what happens to people." Yes and no, I've since discovered. At least there's no organ music. Later I went to school with a kid -- Ross! -- whose mother was a soap opera actress: she went in four or five days a week to perform live. He was a Texan (I think his parents were themselves divorced and he'd just moved to New York). He smoked Nat Sherman cigarettes, but I could never really get into them.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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I remember Topper. Not the Cary Grant-Constance Bennett movie, which I only saw later, but the TV show I'd watch when home from school, starring Leo G. Carroll as Topper. I don't know who played the debonaire ghosts. He was perfect (the show was so much better than the later TV version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir although I liked that too). The role was something of a generic one: the banker in the Beverly Hillbillies, the desk-bound Captain in McHale's Navy, Tim, Wilbur, the car owner in My Mother the Car -- the straight man who has to deal with more charismatic, smarter, more anxiety-inducing people (or Martians or horses or cars) whom he just can't quite understand. But Leo G. Carroll was a figure of stern and dignified intelligence, and his injured aplomb never lost its authority. He was often put into ridiculous situations, but never seemed ridiculous. I was surprised to find him in North by Northwest as the intelligence agency director, where his calm demeanor made for a strangely chilling thoughtfulness. I think it's a tribute to him that the later role in Topper detracted not at all from his force in North by Northwest. Thinking about it now, I see that the young ghosts were parental figures to Topper, the old child (the senex puer). How wonderful to have these beautiful, young parents (I guess they were about my parents' age at the time), ebulliently able to survive their own death and become even more effervescently magical and mischievious. It was as though Topper was everything stuffy about your parents, and the ghosts everything in touch with your own youth. But Topper retained his parental authority too: he wasn't ridiculous. Rather in the show he was the adult, but the child-ghosts were father (and mother) to the man, and understood and participated in all your own youthful perspectives and pleasures. I'd love to watch Topper again, every day.

posted by william 7:49 AM
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I remember No No Nanette! from the posters. I seem to recall white lettering on a starry background, with white gloves, top hat, and masquerade mask in the ads, in the subways and on the sides of busses.

posted by william 7:16 AM
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I remember another problem with record sleeves. The record would sometimes slice through the other side, whether because the glue weakened (when the other side was formed by a quarter inch fold of paper), or because the paper itself wore out over time. It wasn't a problem when the record actually cut the sleeve. It was a problem when you forgot that you were putting a record back into a sleeve that was already cut. The record would go skittering through the sleeve, the groove making a sickeningly rapid sound as it rubbed against the paper, and then the record would fall to the rug or floor. You didn't really want to catch it, because that would be very likely to scratch it. The best you could do was try to compress the sleeve as the record went through it, but even that made you feel that you were doing damage. When you had a damaged sleeve you were left with the unhappy choice of trying to remember to be cautious, or just putting the record into its jacket without a sleeve at all, hoping that doing so slowly and carefully would prevent the cardboard from scratching the record. (Now I think of cd's as having something of an analogous problem: I hate the sound of the cd scratching against the plastic central holder in the jewel box.)

posted by william 11:58 AM
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I remember the clownish, racist governor of Georgia Lester Maddox, who just died. I seem to recall a parody musical of him that played in New York when I was in high school. Can this be true?

Since he too just died (I was surprised that he was alive, and only 78), I am reminded of Leon Uris's Exodus on my downtown grandmother's side-table in her living room. I think he also wrote Topaz, filmed by Hitchcock. Exodus seemed to be a serious book that everyone -- all the Jews of my grandparents' generation -- loved. Not that I recall them ever talking about it. But its hardcover, one-word presence, on display in their rooms, seemed a kind of reminder and testament of Jewish suffering and the nobility of the refugees who made their way to Israel. Leon Uris seemed a name to conjure with: a kind of serious thinker writing a serious historical novel. James Michener had the same effect, but was not quite so important I think for Jewish loyalty to Israel and the very idea of Israel, although The Source certainly contributed to the sense we had of how Jewish exceptionalism might carry over to Israeli exceptionalism. That book Exodus (and the movie made of it) probably plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the cultural image that American Jews, or New York Jews, or New York Jews of a certain age, or even New York Jews of a certain age who never read the book but were impressed by its serenely passionate authoritative bulk had of Israel. It's amazing, now that I think of it, that Uris would have been a generation younger than my grandparents. They must not have thought him a cultural authority -- especially since they knew so much more than I did, knowing many people in Israel (which they; I remember the mailings and receipts from the Jewish National Fund, and the number of tree plantings you could fund). So for them the book must have been more a document of proud achievement, and not of authoritative if novelized history. Or maybe they just never got around to reading it, and its status in my mind as a sort of mythical prop is just my own childish perception of what I took to be a major adult book.

I do remember being surprised about other books -- Herman Wouk's, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s -- that adults I respected (Milton Schubin in particular, though he owned a lot of Wouk, including the non-fictional This is My God more about which another time) turned out to think they were schlocky adolescent works. I didn't know that that's what the taste I preened my adolescent self on came down to.

posted by william 7:22 AM
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I remember the variety of record sleeves: the inner envelopes that you put vinyl records into before slipping them into their cardboard slip-cases. There were two essential kinds: those with a circular opening that allowed you to see the label at the center of the record, and those that were just a solid square envelope. It was good to be able to see what the record was when you had a bunch of records piled up but not slipped back into their covers, records in their underwear. Some of the sleeves -- the solid ones mostly -- had ads on them, mainly small photos of other records. There were very few liner notes on the sleeves. (So what, technically, is a liner, then?) Those with circular windows varied as well. Sometimes the window would just be cut out of the paper. Sometimes it would be protected by clear plastic. Sometimes there would be a plastic lining within the whole sleeve, with the paper cut out in the center so that you could see through the lining. I think I liked those best. But in the ones with the plastic only at the cut-out, I liked the fact that it was a square of plastic glued on the inside of the sleeve so as to cover the round hole. I liked the play of circle and square in record albums in general. I don't get that feeling about cd's, maybe just because I'm older now. But somehow the relation of cd to case is too visible and obvious. There was always a kind of pleasure in the peering and hollowing and warping that you had to do to figure out where you stood with a record.

posted by william 12:16 AM
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I remember that President Eisenhower's name was David Dwight Eisenhower, and that he changed it to Dwight David. I was puzzled by this: David seemed so much better a name than Dwight. I remember reading this in my red Britannica Junior Encyclopedia (D.C. to World Book's Marvell). I don't remember having an "I like Ike" button (which Roman Jakobson was to call the greatest political slogan, from a linguistics point of view, in the world), but my father told me I had one, even though they were all the staunchest of Democrats.

posted by william 12:59 AM
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I remember Jackie and Ari kissing. I think the Daily News had it -- some tabloid did. A classmate brought it to school. Their romance was known at the time -- or rather, her interest in his money, as we thought it -- but this was the first photo. It was really shocking: beautiful young Jackie Kennedy smooching this old, old man. We'd only seen her kissing JFK before that. Later their relationship became a familiar part of the landscape. But that first published kiss floored us. I remember how we all clustered around the kid who had the newspaper, shocked by what could only be the mystery of genuine passion: how else could anyone bear to kiss Aristotle Onasis? His wealth alone couldn't do it: the surrender to the rush of absurdity was too great. It had to be love, but then how absurd love was.

posted by william 5:33 AM
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I remember that tea has more caffeine than coffee. Hugh Cramer told me this. He said it was in the form of tanin. Still, coffee sure works better.

posted by william 8:17 PM
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I remember the fruit sellers on the beach at Milano Maritima. They came walking down the beach every ten minutes or so, calling their wares. I remember in particular the fresh coconut vendor. He'd yell, in a powerful bass voice, "Allo, coco! Allo coco-oah!" And the fresh coconut slices were great. Other people sold candied fruit on sticks, and what I remember about that was the taste and texture of the candy: very different from anything I can find now. The candy was thin, and somehow not sweet on the outside. It broke against your tongue like thin glass or room-temperature ice, and it tasted and felt as though only the inside -- the fruit side -- of the candy was the sweet side. The sharpness of the broken glaze and the sweetness came together, and to mitigate the sharpness was the fruit -- cherries, apples, oranges, coconut again -- that the crunching candy would mix with immediately. I'm sure it was terrible for the teeth, but it didn't feel terrible, the way crunching candy usually does, but benign, like most other things at Milano Maritima.

posted by william 7:22 AM
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I remember when Elton John's album with "Your Song" came out how much everyone liked it. In fact, our seventh grade English teacher taught it as a poem. He typed it up and xeroxed it and we studied it in class. (This was the same classroom, at the Franklin School, where I read the New York Times about Robert Kennedy's assassination. Our paper called his condition "Extremely critical," but a later edition, that someone else brought in, had him dead. I remember that among his last words were "Please don't move me.") I remember that as a poem I could see that it didn't work, though our English teacher wanted love for Elton John to be common ground among us. I accepted it as common ground, but it still seemed rather uninteresting terrain, which disappointed me.

The same teacher -- I think it was the same teacher; I don't remember his name (or their names) -- wanted to talk to me about the creative writing I was doing, and which was (for a seventh grader) intense and powerful. We had a conversation after class in which he asked why my writing was so grim: was I upset about something? I remember I'd written a piece about an old man and his unhappiness at being old. Age had spotted his head with brown patches, I recall writing. My mother's eyes welled up when she read it: I remember her lying in bed and her voice catching. I was pleased with myself, but also surprised and not quite sure that I liked the effect of moving someone in the real world rather than writing something that gave the impression of being moving, just as what I read gave me the impression of being moving. My English teacher probed my mood for a little while, and then said with a kind of uncertain but hopeful relief: "So you're not, you know, thinking about....?" making a gesture of shooting himself in the head. This was not quite the same reaction as my mother's, but still was again a surprisingly real response to fiction. Thinking about it now I'm equally impressed and disturbed that he thought to follow up on my mood: impressed that he did it; disturbed that he relied on his own judgment that I was ok, if he really was worried.

posted by william 10:04 AM
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I remember "The Saint." I think I read the books first before watching the Roger Moore TV series. Roger Moore was amazingly slim then, before he got beefy for his James Bond roles. The Saint because his name was Simon Templar (ST). He was a good guy though the police didn't know that; I think his skills were those of a cat burglar, or they thought he was a cat burglar, or something. The books were by Leslie Chartres, although for some reason I think that was a pseudonym. But that might just be because "Leslie" seems studiously gender-ambiguous, and I might have been making a confusion with Ellery Queen. I remember a talent the Saint had and I envied: he could read as well as hold a conversation at the same time. Chartes notes this authoritatively as a rare and spectacular ability, like a photographic memory. I remember I was reading this under a beach umbrella, in Milano Maritima. As I read it I tried to pay attention both to it and to the conversation the adults were having around me, but I didn't quite succeed. My parents' Welsh friend Ted George used to bring me Saint novels from Swansea every summer.

I remember also, remembering those Penguin copies of The Saint, all the other Penguin books in their plain covers for sale at the Bellagio tourist stalls. And I remember that for some reason or other, we owned Hudson Rejoins the Herd, I don't know by whom, and Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson (which is why I remember both together: that and the Hudson river), whom I later imagined completely forgettable until I read Ford Maddox Ford's praise of him. I remember the Penguin legal warnings: "Except in the United States of America this book is sold under the condition that it shall not be lent, given, or traded, in any other cover than the one provided by the publisher without the publisher's express written consent, and that it shall not be sold without the same condition, including this condition, being imposed upon any subsequent purchaser." I'm certain about the phrase "including this condition." I thought -- as with the tags not to be removed under penalty of law on the furniture (on my desk chair in particular) -- that I was doing something illegal by having these books in the U.S. I didn't quite get the Exception for the United States of America. (Or there might have been some other stipulation instead, that I did understand accurately.)

posted by william 1:01 PM
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I remember PL/I. This was the interesting programming language of my high school days. Harder core (and therefore cooler) than Basic, more intuitive than FORTRAN. I knew a kid named Rick Fortgang whom I thought of whenever I thought about FORTRAN. Rick was a charismatic humanist; FORTRAN was a tough and baffling computer language. The word had for me the same thrilling prestige that deconstruction would have later. Now deconstruction is quaint, but FORTRAN (FORTRAN IV, I think it was: I think i may have liked the two deviant "fours" there: FOR and IV) is still impressive to me: although long outmoded, still both powerful and difficult. Its I/O rules were the real pain. Nothing, though, to HTML, but in those days none of this sort of stuff was familiar. PL/I turned out to stand for Programming Language / One. I used to type commands onto computer cards, and the amazingly fast card readers would blow them in front of a strobe light to read them. I liked being able to read the cards too -- that is to decode their binary punches. I remember paper tape as well, as a storage medium, which I believe was in base-eight on our teletype.

posted by william 11:48 AM
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I remember all the rubber stamps my parents had -- stamps with their home address, office address, date, various legal terms, forms to fill in, and what-not. There just seemed to be too many of them, like my father's overabundant set of keys. My parents kept them in the top desk drawer, in a cardboard box-top, along with the stapler. I remember that the stapler and the ink-pad were both forbidden to my childish touch -- the stapler because I could staple myself, the ink-pad because I could get ink over everything. I remember liking to see how many times I could stamp something before I needed to ink it again. I remember black ink, and double ink pads, half red, half blue. I remember the smell of the ink, and that it dried out if you left it open. I remember how hard it is to center the stamp where you want it. I remember that the stamp's copy was printed on the side of the mallet part of the stamp. I remember also reading the rubber backwards when looking at their bottoms. I remember how hard it was to change the date on the date-stamp: the little notched wheels that you had to turn, and that hurt your finger tips and got ink on them. Nothing worse than going too far and then having to turn it back. Sometimes they turned easily, but then they wouldn't settle right and catch, so the date might not come out legibly.

posted by william 1:09 AM
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I remember red and green kryptonite. Green kryptonite was just toxic to Superman (though not to us). Red kryptonite always had some unexpected effect, different each time. I was impressed, in a semi-conscious way, that they didn't overdo it as a plot device, since they could use it for anything. I also seem to recall one episode about the rare yellow kryptonite, whose effect I don't remember. I remember being amazed when I saw real kryptonite once -- I was thrilled and surprised that it existed. (Did this mean that Krypton itself had once existed? Since kryptonite was supposed to be from the break-up of the planet.) I saw it, maybe on a school field trip (though I seem to recall my mother was there too), probably at the Museum of Natural History but maybe at the World's Fair.

posted by william 1:13 AM
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I remember another couple of Superman episodes. They may be the same one. In one -- somewhat like the one in which Superman learns to pass through solid walls -- he learns to levitate people, at about three feet above the ground. First he puts them into a hypnotic trance, and they go catatonically stiff. This is very useful when some walls are compressing inwards. It looks like Superman will have to keep them apart, letting the bad guys do whatever they plan to do. But Superman levitates someone -- Lois Lane? -- and her stiff and horizontal body keeps the walls apart. Later she complains of a headache. The other thing I remember is Superman and some other people trapped in an elevator. He could get out, of course, but to do so would lead to the others' death. (Maybe, come to think of it, they're in a bathysphere, under water.) He figures out a way to undo the top of the chamber and pull the whole thing up the rope that it's attached to. I thought both the trap and his response were very clever.

posted by william 1:37 AM
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I remember a song, another part of the soundscape that's probably the most extensive part of the general background of the sky of my mind (like the residue of microwave radiation from the Big Bang): a campaign song from elementary school that one my my classmates wrote when she was running for student assembly. I remember her name from the song, and I think I might remember her from her name, but I'm not sure -- it may be another Andrea from a later grade whom I remember. At any rate, it's an unshakeable though almost unarticulated song that nevertheless I have a low-grade awareness of every single day, a sort of low-volume Muzak of the mind only brought into conscious consciousness, as it were, since I'm thinking about things I remembered. It begins (to the tune of "East Side, West Side"): "Upstairs, down stairs, all around the school...." Then what? I don't know, but we get to: "Second, third, fourth graders! Give her a chance to fight. / And then you'll agree, for Andrea, a vote for her is right." I also seem to remember "To vote for her is cool" (to rhyme with school) but I'm dubious about this; I doubt cool was in the lexicon of the P.S. 166 demotic. Our term of praise was neat-o. I remember the song as sung by the children's voices of her supporters. The teachers had suggested campaign songs to the kids running for student assembly, but that's the only one I remember. I can't imagine what grade we were in, because I remember that I was sort of thrilled by the uniting of three grades in the song, but it seems unlikely that she could really have been appealing to fourth graders unless she was already in fourth grade, and unlikely that I would have been thrilled about the united student front unless I was in a lower grade, like first or second. I think she won.

posted by william 7:18 AM
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I remember a pre-energy crisis ad from Con Ed (Consolidated Edison). Light would scare away intruders. Lots of grim black and white. A faceless would-be criminal comes into the light and goes scurrying back into the darkness. End of ad: announcer, in great calm James Earl Jones like voice, intones: "For less than two cents a night: to stop a thief, light a light." I couldn't figure out whether that was supposed to rhyme or not. I recognized as intentional the great rhythm of the last seven words, but I couldn't tell (as I would now put it) whether it was prose rhythm or poetic meter. The first part of the sentence was so unrhythmical. When did it draw itself up into its full rhetorical dignity? With the words a night? Or only in the last seven words? This was a question that had a kind of low-grade presence for me, just as the sentence itself did. (Later these kinds of questions would blossom into a period when I would obsessively try to explain to myself the subtlest effects that commercials produced.) Now of course I see that the rhyme was certainly intentional. But what was most effective about it was that you didn't know, and so kept worrying the sentence. Not that I had control of the lights in our house anyway.

posted by william 7:19 AM
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I remember Fritz Peterson, the Yankees number 2 pitcher, a left hander, behind Mel Stottlemeyer. This was in the Yankees' worst period, when they were always near the cellar. But I could get them on the radio, which I listened to when walking the dogs, and so I listened to them. Frtiz Peterson was having a very good year at the plate that year -- batting .500 or so (it must have been early in the season, which might have been another reason it wasn't hopeless to be listening to them). He had hit a homerun. But the Yankees' manager always took him out for a pinch hitter if they needed one. I was outraged once when they took him out for a pinchhitter batting, like , .190. The pinchhitter made an out. And now they couldn't use Peterson any more either.

posted by william 1:02 AM
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I remember the first day I went to karate class, at the dojo on 72nd street. The class was intense and I didn't quite get it. There were a couple of greenbelts my age in the class, one of whom was sobbing with effort as he drilled: I'd never seen anything like it. We got a demonstration a weekend or two later, and he broke three boards. The sensei was very charismatic. After that first class we all sat on our heels and meditated, eyes closed. But I couldn't quite understand his English, and wasn't sure I was doing the right thing, so I kept peeking. He was always right in front of us, facing us, eyes closed. After a while he said something and everyone got up. I changed in the locker room, but on my way out he stopped me and rebuked me for opening my eyes. I was impressed that he'd known this, since his own eyes had been closed every time I looked. It was a very effective trick -- or not a trick exactly (as it would have been in a movie analogue) but something not quite fair, since obviously he'd opened his eyes to see me open mine. But he was charismatic enough to prevent me from really articulating this to myself, or from doing it firmly, at any rate.

posted by william 12:46 AM
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I remember in Sveti Stefan that they had wonderful hand curled potato chips that came with the dinner -- cvapcicis! -- which I used to love. Then one evening I ate half of one only to find a dead gnat or mayfly curled up in the other half. I was nauseated and horrified. My parents, in a vain attempt to make me feel better, told me that all food was full of horrible stuff, that I wouldn't believe what was in hot dogs -- they mentioned spiders as an accidental ingredient, which didn't quite make sense to me, but I guess they thought rodents or roaches would be too much for me. From then on I thought spiders when I saw hot dogs. But none of this helped very much -- I just hated the idea that something so perfect could so easily flip into something so disgusting.

I remember reading an article in the Times saying that new health department guidlines in New York limited bread to being 2% cockroach parts. That seemed like a lot of roach to me -- a full slice of roach out of every 50 -- say two bags or Arnold's white. I somehow couldn't deal with this fact (which was almost certainly wrong: 2% is indeed a lot of roach), and eventually just settled back to eating white bread, which somehow began standing for the trivial unimportance of ingredients at the 2% or less scale.

I remember reading the health department citations in the Times every day, and seeing Party Cake -- my Party Cake on 89th and Broadway -- cited. It made me slightly hesitant to still go there, and I was happier the days we got anything from Cake Masters, but I still went to Party Cake a lot. At the time, the Times explained that you could fail an inspection for not washing the floor enough, so I convinced myself there wasn't anything seriously wrong there.

posted by william 12:46 AM
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I remember that The New Yorker used to have most of its cartoons sandwhiched between the second page of "The Talk of the Town" and the first ad after the front of the book material. Occasionally there'd be other cartoons and whimsical drawings later. But it was great to just be able to page through those ten to twelve pages -- Talk, then a short story or two, then the ads -- and see the whole, or nearly, quota of cartoons. It was only when my parents told me about the news breaks (which the magazine still occasionally does) that I started paging through the every page. When Conde Nast bought The New Yorker I'm sure they pleased advertisers by scattering the cartoons throughout the magazine, kind of like Playboy. But I stopped reading the cartoons assiduously, so at least one reader became a lost less loyal.

posted by william 7:17 AM
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I remember the very useful term "Sunday driver." I feel that it isn't part of the lexicon any more. It referred to people who only drove on Sundays and who were consequently very bad, hesitant, frustrating co-denizens of the roads. My parents used the term a lot when we were trying to get somewhere on a weekend. Now, I guess, if you have a car you tend to use it every day.

I remember also one day in Stormville when my father and I were driving to Lake Carmel one morning -- maybe for the newspaper -- his suddenly screaming "Stupid idiot" at the car in front of him, after it made a left turn. I asked him why he did that, and he said that it was because the driver hadn't signalled, which I guess caused him to slam on the brakes. (At that age I didn't notice or think about stopping short. Cars went; they stopped.) This was the first time I heard about signalling, or rules of the road, or the advisability of letting the car behind you know that you were slowing, or that you had to slow to make a turn. But I had really asked the question for another reason: Why was he yelling at a car? Since of course the driver wouldn't hear him. His answer was interesting enough that I accepted it though without further inquiry.

I remember another time we went around a circular driveway -- also in Stormville, I think, at some office (maybe the DMV or the post office or a school -- at ten miles an hour. I couldn't believe how slow we were going, and he told me that we were doing 10 mph which then became my reference point for dead slow. But when I said we were going slower than walking speed he laughed and said I couldn't run as fast as we were driving. Somehow I checked this out shortly afterwards -- I think maybe we passed someone running and we were only doing 10 mph. That was a strange experience -- to feel that near immobility in the car turned out to be something vastly different from going on foot. It was very puzzling, and while it seemed to redound to the credit of the amazing power of cars to get you through space, it also seemed to make the world a less reliable place: it wasn't what it seemed, even in the most basic experience you could have of it, or the framework of any experience you could have of it, which was that of moving around in it and seeing what was there. Motion itself wasn't the intuitive thing it seemed to be, and so this was one of my early experiences of the world's instability. Space itself, as disclosed by motion, was volatile. As the fact that I remember my reaction may show, I didn't like this (though to tell the truth it's not like it bothered me a lot either).

posted by william 11:40 AM
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I remember when superballs were invented! (I thought I remembered this, but then I'd thought I remembered the invention of Silly Putty, which turned out to predate my birth by a while.) I was nine. I don't think that kids have the experience any more that we had, because they grow up knowing about them. But for us, used as we were to Spaldings, they were amazing. I remember the commercial, which I disbelieved, but then a kid brought one to school. I dropped it, and it bounced! How could it bounce so high? We spent whole minutes dropping it and watching it bounce, and wondering how long it would take to drum into rest. We tried to convince ourselves that it bounced higher than the height it was dropped from. (It only took a little extra oomph to make it do that.) Of course we knew that it couldn't, because no one was afraid that a dropped superball would get higher on each bounce, eventually flying out of sight. But it was so close to being exempt from the ineradicable disappointment attendant on all balls -- that they come to rest -- that we wanted it to have just a touch more elasticity (actually inelasticity, but we didn't know this counterintuitive fact then). I remember also our great surprise over how uncontrollable their caroms were. A Spalding bouncing off the edge of a stair on a stoop would lose most of its momentum. But a superball would carom off many angles and get lost so easily. For a while they were amazing. For how long? Oh, probably not even a three days's wonder, much less a nine days' one. But still, that first experience....

posted by william 12:21 PM
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I remember the inane pleasure I used to take in having several answers to a riddle joke. I remember when I first heard "What's black and white and red all over?" from my father, and how strange the answer was -- a newspaper -- until he explained it to me. And then I remember liking the fact that there were all these other answers too: a sun-burned zebra; a sun-burned penguin; and to the surprising variation "What's black and white and black and white and black and white and red all over?": a nun falling down a flight of stairs. (Geoffrey Stern told me this last variation.) It was like having four jokes instead of one, a kind of Swiss Army Knife of jokes, with lots of answers that could fold out of it, most of them trivially different from each other. I remember the rapid-fire way I'd repeat the question after each answer, and the odd sense of accumulation and possession that all these answers gave me. And I'm sure I rehearsed them all many times with the same people. Every time I added a new answer, I'd go through the whole gamut again with people who'd heard the previous set. It was important to ask the question each time, although I think in emergencies I'd just ask the question once and then quickly try to fit in all the answers. (There was the related pair of dead baby jokes: "What's red and sits in the corner?" "A baby chewing razor blades." "What's red and blue and sits in the corner?" "A baby chewing razor blades two weeks later.")

posted by william 7:20 AM
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I remember our homeroom teacher Mr. Donahue (unless, again, it was Mr. Baruch) telling us that adolescence was a very hard time. I was puzzled by this, because to me it didn't seem that hard: you had friends, fun, and a pretty decent sense of where you stood in the eyes of adults. (Where you stood in the eyes of your peers was a different question, but didn't seem like a new one.) I remember thinking that if this was a hard time, then maybe hard times weren't that hard (although I worrled, sometimes a lot, about how I would respond to my grandparents' deaths -- whether my grief would be appropriate, or too little, or too much). Even now I don't recall adolescence as a very hard time, certainly not like what came later; but I doubt that I'd still have the strength to be an adolescent.

posted by william 6:03 AM
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I remember Trouble -- "Kohner's Popamatic game." The popamatic was a device to roll a die with arabic numerals. "Have you got trouble? Wait don't run, / This kind of Trouble is lots of fun...." " ? ? ? ... dice. / Pop a six and you move twice! Kohner's Popamatic game, / Trouble, that's the name."

posted by william 5:33 AM
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I remember The Outer Limits, a Twilight Zone knock-off and how scary it was. I never got to watch The Twilight Zone -maybe it was on at the wrong time, maybe we didn't get the channel. I think it might have been on during the week, at a time when my parents were home. So it was like The Birds, something everyone knew about from firsthand experience but me. But The Outer Limits was scary enough.

posted by william 8:01 PM
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