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 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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