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 the sense of impersonal existence that I accorded to the city (and still do, even to other cities). It's not that institutions seemed to me to exist impersonally -- what was (and remains) odd is that it was the city itself, its police, garbage, fire, school, and transportation services -- that seemed to exist as an entity in which people filled the roles assigned to them or made available to them. The city had for me the status of a purely natural entity, of nature itself. It was the ground or base or context of existence. It was the environment. Hence some of my surprise, now, to see things change (not that things weren't always changing; but that change, in those days, was the constant, defining change of the flow of the river, not the course of the riverbed). How could that environment itself have changed so much? And yet New York is still fundamentally the same: the friendliness of its sidewalks and asphalt streets and manholes and building corners. Who wouldn't respond to that friendliness? I think one of the reasons the September 11 attacks were so shocking to me was that it seemed so wrong to think of New York, the physical place, the way the terrorists did, as anything other than friendly and patient and intelligently genial. I think that this has something to do with the odd sense that I have that part of my horror about the attacks had to do with the way they inconvenienced everyone -- inconvenienced those who died and inconvenienced their survivors (one of my students, Bob M., died). What happened then was the totality of inconvenience: it would no longer be possible to fulfill the plans one had made: plans to eat out that night, or get the kids at school, or have a drink with an old friend, or see someone you had a crush on, or see the kids grow up, or care for one's aging parents, or pursue love, or see Matrix Reloaded, or finish Mason & Dixon or pursue the thoughts you were going to pursue, or think about, or think about time or space or death or hope or despair or cigarettes or a haircut or rock music or going to the beach or sunsets or puns and jokes or clean sheets or going to get pizza with your mother as she promised before rushing off for work that morning, ever again. All these conveniences, the things that come with life (convenire), and are life itself, taken away, even that most pleasant convenience of having a familiar language to understand in. The inconvenience of the attacks is unfathomable, as my friend Jeff says. It was puzzling to see the shots of bin Laden drinking tea -- such a lovely little pleasure -- and showing with his fingers how the planes hit the towers, and to think that he didn't think about the lovely little pleasures of others, or thought about them simply and only as what could be taken away, since in this life there is nothing else that we have and therefore nothing else to be taken away. The point is that the city is a place for human convenience, and that human hospitality and sociability is about making life bearable for others. And the city provides those conveniences, most of them, so naturally, though the natural world itself, the Hobbesian world of the terrorists, doesn't provide them naturally at all. How can one fail to love the city? "Here are my books and my papers," as Doctor Johnson said, he who said also, "He who is tired of London is tired of life." But none of those people who died were tired of the city.

posted by william 5:54 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that my parents were completely indifferent to the presence of the driver when they had intense conversations in cabs -- either to berate each other, or to berate my sister and me, or to discuss some pressing issue (really pressing, or just pressing as to logistics). I was always surprised by this indifference, not quite embarrassed by it as I usually was when I saw them acting according to a prerogative that I thought neither graceful nor something they were quite entitled to, but surprised, because it seemed to indicate more that they had a better sense of the dynamics of taxi-cab conversation than I did, and seemed somehow to know that the driver couldn't hear what they were saying. I knew this wasn't true, but I was more than usually willing to hope that my knowledge was wrong.

posted by william 3:49 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my father and all his friends (at least those I saw in swimming pools) had gall-bladder scars. It seemed like one of those things adult males had, like hair on their chests. (I was surprised, later on, when I met a woman who'd had her gall-bladder removed.) But none of my friends seem to have them.

posted by william 7:22 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my uptown grandparents taking me on several excursions to Bear Mountain. There was a large hill that you could climb, that really, if barely, qualified as a mountain, and I liked to climb it. It was pretty far away (to my single-digit self), and it had this quaint name, out of the kind of fairy tale my grandmother would read and tell me. Like Fort Tryon Park it seemed an old, European immigrant's version of America: Bear Mountain, Fort Tryon (when it should have been -- as I thought -- Fort Ryan): these are names I associated with my granparents' perspective on the United States. I remember also how much I loved the song "The bear went over the mountain," which I had on one of my records. I think of the hill up Riverside from 95th to 91st street when I sing this song, and also of Bear Mountain, though I never thought of the bear going up that mountain. I think I was very glad that all the bear could see was the other side of the mountain: it corresponded with my childhood sense of geographical regions being islands in the midst of the incomprehensible vast discontinuities of the world: not of their all being interconnected. That later sense of being able to place things in space, which came from learning how to read a map, I count a great loss to my sense of possibility. I now know what I'll eventually get to in whatever direction I go. I can get lost, but not globally lost. But the mountain the bear went over, only seeing its other side: that's a mountain that's not located somewhere. I want to see the other side of that mountain too.

posted by william 2:44 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember how for quite a while whenever I walked around New York I looked at buildings as potentially climbable. I would think about whether I could get up to the second story, where the climbing was easier because of the regularity of the alternating granite blocks. The first story was always the hardest to climb, but sometimes you could use the bars on the windows to boost yourself up. I remember a Batman comic where the thief used his cape (I think he was disguised as Batman) to pull down the ladder from the second-floor fire escape, so that he could then climb it into the upper stories. The clue was some chipped paint on the ground, I think. It seems to me you saw Batman as a thief in the teaser, but it would have been the thief in disguise. But the idea of climbing buildings, and seeing all walls and all ornament as an incitement to climb, was pretty longstanding. I think it dated to our clambering and climbing up the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on 89th Street. You could make it up to the eagle that looked South, and just hang out there. If you fell you probably wouldn't die, though the climbing was hard. Then there was another bit up past the base of this monument that looks I guess like a gigantic column (framed in a basket of smaller columns), though I wouldn't have thought so at the time. Inside was a very high wall of stacked and alternating blocks, that went up about ten stories to the capital. There was graffiti there, half-way up, but no one I knew ever climbed that high, not even Hugh Cramer. (If you click on the link above you'll see the eagle over the entrance, in which it turned out sweeping machinery was kept, and to the right, the farthermost mansion from the perspective up Riverside, what is now -- or was when I was climbing the monument at any rate -- the Yeshiva Torah Va'adoth, the last mansion on Riverside Drive).

posted by william 11:44 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember Bobby Bonds. I remember hearing, maybe from Tommy Hoge, maybe from Freddy Cooper, that he was the strike-out king of the majors, and I thought this meant he was a bad player. A little later when I found out that he was also a home-run leader, I realized that sluggers strike out a lot. This was an interesting thing to discover about baseball, and to discover on my own (like realizing that Leopold Bloom was Jewish); and it never seemed to me to have any relevance, positive or negative, to life.

posted by william 10:47 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember hearing the term blackout in our dining room, overlooking the courtyard of our building, when I got home, or maybe the next day, after the 1965 blackout. I think of that room now as where I heard about most of the public issues that I did hear about at home. Remembering my post from August 7 about that room as it appeared on the Super-8 film my father used when I was very young, it's hard to think of it also as the room that felt slightly tinged with the tawdriness of the world, as it was with the darkness of the courtyard, when I was older. It might well be that out talk about the blackout was my first initiation into the talk about the public world in that room, since it interested me as much as anyone else.

I remember in the 1965 blackout my mother being very glad to see me, when I got home, though to me it was not a big deal. I remember talking to Hugh Cramer about it the blackout the next day.

I remember posting, on March 5, 2002, this account of the 1965 blackout:

I remember the first black-out. I was standing on my head (in an exercise class in the Hotel Breton Hall on 86th and Broadway -- this was, and still is, a residential hotel populated by performing artists who valued its thick walls; we did exercise to music pounded out on a loud piano. Sometimes I waited for my mother in the dark musty dining-room while she did her class. There was also a changing room with a bathroom behind it, also dark. I'd sometimes get water in the bathroom filling a musty old glass from a musty spigot. I didn't like all this mustiness, but it was somehow all right as well because the smells were not unlike the smells in my Haven Avenue grandparents' house. Or maybe I did mind, because the glass for the water and the mustiness of the smell were associated for me with my grandparents' false teeth sitting in their wide-mouthed water-glasses all night long. I also remember that my grandmother would keep a glass of water by her bed and that it would slowly aerate over the course of the night and be full of bubbles by morning. All of this was unlike the brisk cleanliness of my house.) I was standing on my head and I could see the light fading out and then coming back. This was puzzling -- not something you could really judge standing on your head. I stood up and the light lasted a minute or two more and then went out for good. It wasn't quite dark yet, but I was sent straight home: I remember headlights and the unilluminated stop-lights, and being struck by the fact that the blackout wasn't universal: some lights worked, just not the power-grid. The next day people were amazed that everything had worked so smoothly -- no looting or anything. I didn't know what they meant: why should there be anything different just because it was dark? I think this shows my great confidence in my world back then, when my world was basically a neighborhood in New York City.

posted by william 7:54 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my mother lighting Sabbath candles at sundown Friday evenings. This was my father's idea, I'm pretty sure, since my mother is a determined atheist, and sympathetic only to the druids. But she was game, and we would say a prayer, and then sit down and eat, on a somewhat nicer table-cloth than usual. It's hard to say how often we did this, but I suspect it wasn't more than a dozen times. I can only remember one specific occasion, but the atmosphere of familiarity that goes with that memory means that it wasn't the only time. It was surprisingly nice -- given the ritual of prayers, which on holidays with company bored me to tears. I think what I liked about it was my mother doing well something that wasn't the kind of thing she did (although I didn't know then that she had no attraction to this at all). I liked her calm knowledge of how everything was done, and so her serene competence at lighting the candles had a calming, Sabbath-like effect. Anyone might have done so as well and as calmly as she did, but this didn't matter: she was the one who was doing it.

posted by william 6:54 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember a story we heard in third grade (I think -- that is I think it was Miss Luberg who told it to us). It was in the context of The Merchant of Venice, and I think she (Miss Luberg) told it as a story about Portia. A poor man took his dry crust of bread and held it over the steam coming out of the cart that a rich food peddlar was cooking on. The peddlar demanded payment for the steam whose moisture softened the bread and whose smell gave it savor. The poor man didn't know what to do. But at his trial Portia defended him: just as the poor man had to content himself with the aroma from the rich man's food, the rich man would have to content himself with the sound of a coin clinking. I loved how clever this was.

posted by william 7:30 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the day my mother made croques-monsieur for a party. It was very hectic. She made all these sandwiches, and then dipper them in egg! And fried them! And then trimmed off their edges! It was like seeing the invention of a new food (not just a variation on something I was already familiar with.) I tried one, and it was delicious. Even though it had swiss cheese in it. This was the first time I saw the appeal of swiss cheese, taste-wise. (I'd liked the holes but hated the bitterness.) And of ham. I ended up staying in the kitchen eating all the trimmings. As far as I was concerned the croque-monsieur was a major success. But I don't think she ever made them again, probably because they were too labor-intensive.

posted by william 6:39 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember one Sunday morning in Bellagio running into Michelle Malliet's mother walking their chiuaua on the dock. I asked her where Michelle was. Her mother (who spoke perfect English) told me she was at "mass." I was slightly shocked by this, made jealous by it, as though there was this activity to which Michelle actually devoted herself, rather than sustaining the aristocratic indifference which made my treatment by her no worse than anyone else's, and in certain ways worked to my advantage since I was capable of infinite patience, and I knew that no one else would be. (I don't think there was any competition around either, although that wasn't the issue and wouldn't have mattered. The one very handsome older boy I saw her with turned out to be her brother. I remember his inflatable dinghy which later I went water-skiing behind. It was neat that you could inflate a boat that could then go that fast, slapping the waves. I remember one summer a very handsome Englishman showed up and monoskied, which I had never done, and which my mother, the water-skiier, couldn't do. I learned how, eventually, but it was very hard to get up behind the dinghy, and I remember the cold lake water in my nose as I was dragged face first through the water when I fell.) I somehow expected that Michelle would expect of anyone she might take seriously such infinite patience. And she was older than me! Her birthday was April 27th, mine not till November. So in the summers she was always a numeral ahead of me. And yet all this made my pertinacity all the more significant -- to me at least. But there she was, at mass. And I somehow knew what the word meant, without my ever having heard it before. She was at mass, she was Catholic, there was a secret portion of her life that I had no access to, that my patience and devotion in no wise engaged with. I somehow realized that "mass" explained the rest of the word "Christmas," and so I was brought to think of the central Catholic holidays, as I knew them to be, of Christmas and Easter -- holidays that took place when we were in New York and Michelle and her family in Luxembourg. So this meant that the part of her life to which she was most devoted was somehow centered on Luxembourg and not on Bellagio, whereas the part of my life that I was most devoted to was centered on Bellagio, and on her.

posted by william 11:42 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the odd shade of pinkish tannish clay that my uptown grandparents' upholstery was -- their wing-chairs and couch. It seemed such a natural color then, but now I realize that I don't think I've ever seen any furniture anywhere else in the world that color.

posted by william 7:43 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember how odd the locks were on our apartment's front and back doors, since you turned them opposite to the way you'd expect -- counterclockwise to lock, clockwise to open, even though the hinge was on the left and the lock on the right. I think this was my first intuition of gearing, and the way it could reverse directions. It was interesting -- and I think I knew this at the time -- as pure intuition, the pure thought that there was a perfectly straightforward mechanism in which motion leftward of the lock-handle would issue in motion rightward of the tongue of the lock, a kind of mechanical version of Newton's law of motion. It felt elegant.

posted by william 11:58 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my parents' pastel bed-spread, pinkish mauve with broad satin piping which I didn't get. It was like their good table cloth, which I think was a kind of beige-lilac and also as I recall it had that piping, though I wonder if this is true. It had a kind of authority to it -- maybe because I associate it with the extremely bright lights that my father set up when he filmed interiors, which always meant parties at our apartment. The good table cloth would come out, and it would look special and knowing and intrinsically pristine in the parabolic flood-lights, a table cloth that had been posed by my father. I don't think that I ever ate off it myself, though I remember it being put out for guests. I think the time my mother made croques-monsieur, she served them on that table-cloth. I have no idea where it is now: when they moved it didn't seem to become part of whatever mode of fanciness belonged to the new apartment.

posted by william 1:11 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember police phone boxes, generally next to fire alarms, on lampposts. They were battleship grey or green, and cops on the beat would call and check in from them, or use them whenever they needed to communicate with headquarters. They were part of the cityscape at the level of adult heads. I never quite knew why they existed -- like the other mail boxes, the olive ones that stood (and stand) near the regular red white and blue ones (just white and blue now). They belonged to a world of vocation and expertise that was parallel to ours, and somehow made it possible.

posted by william 7:28 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the night people. Sometimes when we were going home very late, we'd see late shift workers arriving or departing, and my uptown grandmother called them by that spooky and evocative term. They were the people who worked while the rest of us slept. I thought of them as a permanent population, like us and overlapping with us but also in a different world, awake while we slept and sleeping when we were awake. (I used to worry about whether they could sleep through the pneumatic drilling outside my school in the mornings.) They seemed ghostly to me, if only because they were so silent. Sometimes they showed end-of-the-work-day raucousness (those who were coming off-shift) but even that was muted and a kind of gesture towards noisiness rather than real noise. We'd see the night people near my uptown granparents' apartment, and now I realize they were the night shift and Columbia Presbyterian; and sometimes in Brooklyn, on Flatbush, where they were the telephone workers, gliding towards the subway.

posted by william 6:43 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the first Polaroid cameras. They were so cool. You took a picture with a camera that looked amazingly old-fashioned, with a pleated accordion cowling for focussing, and a lattice-work collapsable frame -- there must be a term of art for this. They were black and white. You took a picture, and then pulled a white tab that hung out of the back of the camera and which pulled the exposed film out through rollers that pressed it against a gelled negative backing. I guess, now, that the positive and the negative were actually separate in the camera, and that pulling them out brought them together. You counted to sixty and then peeled the backing off the photo. You threw the negative out, wiping the gel off on your pants, or wherever. I always wanted to keep the negative as a sort of carbon copy of the photo, but it was too yucchy. There was a metal folding clip you could use on cold days. You warmed it in your shirt pocket or under your arm for a minute before taking the picture. Then once you pulled the exposed sandwich out, you put it into the clip, which kept it warm enough to develop. I loved the smell of the chemicals, and the promise they made of new photos. One besetting problem was that they might streak if you weren't careful, but this wasn't hard to avoid. All those instant pictures, and I don't know whether any survive. My father thought it was very clever of Polaroid to sell the cameras so cheap -- $19.95 -- and make all the money on film. This impressed me.

Remembering that the original Polaroid camera was $19.95, I remember the infamous Ford Pinto, which went for $1,995, according to the full page ads in the Times.

posted by william 10:12 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that baseball cards that were multiples of ten were the star players, and multiples of a hundred were the superstars -- like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. I think Bobby Murcer was a multiple of ten. I remember the backs of baseball cards had statistics, and often a strange cartoon (although that might instead have been the strange sports cartoon in the Daily News); the stats were: at-bats, batting average, doubles, triple, homeruns, BBs, errors. But I was always startled by the fact that when you turned over a pitcher's card you got statistics for pitching, not hitting. I was always newly disappointed by this, because I was always curious about how bad pitchers really were at the plate. I'd been surprised to learn from Tommy Hoge that pitchers were always bad hitters, and glad to find Fritz Peterson the counterexample, and I always wanted to find others. After all, Babe Ruth had been a pitcher. But instead we got ERAs, a statistic that I couldn't understand until much later, and fractional innings. And for some reaon, unlike for the batters, you only got the previous season or two, not a table of the batters whole career, including those interesting early seasons when they were only at bat nine or ten times, yielding a series of one or two digit numbers, followed by that surprisingly detailed 3 digit batting average -- the same three digits everyone else got. I liked that such sparse date could yield so long a result. Rookies (identified as such on the front) had their minor league averages on the back, so they always looked impressive till you saw that this was in the minors. But for pitchers you got very little, and yet I knew enough to love them, without yet knowing how to evaluate them.

posted by william 2:26 PM
. . . 0 comments