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 father taking me to the Thanksgiving Day parade. We saw marchers dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers. At the time I didn't know the difference between parades with real soldiers, policemen, etc. and costumes. I liked the rifles or muskets the soldiers were carrying. I said something about the fact that they were carrying guns, but my father said they were "sticks" not guns. I found this confusing, because they didn't look like sticks. The had shoulder stocks and rifling and were uniform. This was troubling to me: his authority vs. my own judgment about what we both were seeing. His point -- as I only realized years later -- was that these weren't real soldiers, and they weren't carrying real weapons. But I think I didn't realize at the time that there still were real weapons still in the world. That would have been like real cowboys. (I did know there were revolvers, or at least handguns, since I would sometimes thrill to see policemen carrying them in their holsters.)

posted by william 2:15 PM
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I remember that park workers used picks with sharp metal points to pick up trash in the park; they'd drop the trash in burlap bags. (Now they use prehensile plastic grabbers and heavy duty plastic.) I thought the tool was really neat. I remember watching them with my grandparents, either uptown in Washington Heights or near our house in Riverside Park. The idea that trash belonged to the order of things as well, that there was a tool specifically designed for it, was both curious and serene.

posted by william 12:35 PM
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I remember the woman I called "The Prejudiced Lady" on 91st street whose dog I walked (sometimes with the Weisers' poodle). She'd broken her hip and couldn't walk her dog herself. I walked her (the dog) morning and evening. I tried to get there at 8:10, since I had to leave for school at 8:30, but sometimes I wouldn't get there till 8:25. (She'd leave the door open when she went to the bathroom for her morning rituals, so I had some leeway since she wouldn't know just when I arrived.) Then sometimes the dog would pee inside, and she'd be very angry at me. She gave me, I think, $5.00 a week. I remember once coming out of her building after walking her dog and seeing someone trying to file through the chain link lock I'd locked up my bike with. (I thought that the clear plastic sheath around the chains was part of the lock, maybe to prevent files from working. It seemed one of those odd, adult innovations that they no doubt had reasons for but which made no sense to me.) He was concentrating pretty hard, but when I said "Hey!" to him he looked up and asked, "Is this your bike?" He must have been thirty or thirty-five. When I said yes he apologized. He put over convincingly: that had he known it was my bike he wouldn't have tried to steal it. But of course I was a complete stranger to him. Nevertheless, I believed him. And I felt it was just a little odd that someone twenty or more years older than I was should be apologizing to me the way he had just done.

The prejudiced lady hated Mayor Lindsay. He had let "the niggers and the spics" ruin the city. The first word I knew, maybe from To Kill a Mockingbird, but not the second. My parents told me that it referred to people who spoke Spanish, mainly Puetro Ricans (they didn't use the word "Hispanic"). So I imagined its derivation: from Spic and Span. They were SPANish, so they were called SPICs as a kind of not-so-witty reversal. The person who got me this job -- perhaps Mark Dollard? -- warned me she was prejudiced. I think she used this term when I came in to find her watching a news show (she was always sitting on her chair, on a crocheted blanket with her metal cane in hand, watching TV) about black leaders agitating in Bed-Stuy (maybe) about no longer using books with black print on a white background. Rather black students should be given books with white print on a black background. That seemed vaguely interesting to me. But it was calculated -- really calculated, at least by the TV station -- to inflame the likes of her. I tended to maintain a diplomatic silence, though sometimes I would start arguing passionately against her. At the time my conscience wouldn't let me listen to vicious opinions without ever lodging a protest, no matter how ineffectual. Alas, things have changed since.

I remember that she used to send me to pick up pepper steaks for her dinner at the Chinese Restaurant on 91st on the East Side of Broadway. This was a restaurant I took my parents to a couple of times in those years, and that I went to a few times in college too, until I found out about Empire on 97th.

posted by william 4:05 PM
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I remember The Sign of the Dove on Third in the seventies. We'd pass it a lot in taxis, and once we walked past and I got to look inside. I was awestruck by its beauty, and it became for me the El Dorado of restaurants, the place you'd want to go to if you could go anywhere. My parents were mildly amused by this, and by my atavistic awe of at least this feature in their lives, that they went there some time. There was something marvelous about the way the idea of the Dove, or the pictured dove on the sign, and the beautiful mildness of its brilliantly suffused interior went together. And then it was the only building with a light facade, a kind of afterimage of pink, on the entire street. How could there be any question about the food in a place that made all sensory experience somehow luxuriantly visual: made seeing into a constant, gentle, caressing luxury. I found it breathtaking. When I was old enough to go there it was -- of course! -- mildly disappointing. (I think the first time I went in was with Margot, in college. We had drinks, but they were booked for dinner. It was probably a couple of years later that I ate there.) But only mildly disappointing, just part of the general dim sense of disappointment that is part of adult experience of what you'd longed to experience as a child. So to say that it was mildly disappointing is to say that it sustained as well as anything in the world possibly could sustain its earlier beauty for me. It was all it should be: everything the high and dazzling adult experience I longed for could come to. That was less than I thought, but I was still glad that it wasn't the fault of The Sign of the Dove.

posted by william 4:04 PM
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I remember the poem that we were assigned to write, maybe the Tuesday we returned to school after Kennedy's assassination. I didn't know what to do. My parents "helped" me, by writing the poem (just as they "helped" me with my report in which I pointed out, to my surprise, that "The tomato is a fruit"). I was very impressed by it. The poem began:

On that black Friday when we heard
That our President had died,
We could not quite believe the word--
Then, knowing it was so, we cried.

It ended alluding to John-John's salute:

You really are your father's son.

(This turned out to be true, though in a slightly different way.)

I remember all the parallels we later spooked ourselves with between Lincoln's and Kennedy's assassinations: it was Friday; they'd both been elected in '60; they were both shot in the presence of their wives; Lincoln had had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. There were others, but that's what I remember.

I remember posting this a year and a half ago (May 28, 2002):

"Mrs. Eben announced Kennedy's assassination to us, over the school loudspeaker. It was near the end of the day, a Friday, and I was already in my coat, but we were at our desks still, making Thanksgiving decorations for the party we were to have the next week. I was coloring in a feather on the cream construction paper. She made the announcement, and we all didn't quite know what to do. I think our teacher, Mrs. Comiskey that would have been, told us this was shocking and serious, or maybe Mrs. Eben had already asked for a moment of silence or of prayer. (At some point, there definitely was a moment of prayer, and I said the Shema -- I had no idea what else you were supposed to do. I still don't.) Then we just sat there, and I went back to coloring my feather. Monday they cancelled school, and we watched the funeral and John John saluting the caisson. I think I didn't know the song yet about the caissons keep rolling along, since I remember this is when I learned the word "caisson." But I wasn't very good about the words of songs, especially of choruses, or about seeing that they were the same words that we might use in other contexts. On Friday, after we went home, my mother asked me whether I still wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History, where she had promised to take me to see the dinosaurs. I had been reading Danny and the Dinosaurand I really wanted to see them now. I said I still wanted to go. It was nearly empty: I remember that in the dinosaur room there was a young couple (in their teens or twenties I'd say) and a guard. I was struck by how empty it was, and I think I wondered what theywere doing there. I was disappointed by the dinosaurs because they were just skeletons, not the dinosaur that you saw in Danny and the Dinosaur which was more a taxidermy model come to life. They told me I think the next week that Mrs. Eben was weeping when she announced the assassination, although I don't recall this or noticing it. We had an assembly in the auditorium when we got back to school, and I do remember how subdued she seemed then. I remember Johnson's first speech on the radio, and being impressed that he could lead the country so quickly -- he seemed so much more authoritative than the assistant principal (Mrs. Nadler!) ever seemed when she took over just because Mrs. Eben was out. But that hierarchical principle still kicked in, and we all thought the vice-president was no match for Kennedy himself, the greatest of all presidents ever, as we assured ourselves for a long time. We felt both sorry for Jonathan Richmond and in awe of him since he knew Kennedy's inaugural address by heart (see an earlier entry); it was as though he was the great surviving member of that time, and as though Kennedy's passion could now survive subjectively only in his memory. His recitation skills were much in demand for the next little while."

posted by william 6:06 PM
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I remember Dewar's Profiles, the ad campaign. They always had the back of The New Yorker. There was always a parenthesis that informed you that "Dewar's Profiles" was "(pronounced do-er's White Label)" but I didn't get that this meant that we were supposed to think that Dewar's drinkers were also do-ers. And I always read it as "Dee-wores," ignoring the parenthetical pronunciation, which I didn't much care about because I never imagined I'd be drinking Dewars (and now I try to avoid it still, though Margot and I used to order it as our standard everyday scotch). I was more puzzled by the word "profile," not least because of that bizarre pronunciation (White Label?), a word which also went with The New Yorker, since they had a feature called "profiles" which were long articles on interesting people. What made these profiles? All I knew about profiles were from drawing: they were easier than the impossibly-nosed full-face. Somehow it seemed that the only sense I could really make of this was that the shapes of letters, black against the white page, were like profiles: it was the countour that counted. I don't know when "profile" stopped bothering me as a word in this context. But perhaps it helped me understand -- decades later (!) -- what Michel Leiris meant in his essays on "literature considered as a bull-fight" that the matador turns in profile to the two-dimensional cut of the edge, becomes an edge himself to dodge the edge of the horn. Any cut he receives is then two-dimensional as well, the only cut that a pure surface can suffer, a kind of pealing away of a half-ply. How odd the idea of a life as profile.

posted by william 5:08 PM
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I remember Megillah Gorilla. That's almost certainly not how its (her?) name was spelled. But it made the Megillah Esther funny. "Gorilla! Megillah Gorilla for sale!" It must have been a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I just now realize that the theme song must be harmonically the same as the one for the Flintstones. "We'll have a gay old time!"

posted by william 12:36 AM
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I remember a show called Maverick, a Western. Then I became aware of the car. Then of the figurative use: a contrarian. And finally: the horse.

posted by william 10:21 PM
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I remember step-ladder chairs. In Vertigo Jimmy Stewart steps on one just like the one my downtown grandmother had. They were high-seated chairs, for sitting at counters, with backs, yellow or red metal (the Hoges might have had a red one), with steps that you could pull out so that you could stand on them, pressing your shins up against the back for a feeling of added security, added sense of balance. You used them to change light bulbs. I remember falling down face first at my grandmother's house off the step-ladder. I was a sheet of red pain from feet to face, but I held back my tears. They were very proud of me; I was very proud of myself, and for a long time I would refer to this time, asking them (in front of my parents, in front of their friends) whether they remembered the time I fell of the step-ladder "and I didn't even cry."

posted by william 6:17 AM
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I remember a game you played with three pennies. You made a goal with your pinkie and index finger extended from the fist pressed to the edge of the table, and your opponent flicked one of the pennies through a gateway made by the other two. You couldn't flick the same penny twice in a row, and if you missed the gate or sent the penny off the edge of the table it was the other person's turn. The aim was to flick a penny into your opponent's goal. It was always harder than it seemed it would be. There was something interesting about the different but related sensations of extending two fingers and jamming the others to make the goal, and curling your index finger to flick the penny if you were on offense.

posted by william 1:04 AM
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I remember when automatic doors came in at the supermarket. They were only for exiting at first. I think Key Foods on 92nd Street had them before the Garden Market on 90th. The door opened when your weight on a padded platform in front of it signalled that you were heading towards it. This was before the current radar technology. It was fun to straddle the platform and go right up to the door without its opening (annoying, almost always, the people behind you waiting to go through). We'd also hold ourselves up on the hand railing that actually acted as a kind of guide to direct people directly to the door. I think we would engage in this apparently pointless activity just as a way of psyching the door out -- understanding its mechanism in a way that it couldn't understand out behavior. We could be invisible to it, and the reason we could is that its workings were so transparent to us.

posted by william 12:13 AM
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I remember the "razzle-dazzle" in touch football. Lots of laterals: it was a play that was a sort of precursor to ultimate frisbee. It always ended with a forward lateral being called by the other team very early on.

posted by william 8:43 PM
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I remember that "Veteran's Day" used to be "Armistice Day." My grandparents still called it that when I was a child; and I think some calendars called it both. Or it was like carrying the one vs. exchanging it: some adults used to insist on the older terminology. My grandfather fought in the First World War so for him it was Armistice Day. I guess it still is in Europe; and so maybe it wasn't an atavism but a Europeanism. Then I forgot this, but was reminded of it in seventh or eighth grade when I read Slaughterhouse Five, in which Vonnegut deplores the changed name, and the dishonor it does to the dead.

posted by william 10:12 PM
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I remember that I used to think there was a word "anhiliate." It was actually my mildly dyslexic, or perhaps lazy, reading of anihilate. When I used it in conversation, Doug Breitbart said it was obvious that I read a lot, since it was one of many words that I deformed (like "parsh" for phrase or parse).

posted by william 11:40 PM
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I remember, maybe from Mission Impossible, that voice prints are like finger prints -- they are unique identifiers. I think this isn't so well accepted any more. I liked the idea of voice-prints. On the show they were large and rectangular, more like finger-paints than -prints. It was interesting that the voice was somehow rectangular. I remember another Mission Impossible, I think, where a murder was committed by the murderer using a tuning fork over a phone line which somehow killed the person who was on the other end of the phone. I think I was told to go to bed before I saw how the episode resolved. It was scary to think you could kill people that way. I guess it was an imaginary prelude to the cell-phone with plastic explosive bomb that the Israelis (and I think the British too) have perfected.

posted by william 8:07 PM
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I remember that in the downstairs (guest) bathroom at the Sterns' house they had a framed poster above the toilet of a vaguely Chagallian landscape and the word Hundretwasser (spelling?) below. I thought that must be a place, or perhaps a Yiddish, or German word, and I kept trying to parse it as Hundredwater. It would always be there when I peed, and it never made sense. But the enigma never lasted longer than the fifteen or twenty seconds it took to pee, and faded back into the ranks of annoying obscurity until the next time. Later I learend -- I think I learned -- that he was a person, the painter of the landscape, and that the poster was from some show or other. But I still don't quite know who he was or why or how his strange name designated him.

posted by william 10:29 PM
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I remember, on my birthday, that it was maybe for my thirteenth birthday that my father got me the small pool table from Rappaports (which I've mentioned before). Recalling it now, I remember that there was some problem with it, and they took it back, and my father kept pressing me to call them to find out what was happening. But I was mortally embarrassed about calling stores about anything -- whether they had something, whether they were open, etc. So somehow I managed to dodge this call, which I now see was part of my father's campaign to make me more aggressive with other people in the world (but it was his aggression that I hated); what I don't understand is how it came about that he eventually let the matter drop (since I do know it was never resolved). This is one of those things where I don't know now whether to admire or disparage his behavior: did he decide, after full consideration, not to pursue it? Or did he just forget, as Miss Brenner did the note she sent home and that I never got signed (see entry for March 16, 2002)?

posted by william 10:16 PM
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From Tim Paul:

I remember the sound of rotary telephones. And how if you dialed a "9" or a "0" it would take what seemed like a very long time to complete the dial. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I remember how you used to rent phones instead of owning them with only three or four varieties to choose from. We got the most plain black socialist number. I remember when touch-tone came in and how sexy that was. I think it was my rich uncle who had the first touchtone phone with glowing (green) buttons. And loud and melodic tone sounds. bleep, bleep, bleep. It took another year or more before we got one at home. I remember my Granny had rotery at her summer home until only a couple years ago and it seemed perfectly natural that she had one. - Tim Paul

posted by william 10:32 AM
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I remember that it's ok to buy one stick of butter. You can take it out of the box. I was always embarrassed to do this, but the check-out cashiers never looked twice. I'm still a little embarrassed to do this: what if the rules have changed? But I like knowing that it's ok.

posted by william 9:50 PM
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I remember the Hathaway man with his beautifully pressed shirts and his eye-patch. That was the first eye-patch I saw that didn't belong to a pirate. I was confused. Was he a pirate? Or in disguise? I thought eye-patches were only pirate accesories. But now they seemed to mean -- well what? Had he lost an eye? It seemed unlikely, since he was so well put together. Was it just a fashion statement? Well, yes, but somehow it wasn't supposed to be only that. I never quite got it. I remember though at about the same time that some Peanuts character had to wear an eye-patch because she had lazy-eye, and this would force her bad eye to work. The concept of lazy-eye was interesting to me.

posted by william 10:18 PM
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I remember people opening car doors to slam them tighter while we were driving. I have a general memory of this -- a practice that is much rarer now that lights and bells tell you that the door isn't shut. And I have a particular memory of my mother doing this, in the left back seat of the car as we drove up the West Side Highway. I was surprised at the incongruity of her opening the door as we were driving, and then of her slamming it. My parents told me never to do that, so I think I must have wanted to open my door as well. I didn't understand then that you could get killed falling out of a quickly moving car. I thought that all that counted was downwards velocity -- and besides in many TV shows people fell out of moving trains. But later Hugh Cramer told me -- in the context of admiring some hero who survives a fall or jump out of a car, or maybe some friend of his brother Ben's -- that fifty miles an hour was usually fatal.

I remember Hugh was also the source of information about the world's records for bicycle speeds: fifty miles an hour on a straightaway, and close to a hundred when drafting a train. He was also, as I pursue these associative memories, the source of information on land speed records on the salt flats. And my father told me why they used the salt flats instead of roads: because if you even hit a pebble at four hundred miles per hour you would flip and crash and burn. This seemed unlikely, though it did tell me something I couldn't have suspected about the salt flats: that they were perfectly debris-free and smooth. Later, when Paul Marsala taught me to shoot a rifle (see entry in archives for January 22, 2003), he said that a single blade of grass would deflect a high-velocity bullet. This was one of those cases where two intuitions clashed: that the momentum of the bullet would be hard to deflect; that the momentum of the bullet was so tightly wound, as it were, that the smallest perturbation would be catastrophic. (In Jack Finney's Time and Again, a book I inherited from the house my parents bought but didn't read for twenty years, the conflicting theories about the alterability of the past take the form of the same intuitive hunches.) At any rate, opening doors in moving cars seemed another one of those adult skills: they could do it, and they knew when it was necessary to do.

posted by william 10:40 AM
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I remember doing a report on fruits and vegetables in third grade, or maybe second. It was a collage report on colored construction paper. My parents helped me, a lot. They had all sorts of neat binding gadgets, and they used a three-hole punch and some manilla envelope ribbon to bind the report together. But what I particularly remember was the austere page, all in black, near the end with a picture of a tomato glued right in the middle, and the caption "A tomato is a fruit." My mother put this page together. I was very surprised that a tomato was a fruit, and impressed that the page knew that it was surprising. But I was also surprised by my parents' knowledge. This was one of those times, like the time when they told me that the first straight-edges were traced against taut string, that I was impressed with the sheer extent of their knowledge. Not impressed that they knew more than me, which was obvious, but that they had a kind of command of a vast space of knowledge that I didn't know existed. Generally they seemed to me the adult presiders over a world whose measure I knew even if I didn't know its contents or its controls. I thought I saw what I would grow into knowing. But in moments like this, I became aware that their knowledge exceeded mine in kind as well as in degree. They grew somehow distanced from me, they expanded like a benign version of the father figure in Kafka's "Judgment." They were no longer captured by the term "my parents," whereby I was the center that defined the circumference of the world they knew and acted in. They were something else besides, strange to me, remote, distant as their own friends. "A tomato is a fruit:" in a way this was my first inkling of adult life.

posted by william 12:48 PM
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