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 parents' getting me chestnuts on the street when it was very cold in New York. I was surprised that ice-cream or pretzel vendors also had this wonderful hot bag to warm your hands on. I loved holding the hot bag of chesnuts in the cold, and watching them steam. I was surprised, later on, how little I liked chestnut puree or marron glace.

posted by william 5:23 PM
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I remember spending Christmas one year in Stormville; I must have been seven or eight. The kids all stayed with the Herings in their house. They had a tree, despite the fact that they were more Jewish than Christian. We taped our socks to the mantle, I had no idea why. I was told that they would be filled with treats (or coal, if I'd been bad); this was the first I'd heard about that. I wished I'd worn more capacious socks. I remember my black nylon sock didn't look like it would hold more than a Hershey's kiss or two. But no one had very big socks anyhow. None of this seemed a big deal to me. I was amazed, and felt what you were supposed to feel, the next morning when my sock had been replaced by a giant Christmas stocking full of good things. I think this was the only Christmas I really shared in as a kid, and it was magical. (I think there were gifts too, but I don't remember those.)

posted by william 8:04 AM
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I remember: "as effective as codeine, but not narcotic." This was an ad for some cough syrup. But I don't remember which one. Codone?

posted by william 11:20 PM
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I remember more about the archaic servants' bells in apartment 7-F, which I was so thrilled about when we moved there. In most rooms they were push-buttons, as I've mentioned before, but in the dining room you rang by pushing a big metal plate under the dining room rug. I seem to recall having seen it once, but I'm not sure: I have a sense of its being surprisingly ugly and not the continuous surface I'd imagined it was. But I'd only have seen it when we moved out (or perhaps if we ever changed the rug in the dining room), so I'm not sure I ever did. The rug that covered it was probably 8x10 and the heavy dining room table was above it, though once my parents moved the table out of the way for a party. More about that party in a moment. What I remember about the bell was the fun I could have with my parents and sister first, then when they got both irritated with me and habituated to the prank, the fun I had making my friends think there was someone at the door. Because you could hear the bell just fine: which sort of obviated what I now realize it was used for: making the servants appear as if by a kind of magical discretion at just the right moment of the meal, the way they do in the movies.

My memory of this bell, which I can't have thought of for decades, despite the way I would worm my way down in the chair -- the black leather chair with studs! what I thought of when I read about points de capitons in Lacan years later -- is partly how awkward it was to get it to ring. I remember feeling with my bare and therefore slightly shortened foot for the tell-tale projections that were part of its mechanism, like the projections you feel for now in a Barney doll to make it talk or sing. The dining room bell was so much more interesting than Barney. I must have been still fairly small, because I sat on the long side of the table, so only had to reach halfway across the shadow of its width. I remember the pleasure of finding one of those projections, having it under foot, and sitting there quietly, cherishing the power to ring.

I remembered the bell again because there's a similar one in A Slight Case of Murder, a wonderful Edward G. Robinson movie, with zesty and farcial screenplay by Damon Runyan. Jane Bryan, who plays Robinson's wife, tries to summon servants who have gone to move some dead bodies around and are unavailable. Robinson says, "Ring again." We haven't seen her ringing. But then she says, "If I ring any harder I'll put my foor through the floor." So this must have been a very well-known feature of apartments or houses at the time, and not only upper class or upper middle class. When I saw the scene in the movie, it all came back.

And this prompted me to remember this party which was attended by friends and friends of friends of my parents, including a very genial man whom I quite liked -- to my surprise, because he had two hooks for arms. And he was married, to someone he'd met after losing his arms, trying to defuse a land-mine for the Israeli Defense Forces. I wonder was that 1948? It might have been 1967: I think this party was after the six-day war. He was probably in his fifties or sixties though. But who knows -- maybe he was just in his early thirties. He was very jovial. My memory of him at the party is fixed not so much because he was there as because a few days later my parents went to another occasion with him, and my father told me that he'd really put his foot in his mouth, by telling one of his favorite jokes: "It's gangrene; we've got to amputate your leg." "Oh my God." After the operation: "I have good news and bad news. " "Ok, Doctor, give me the bad news first." "We cut off the wrong leg." "Oh my God! Well what can the good news possibly be?" "The other leg is healing." (I think his wife was a doctor. Now that I think of this, I think she might have cared for him professionally. A belated Great War story.)

I was shocked by my father's bad judgment, and asked him how this guy had responded. My father shook his head in pleasant disbelief and said, "He laughed harder than anyone." I loved that.

posted by william 11:17 PM
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I remember, as I do on Hannukah, that I understood how dreidels worked but was baffled by tops with strings. They were mysterious to me, and being able to set a string-top spinning was like being able to whistle with your fingers -- a technique I didn't have a clue as to how to master. I still don't.

posted by william 11:20 PM
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I remember being sick as a kid, but don't want to remember it because I've got a high fever now. I do remember my skepticism about aspirin making you feel better, but I'll certainly concede now that aspirin and its ilk can help. Not quite enough though. But that puts me in mind of a Bazooka Joe bubble gum strip where the scholarly professorial kid goes to the drug store and asks for salicylic acid. "You mean aspirin?" asks the silver-haired pharmacist. Nerdy kid: "That's the word! I never can remember it!" I admired him. I remember also learning that bazookas meant something else before it became a proper epithet for Bazooka Joe derived from the name of the gum which was its original meaning. At least I think so -- I'm not absolutely certain which came first. (I remember that like the color lemon, the color orange derives its name from the fruit, where I always thought it was so elegant to call the fruit simply by its vivid color.) I had friends, like Hugh, who knew what bazookas were (and had toy bazookas), just as they knew what the Blitz was in football, when I didn't.

posted by william 11:45 PM
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I remember first learning the word "jeopardy" as the name of the Art Fleming game show; then my mother told me it meant danger. And then in high school, when we read the Constitution, I became aware of the prohibition against putting someone in double jeopardy. I had no idea. The phrase still seems a little bit funny to me.

posted by william 2:18 PM
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I remember how impressed I was by the fact that adults could swallow pills. My parents did this as a matter of course: another impressive way that they moved with ease in the glamourous world of adults they defined, but defined as a vast penumbra around them. Swallowing pills was even more glamourous than whistling, since I wanted to be able to whistle, but saw no need to swallow pills. I think swallowing pills was for me something like the adult taste for wine and beer would seem a little later: an acquired taste that was glamourous because it was an acquired taste, and yet because it was an acquired taste there was no incentive for someone like me who didn't have it to acquire it.

posted by william 10:02 AM
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I remember that everyone would applaud when we landed safely on our trips to and from Europe in the summer when I was a kid. These were Swiss-Air charter flights (always hours late), when charters were the only way to get discounts. I don't know whether applauding was a standard convention at the time (as I didn't know that it was when everyone applauds at the end of Kingsfield's last class in The Paperchase, till my mother told me that this was standard -- indeed standard at the end of every lecture); whether it was or not, it must have been the case that people applauded because for them air travel was not as routine as it later became. And yet the passengers also seemed like connoisseurs, and I felt proud to be among them and their expertise. It seemed a fine and European thing to do.

posted by william 11:38 PM
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I remember my mother getting a telegram one summer morning in Bellagio which said: JUST DIED YESTERDAY OF A CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE. I knew enough about telegrams, partly because of that one to me signed "Mummy and Daddy" which I wrote about November 26, 2002 here (scroll down), to know their postcard abbreviation convention. I was amused by the idea of someone saying of himself that he'd just died. I knew that the telegram was serious -- after all it was a telegram -- but seriousness wasn't serious enough for me at the time not to laugh when I presented my mother with my interpretation. (The telegram was delivered open on a polished tray, and I remember reading it on the counter of a table or bureau on my parents' room.) Of course Just turned out to be the last name of the woman who had died (my mother was either or lawyer or the executor of her will or both) -- died suddenly: this was the first I heard of cerebral hemorrhages. I think perhaps I wasn't disturbed by the idea of them immediately, but I was now well-enough informed to understand the story about FDR's death presented a year or two later in the reading textbook I remember using either in fourth or fifth grade. I remember Roosevelt's last words were, "I have the damndest headache," though this wasn't how the textbook quoted them. There he might have been reported as simply saying "I have a terrible headache," though I'm not sure. After that, every headache I had would always be slightly scary.

posted by william 2:41 PM
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I remember reading a story in Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazine-book on the beach in Bellagio, probably the last summer we were there, when I was twelve. The story was about the possibility of going to another world, a utopian world open to people who longed enough for its spirit of cooperation and generosity. You went to a travel agency, and if you looked like the right type of person and asked with the right mixture of subtlety and humility about this possibility, you might be told about it by the eerily knowing agent at the counter. I remember that he explained to the protagonist that this other world was both far away and not -- that it was like going to dinner at someone's apartment which shared a wall with yours, but to get to it you had to go out your front door, down the elevator, around the block, into the other building and through the front door of the other apartment. This other, Utopian world had vacuum cleaners but no TVs; busses but no cars (maybe: it's the vacuum cleaners I really remember and was impressed by). The protagonist is accepted and he sits in a waiting room with other travellers. Then he panics, and leaves the room. Then he regrets his panic and returns to it. But they're gone. He goes back to the travel agent and asks to be re-accepted to the utopian pioneers. But the travel agent feigns blank incomprehension. He's missed his chance forever.

I remember this story pretty well. I was surprised, yesterday, when a student in my Hitchcock class showed me a hardcover best-of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine that the story turned out to be by Jack Finney, whose Time and Again and From Time to Time are pretty marvelous evocations of time travel and the reality of the past. Time and Again was a book I inherited from someone, but I can't remember whom. It had a green hard cover, and it sat on the middle shelf of my right hand book case in my room for a while. I didn't read it at the time though. (The hero lives at the Beresford, just after it's built, where later John Lennon would be shot. I always confused the Beresford with the building in Rosemary's Baby, which is, I believe, slightly uptown, on Central Park West.) But had I recognized the name from the story, which turns out to be called "Of the Missing," I would have read it immediately.

The story was magical, and the sense of loss at its end palpable. It was maybe the first story that I ever read that was about itself, about the fact that it ended. The protagonist lost his access to that marvelous other world, and so did I: the story was over.

So of course when I saw the story again -- I only looked it up in my student's book because I saw the author's name, not because I recognized the title -- I was slightly disconcerted. I had to check to make sure it was the same story (it was), but only as cursorily as possible, since I know that if I reread it now, I'd lose its magic forever, more conclusively even than its hero loses his access to that other world.

posted by william 4:29 PM
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I remember that Larry Sedgewick could belch at will. I couldn't understand how he did it, and asked him to explain. He couldn't explain, and he couldn't understand how someone could be unable to.

posted by william 6:46 PM
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I remember, thanks to George W.S. Trow's "Collapsing Dominant" in Within the Context of No Context, which brought them back to me, the stencils on the sidewalks of New York that said "Pray for Rosemary's baby." I didn't know -- who did? -- that it was a movie at the time. It seemed like some vaguely Catholic cult. Which was what it was supposed to seem like. Then when it turned out to be one, I read the book (as usual!). The movie ads gave Mia Farrow a lot of other-worldly, saintly, even Avila-like prestige.

posted by william 3:52 PM
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I remember a kid with a bite plate (I don't remember his name). He could remove and take it out with his tongue, displaying it by turning his head around. It was disgusting, the sort of negative space version of my grandparents' taking their dentures out. And then of course he was young and they were old. In fact he was younger than we were but was able to disgust us -- and so he had power over us.

posted by william 6:42 PM
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I remember going down with my parents and maybe the Hoges and their parents one snowy evening into the playground at Riverside Park to make snowmen. The snow had stopped and the night was clear, with that odd clarity that comes at darkness when the sky is finally black but the ground is white so it's luminous all over. I knew about snowmen, from cartoons, but I'd never made a real one. I think they must have been refencing the playground, since I recall that we went down the sledding hill which forms such a feature of the landscape of my early memories straight into the playground. I was surprised how easy it was to roll the snowballs into the snowman's body. And the adults -- the Hoges or whoever they were -- really knew what they were doing. They'd brought coal! From where? And a carrot! And they wound a scarf around the snowman, and put a cap on its head. And it held a stick, somehow. It looked just like the snowmen in cartoons. It was amazing that rolling up that anonymous, featureless snow could produce something so like its own simulacrum. I mean the snow was still that anonymous thing, that visual hum, that it always was. But now the vast extent to which that substance could reach became somehow clearer: the most familiar, friendly, artificial, indoor thing -- the snowman on TV -- could be reduced to the pure blank exteriority of snow. Snow was at the base of everything.

posted by william 8:24 PM
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I remember that I assumed that my parents knew that I was smoking, and that they were wisely not challenging me. I smoked so much: how could they not know? I was impressed by their wisdom (though I don't know if this wise silence would really have been effective; but it still seemed like the right Ward Cleaver response). But then they found some cigarettes in my pocket -- English Ovals! what a fool I was -- and they hit the roof. I'm not sure that was a wise response either, especially since it meant that they were so much less insightfully aware of what I was doing than I'd thought.

posted by william 7:22 PM
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I remember that I looked like Jerry Fall. When I changed schools in tenth grade, everyone at my new school, especially the athletic coaches, asked me whether I was related to him. He'd graduated the previous year. I think he was a football star. I didn't know whether to be flattered -- or anxious that I couldn't live up to him. I came down on the side of anxiety. People seemed to imagine I'd play football, which wasn't even the remotest of possibilities. In tenth grade, people who've graduated are like people who've died. I'd never met Jerry Fall and so coming to school after he was gone was like becoming aware of a historical figure (like Calvin Hill, who'd also gone to my school, and who was a historical figure). It was odd to be compared to him -- it was like being compared to the long-dead. (Of course he was just in college somewhere, but even now it's hard to believe that he was alive, present in the world, perhaps nearby.) I wonder now whether this was something I was particularly sensitive to because of my being named after my uncle, killed on Biak in 1944.

posted by william 3:59 PM
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I remember that in older hospital rooms the windows are open to the fresh air even in winter. I remember visiting my grandmother once at Columbia-Presbyterian and liking the way the windows were open six inches on the bottom, but the draft prevented by a glass baffle, so that right by the window there was a kind of coolness rising between the baffle and the opening muffled and insulated by the lovely warmth rising from the steam radiator just below the window: the warmth and coolness each making the other feel more precious and luxurious. I liked the marble and stone of the old building, and the high ceilings and tiled floors. Not that I would have wanted to stay there. But if I'd been sick, it would have been the room I wanted.

posted by william 3:30 PM
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I remember my parents' friend Ken Boyer, who was an interior decorator. He lived in Long Island, eventually moving in to a servants' bungalow next door to us. But he drove a Rolls Royce. He was friends with the pianists Whittemore and Lowe. (One of them was a pianist, anyhow: I don't quite remember how they performed together. Baldwin featured them in their competing-with-Steinway ads: "Whittemore and Lowe's accompanist.") My parents met them through him, as well as several other members of the gay intelligentsia. Ken Boyer got on very well with my sister. He struck me as very effiminate, his boyfriend -- Raoul! -- not. Raoul was maybe from Brazil. He was a doctor. His English was bad: I doubt he practiced here. One day I took Raoul and some other friend of theirs out in my boat. Or maybe it was Dr. Taylor, a confirmed heterosexual MD. At a discrete place Raoul made me stop, since he "had to go pipi in the water." ("PiPI" was how he pronounced it.) He pissed a nice lovely arc off the side of the boat. I had somehow expected that a gay man would be as embarrassed to piss in front of other males as I would be in front of girls. But it was all interestingly unexceptional.

posted by william 8:56 PM
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I remember worn coins. In particular I remember how worn dimes might get, so that you couldn't tell the difference (especially on the reverse) between Roosevelt and Mercury dimes (with their three torches). Once the zinc-copper coins came in (I remember being fascinated by the brand new band of copper in the milling of the dimes and quarters!) they got replaced faster; but it was still possible to find worn pennies, especially the pre-1959 wreath ones. But then pennies started being coined out of zinc instead of copper (when copper came to more than a penny a penny-weight -- I wrote about the penny shortage during high school here -- scroll down to April 1, 2002). Since a worn silver dime had less silver than a new one, and since a new one was supposed to be made of roughly ten cents worth of pre-inflationary silver, it was more cost-effective to use old coins. Melt a hundred old dimes and you might only have silver for 98 new ones. But now the metal isn't worth the paper its printed on, so we get shiny but worthless new specii all the time. But I miss those friendly coins, comfortable somehow like the old shoes my feet were then growing too fast ever to have experienced.

posted by william 3:26 PM
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