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 not understanding why in the story of Goldilocks and the three bears we are told that she was called Goldilocks because of her long blonde hair. I didn't know about locks of hair, and I didn't make the connection between Goldi- and the color gold. I think that it's only much later that you can see that words decompose into more elementary words. For me Goldilocks was a name, pure and simple.

posted by william 2:26 PM
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I remember rusty water. I remember the first time I noticed it, and remember feeling mildly relieved when my mother said, "Oh, that's rusty water; just let the tub run for a while." The water was always rusty when we got back from Europe in August, and I remember thinking of that as part of what it meant to be back in our hot apartment at night, part of the way home had been waiting for us, perdurable, there, steeped in the heat that was now everywhere, as though the heat itself were the accumulation of the time we were away in a magical place. Somehow that accumulation of time, heat, gas fumes and grinding gears from the busses, and rusty water felt like a kind of faithfulness or loyalty on the part of the city, and although I longed to be back in Italy it made me happy all the same.

posted by william 11:08 PM
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I remember Mrs. Yerzley borrowing a cup of sugar. Or maybe my uptown grandmother borrowed it from her. This was the first time that I'd seen such a thing. (Later I think I was sent to borrow an egg from someone by my mother.) But I'd either heard or was informed that neighbors did such things. But I was surprised that Mrs. Yerzley was a "neighbor" since she lived on the sixth floor and my grandmother lived on the first. I' d thought (from the Hoges's living next door) that neigbors had to be contiguous to you. This somewhat challenged my sense of space, or of the relation of people to the space they inhabited.

posted by william 11:46 PM
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I remember my father getting some mothballs once. I was intrigued. I might have thought they were mints. Or maybe later mints looked like mothballs. He put them in some bags of clothes. I remember this as being in the hallway of 7-F. This was one of those adult things, since I didn't think there were any moths around. It was one of those things adults knew it was appropriate to do, unconnected to any cause that I recognized as cause. I don't mean I was even remotely skeptical of the moth balls. It was purely disinterested curiosity.

posted by william 1:24 PM
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I remember the first time I saw a tennis court. I don't remember where it was. I think my parents' friends the Lindenstrauses were around, and maybe the Herings. But I saw the court with my mother. It was early in the morning, shadowy. I think I recall dew. The court seemed overgrown -- long grass by the rusted fence. I believe I recall how cool it all was (which means it must have been a hot summer), and the referee's seat and a bench by the fence at the net for spectators. I had no idea what tennis was -- I just remember the court, the slack net, the white peeling paint on the seat and bench. I think my mother told me that tennis was an adult game, and this might have seemed somewhat odd to me, since I thought of games as the province of children.

posted by william 5:34 AM
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I remember my father's shirts being delivered every week from the laundry. The bell would ring and I would run to the door in excitement, but it would only be a delivery of a box of shirts. But I remember loving the loose blue paper band around each one, which later I would turn into moibius strips; and the cardboard backing that gave them structure. The cardboard was very dark, and when I would fish it out of the trash to draw on -- and I seemed never to learn -- it was too dark for the ink to show, and too pebbled for the lines to be continuous (somehow it was worse than the backing for my mother's legal pads). I remember the curious tactile differences between the soft paper of the band, the softer cloth of the cotton shirts, and the stiff and cold cardboard that backed them.

posted by william 6:06 AM
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I remember various practical jokes from cartoons -- in particular giving someone a hotfoot -- that you never saw in real life. But I do remember one day when the teacher was late, a substitute, I think, and someone decided to put a tack on her seat, like in the comics (maybe in Archie?). After this it's somewhat hazy, but those of us with bad consciences managed to avoid the potential disaster -- either we warned her or we got the tack off before she came in. I don't think we warned her, because somehow we realized -- somewhat to our anxious horror -- that it would have worked. She didn't look at the chair before sitting down. Maybe we put a sticker or tape or a reinforcement or something there and it did stick to her bottom (as I would have thought of calling it). It was shocking to think that we might, if we'd wanted, actually have been able to cause her physical pain.

posted by william 11:21 AM
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I remember, but only with the greatest haziness, Charlie Chan movies. My father and Hugh Cramer knew all about them. I doubt I ever watched one all the way through. I remember something taking place aboard a ship, and Charlie Chan looking severe in close-up. That's about it.

posted by william 8:44 AM
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I remember answering services -- how glamorous they were, how frustrating they were. You thought you'd reached the person you were looking for! "Sorry, this is the answering service." They still exist, but their niche must be very small now, with the ascendency of answering machines and voice-mail.

posted by william 11:40 AM
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I remember how much I loved e e cummings, after Mr. Luke taught us "in just -- / spring;" he liked how the "little lame balloon man" turned into the "goat-footed ballon man." So I read pretty much everything, including i: six non-lectures and what mattered about that were the readings of canonical poetry cummings did (and printed) at the end; for me the most important were the ballads and Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, which I first read there. I remember all this because I remember that The Enormous Room had a kind of privately legendary status for me, and that when I finally got a hold of it I found it unreadable -- all that French! And yet it was probably his best book, I now realize.

posted by william 5:44 AM
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I remember a Batman comic where a check forgery or document forgery was discovered through this counterintuitive insight on Batman's part: two signatures matched exactly, but Batman pointed out that you never sign your name the same way twice so one was a forgery of the other. I found this much more interesting than the idea that no two snowflakes are alike, since signatures were also supposed to be recognizable and consistent. I liked the fact that consistency was not the same thing as replication. (I think this comic affected, for good and ill, how I came to read "Signature Event Context" in grad school.)

posted by william 2:24 PM
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I remember my bright orange parka. (I thought, when my parents announced we were getting one, that it was spelled "parker.") I wore it around a lot, and I remember walking my dog in the rain down to Riverside Park one Saturday. It was capacious, and I had the hood up. In the field we always played softball on were a bunch of guys maybe in their early twenties. I was probably fourteen. They looked vaguely threatening -- they were roistering in the rain, or maybe just loitering in that way that threatening groups loiter. So I kept my distance. One of them saw me and pointed me out to a couple of others. One of them called to me, "Hey baby, come here!" He blew me a kiss and made that swinging embracing lovey-dovey motion that I'm not quite sure I could replicate but which he did very gracefully. They thought I was a girl! Which suggested an easy way out of this predicament: disabuse them. But their mistake was oddly thrilling to me. And so I had what felt like a girlish response to it: I didn't want to disappoint them; I wanted to be nice. So I smiled and shook my hooded head girlishly, and then pulled my dog back up the hill away from them, breaking -- they claimed -- their hearts.

posted by william 7:25 AM
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I remember the posters for In the Realm of the Senses. They were plastered all over the post-no-bills plywood walkway down 28th street near the Fashion Institute of Technology where they were remodelling the building. The walkway was about the last quarter of the block east of Eighth Avenue. I'd get off the subway to go see my downtown grandmother and walk west and pass the posters. For a long time I didn't get what the doll-like object at the center of the poster was. It was a photo of a man holding a smallish doll. Then one day I realized it was his penis, dolled up. It wasn't quite a shock because by then I was so used to seeing that doll that it didn't become radically different when I realized what it was. Rather it seemed a slightly weird thing to be doing with your penis. I was surprised, therefore, that people found the movie, and the whole add campaign aroung it, including that poster, so scandalous. How shocking could it be, if this is what the producers thought would be a shocking poster?

posted by william 12:02 AM
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I remember Cai Glushak. I loved his first name. I liked it that his last name reminded me of goulash, which my family sometimes served and which I thought of as a middle-European inheritance that belonged to the family and not to the culture of my friends at large. (Somewhat later I was mildly surprised that restaurants offered goulash; but I think I'd been prepared for it by seeing Robert Goulet appear as himself -- I didn't know who he was -- on The Lucy Show.) I remember him from second grade. Then later he got taller than I was. He was one of the first people I knew to wear glasses -- he was soft-spoken and with his glasses and his modualted and urbane voice he reminded me of Mr. Peabody. I remember him explicitly twice: standing on line, against an institutional wall somewhere, waiting to get in or to leave: maybe a museum, maybe some unusual corridor in school. And I remember seeing him in Riverside Park one afternoon, just North of the Soldiers and Sailors monument. I always liked him but we were never friends. I also remember Jon Sykes, who might have been there that same afternoon, and who looked just like a blond Dr. McCoy, which was why I liked him. (I believe he was a very decent guy, too.)

posted by william 11:46 PM
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I remember when Hugh and Gloria Cramer explained the facts of life to me, and my father confirmed them (see entry for September 30, 2002) I imagined that you procreated standing up. (After all, fucking was like peeing, as I understood it, at least from the male perspective.) Imagining what it was like I imagined, from a spectator's perspective, the adult stranger I would be when I started doing such things (the adult stranger who would be a parent, a jobholder, etc.) standing on the brown carpet facing his partner in the middle of my room, with the overhead lights on. Our arms were at our sides, out of the way, and of course I had no idea about erections, so I thought again it would be like peeing. It wasn't for another year or two that I became aware of more standard ways of picturing and engaging in sex.

posted by william 7:50 AM
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I remember when you could see things across the world, live, on satellite! I seem to recall the first satellite transmission I saw as being of some Soviet leaders, maybe talking to U.S. leaders. Possibly it had something to do with Kruschev, before he was removed from office. I remember that you could tell these were European leaders because they were wearing hats. My teacher (were we watching this in school?) was very excited that we could see them live. I recall that it was in black and white (of course it was -- all TV was. But this really looked black and white) -- it seemed that we really were watching Europe because of the graininess and the B&W and the hats, all somehow different aspects of the same thing.

posted by william 5:14 PM
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I remember that when The New Yorker came in its brown slip wrapper so too did Commentary. Commentary came once a month, The New Yorker once a week. I always loved slipping The New Yorker out. And once a month I was always disappointed when it turned out to be Commentary instead. The brown wrapping for Commentary was slightly stiffer and its dimensions slightly larger. It wasn't quite as brown nor quite as smooth. So my disappointment was sensory before it was cognitive -- I knew before I knew it that it was only Commentary.

posted by william 4:13 PM
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I remember that playing the oboe does strange things to your brain, and that oboe players are therefore reputed to be weirdos.

posted by william 11:40 AM
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I remember the parkas that were fashionable in seventh grade or so: green (later there was a blue variation) with faux seal fur in the hood, and pockets galore, including one on the upper sleeve of the left arm, where you could put a pen. They were so cool! I was so glad to get one -- late, but not that late. I'm sure they have a name, and occasionaly you still see them around. I just loved them, and everyone I had a crush on seemed to have one.

posted by william 1:37 PM
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I remember various (or was it only one?) International Geophysical Years. (Were they consecutive? Weren't there three in a row?) I remember, at any rate, that one was coming up, and my geography textbook was pleased. I seem to remember as well an international Antarctic year, although maybe the International Geophysical Year that was coming up was devoted to Antarctica. At the time the idea of a year that was International and also Geophysical didn't make sense, but in a way that a lot of interesting things didn't make sense: that is it seemed a very neat, rarefied, institutional entity that I wasn't old enough to understand the workings of. Now I think I don't know what it was at all, except in the crudest sense: a kind of World's Fair of Geophysical science. But what does that mean?

posted by william 10:13 PM
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I remember having to memorize Carl Sandberg's poem "Fog" (was it?). I remember it (misremember it I'm sure) as "The fog comes in on / little cat feet / sits quietly / looking over / harbor and city / and then moves on." Our teacher had very high praise for "little cat feet." I was impressed by the praise: it made me think there was another way of thinking about poems. The line didn't quite get me though, although I didn't admit that to myself then. It still doesn't. But I think our teacher also liked the way "little cat feet" set up "sits," which is good. I liked "The people, yes" much better: that seemed to make Sandberg a real poet. Am I spelling his name right? I remember he wrote that biography of Lincoln. I'm sure I never read him after junior high. But as to "Fog," I remember trying to memorize it, standing in the living room by the stereo, and failing over and over, till my father had me memorize it by one-line increments. Except I think it was actually a different Sandberg poem I was memorizing, after we'd read "Fog" in class. But I don't remember what that different poem was. I think it also had a ship or a harbor of the sea in it. But it was longer than "Fog." I seem to remember also that I first heard about Upton Sinclair in connection with Sandberg: they were both radical muck-rakers interested in Chicago.

posted by william 10:23 PM
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I remember that I didn't know how I was able to swing objects attached to string looped around my finger. I can't even remember what it was I liked swinging (though somehow I have a mental connection to a Venetian blind in my parents' bedroom -- perhaps I was swinging something in front of their window when this question occured to me). But the kind of thing I would swing would be pendants or stones attached to laces or cords. Maybe a compass on a cord or something like that. What I liked was the centrifugal force that kept them going in perfect circles (though I wasn't sure about this) around my finger. I could control what I was swinging, but didn't quite know how. I'd watch my finger, but if I slowed down enough to see what I was doing the object would stop swinging. It was interesting to have this skill whose details I had no command of.

I remember that I learned about centrifugal force from Hugh Cramer. I heard it as "centrificle" force.

posted by william 9:00 PM
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