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 Thom Gunn (not personally, but his great great poetry).

posted by william 11:25 PM
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I remember that baseballs were also strange and exciting, as compared with softballs. I remember my father introducing me to softball, and my disappointment, and then surprise when this big soft ball turned out to be pretty hard and hard to catch, and not so child-designed as its name suggested.

posted by william 11:06 PM
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I remember certain words had a near-charismatic force, like the tremendous word tackle in "tackle football." We almost never played tackle -- to scary, too rough. Once when I did I was amazed by how hard you got slammed when you were tackled. The Kennedys were famous for playing touch -- I remember two-handed touch and one-handed touch -- but tackle was the transcendent thing. Later I think first cigarettes and then deconstruction gave the same thrilling feeling.

posted by william 7:45 PM
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I remember classified ads in The Times, and also I think the International Herald Tribune, that read: "My wife, ______, having left my bed and board, I no longer am responsible for any debts contracted by her. Signed, ______." There'd always be one, sometimes two or three. I found these fascinating: where they legal? What if you failed to read it and lent her money -- how was this fair to you? (The print was so tiny.) Was the husband sad? Angry? Was the purpose to embarrass the wife? Was that why he named her? Was she being represented as someone who went into debt? And was the husband unhappy or not? He certainly had enough presence of mind to place the ad. I wanted to know the psychological circumstances in which someone would engage in this ritual. And also to somehow plumb the fact that these circumstances were stereo-typed, that every day this happened between two or three people, with different last names, different ethnicities (as indicated by the last names), but that it was universal. And I also wondered whether they spontaneously kept hitting on this formula, or whether they were copying each one his predeccessor, so that maybe the fact that these ads existed was self-sustaining, every abandoned husband thinking he was supposed to post one on the model of the ones already posted. I didn't quote get the exact nature of the authority or custom that governed and regulated the placement of these ads.

posted by william 5:45 AM
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I remember Woody Woodpecker's laugh, in the song. I remember it because I just saw (on Boingboing) that the guy who did it, Harry Babbitt, just died at 90 (his interesting obituary here). I always thought, when I thought about it at all, that it was the cartoon character who provided the laugh.

posted by william 7:03 AM
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I remember things that I saw on cartoons way before I saw them in real life. Some I was surprised really existed, like fly strips hanging from the lamp. But I also saw mousetraps, and mouseholes, and even, I think, mice in cartoons before I saw any real ones.

posted by william 1:05 AM
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I remember TV dinners. In that pre-microwave age (yes, people had "radar ranges" just as they had color TVs, but we didn't, and they weren't standard) TV dinners came in aluminum trays and were covered with foil. They were fun to eat, although no one ever liked the hot apple sauce. When my parents didn't come home for dinner I used to sit in the pantry on the step-ladder, watching the little portable TV there and eating my TV dinner. My downtown grandparents had a TV tray, or what I thought was one -- maybe it was just a little side table -- which I thought of as perfect for putting the TV dinner down on. I think I usually ate Salisbury Steak.

posted by william 8:26 AM
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I remember Mrs. Russler, one of the Hebrew School teachers (and who reminded me a lot of my uptown grandmother, although I hadn't been in her class yet) giving a stern talk at some event, some extraordinary symposium, one afternoon, taking Lord Snowden to task for his claim that Jews were probably genetically endowed to be intellectually superior. I was surprised that she was against this idea -- who wouldn't want to be genetically superior? But she was fierce, and it was neat to have this experience of intellectual surprise. She was obviously right, and I believed her, and yet I'd assumed completely that she would take the opposite tack -- partly because the opposite tack would provide a reason to believe her: she was Jewish, she was smarter. This is the earliest experience I can remember of a kind of intellectual thrill in being convinced of the superiority of a new idea.

posted by william 11:49 PM
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I remember the little opaque plastic eye-shields that you would put over your eyes like pince-nez to lie under the sun and tan. They were improbably slight, but they kept the sun out, though you could see red at the rims of your closed eyes. I liked lying with them: they looked really neat when my mother (and others) used them. I remember that I thought the word was prince-nez (with an "r") until maybe college. I remember Natty Bumpo saying that even a blind man could tell the direction of the sun, I thought (and think) in the same way that I could tell it through closed eyes, because of the translucency of the eye-lid when struck full on by the sun. But he might have meant only that you could tell it by feel. I remember Peter Graves on Mission Impossible getting opaque eye-implants so that he could go under cover as a (particular) blind man, and not reveal his sightedness through involuntary reflex. The villain holds a match up to his face and Graves says, "Even a blind man can feel heat, Mr.____." And I remember another wonderful Mission Impossible in which they convince someone he's on a moving train leaving the country, but it's done in a barn with filmed scenery and a shaking mechanism -- a simulation, just as though it were in a film or TV studio.

posted by william 12:25 AM
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I remember that a trinket you always used to get, in gum machines and party favor bags and purim loot, and carnivals, was a bubble level -- an inch long, yellow plastic and the bubble in the water. I didn't see the point (though Hugh Cramer explained how they worked to me), and couldn't do anything with them, except hypnotize myself moving the bubble around. And I didn't like the bubble, which I read as aesthetic imperfection, like the unevenness of training wheels. But I guess that actually levelling something would so centralize the bubble that it would get close to aesthetic satisfaction. Capillary action and friction prevented those small levels from working right, though, just as they compasses we also got as trinkets never pointed in the same direction -- again because of friction and inertia. I disliked that fact too.

posted by william 8:56 AM
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I remember having to write about an embarrasing moment at the beginning of the school year -- maybe in seventh grade. I wrote about seeing a woman naked through the window of her hotel room in Bellagio, which I thought I mentioned here, but can't find now. My sister and I were eating on the terrace in Bellagio, and I looked up to see a woman I saw often on the beach, saw often lying face down on her towel, reading (including The Autobiography of Malcolm X, her bathing suit strap undone to give her back an even tan, come out of the bathroom naked. She saw me see her and a look of horror crossed her face as she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her, then approached the window to close the blind. I didn't see this part because I looked away, horrified myself, and didn't glance at her window again. I wanted to eat dinner quickly, and get away before she came out. I had visions of her talking to the dinner-jacketed head-waiter I liked so much, and his looking at me with reproachful surprise. I remember the scene and also remember remembering it when I wrote about the embarrasing moment, in which I described being "afraid she would sue." My teacher or my parents or both were amused and impressed by this phrase. and by the whole incident, and their amusement, a couple of months after the event, decathected it for me. It was really interesting to have this tense interior adventure come out so much after the fact and get defused.

posted by william 3:57 PM
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I remember sitting on the subway once and watching three toughs stride in. They walked purposefully to the middle of the car, leaned over a bunch of people sitting on the bench there, and slid the windows down. Then they strode out of the car -- all this in the interval that the door was open. This seemed odd, but then when the doors closed and the train started moving they reappeared on the platform and with a whoop reached in and scrunched the hair and hats of those sitting below the open window. I couldn't help grinning -- with pleasure? with relief? I'm not sure. It turned out to be so mild a version of delinquency.

I remember people who knew people whose brothers were JDs (juvenile delinquents).

posted by william 5:55 AM
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I remember walking down West End once, a block or so North of where I'd been doored (on the East side of the street) when a girl about my age smiled at me. I think I was smiling too, but either because that was my perpetual mask or because of something private. But she smiled back! And that was the first thing I noticed about her. It was a lovely moment. I remember in connection with that getting self-conscious about eye-contact on the street, and then reading somewhere that in the U.S. approaching pedestrians maintained eye-contact till they were about eight feet from each other, at which point they looked down. This was helpful when I got self-conscious, mainly because I was struck or attracted by the person approaching.

I also remember the opposite: getting involved in staring contests on the subway -- usually they were one-way. I'd read somewhere in a novel of someone who was frankly at ease with himself and didn't look away, and I liked getting strangers to look away first. Since they weren't even thinking that this was a staring contest, they usually did, although I think also that you're aware of a kind of timed and cued agreement to look away. One night, in the bus to Long Island (I don't remember why I was taking the bus out: my mother might have been there for the month, while my father was staying in the city) I got involved in a staring contest with a guy in his thirties. He wouldn't look away. He was very tough. He got angry. He rebuked me. But I was within my rights! I wouldn't look away, but he got scarier and scarier. Finally I did, and then he explained, with some vehemence, that challenging people like that was a very stupid thing to do. I don't think I did after that.

I remember another time going to the city from Long Island on the train and smoking. Once I got away from my parents I could smoke. On the platform I heard a guy yel, "Watch your cigarette, fuck!" I wondered what he was talking about. "Yeah, you, fuck!" He was yelling at me. Apparently I'd given a jaunty swing to my cigarette-holding arm and came too close to his child. These are morphing into memories of rebuke, but this one was different in kind. He wasn't being helpful to me. It wasn't to improve my behavior or the impression that I made on people, or my chances in life, that he was rebuking me. He was protecting his kid, and expressing his sheer hatred for me. And I was just a kid myself! This was the poisonous version of the first time a mother told her toddler not to "bother the man" -- meaning me.

posted by william 10:07 AM
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I remember that today, April 13, is Beckett's birthday, Jefferson's birthday, and Linda R.'s birthday. And she had my phone-number permuted. You'd think we were made for each other. But we weren't.

posted by william 6:15 AM
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I remember riding my bike North on West End Avenue once and being doored. Luckily the window of the door was open (in those pre-air-conditioning-as-standard-item days), and I went over the handlebars and through the window, not into it. The driver was veru apologetic. To me it was a medium-sized deal.

posted by william 12:02 PM
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I remember that they were searching for a rare heavy element that had never been found (or synthesized) in Russian stained glass windows, when I was a child. The idea was that this element might be stable, unlike other superheavy elements, and that the medieval Russians might have used it instead of lead. I was surprised there was lead in these windows. But I loved the science fiction idea that the medieval artists might have access to some atomic age materials. I don't know what became of these investigations.

posted by william 12:27 PM
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I remember that my uptown grandmother would assign my grandfather the business of leading the Seder -- the blessing over the Matzoh, the (very minimal) reading from the Haggadah, and I think the carving of some of the meat. This was an event because my grandfather was usually content to follow her lead, and she was unusually intent on leading. She ran everything, and so it was always with some surprise that I saw him running the Seder. The only other time he seemed to have independent initiative at their house was when he was playing bridge, a game my grandmother didn't play. Otherwise he was content to live through her offices. I never knew quite what to think during Seders. Luckily Vlado Hertz usually came too, and he was expert (on Seders and so many other things) so he would pretty much take over. I think the Seder that I'm actually picturing now, with some surprise (although I'm not sure if the surprise is from now or from then) is one that Vlado didn't come to: it was just the family. (My downtown grandfather was much more expert, and insisted much more on his own perogatives.)

posted by william 7:17 AM
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I remember idioms my family used, of which I wasn't sure whether they were just ours or part of general idiomatic English. In particular I rememner that we would be allowed some indulgence because it was "a special occasion," and that my mother would often rebuke my father for making something "a federal case." I think, now, these actually were idioms of the time (like "having company"), but I'm not absolutely certain. Another one was the one I associate most with my downtown grandmother, but which my parents also used: they would ask, "Did you make a duty?" meaning had I defecated? And shit was "duty," as in "there's some duty in the toilet." I wonder, now, just this minute, whether that's where "doo-doo" comes from? (I remembe learning the term "BM" from the Hoges, which I quickly discovered was the more common terminology.) Maybe duty was also an idiom of the time? But an atrocious one, and one that ruined my reading of 1) Kant and 2) Wordsworth (his "Ode to Duty"). Also "dutiful" and "beautiful" are so easily misapprehended for each other that at some archaic level my aesthetic categories got strangely mixed up.

posted by william 8:10 AM
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I remember that Bill Rodgers, or maybe it was Frank Shorter, trained at marathon length, when everyone else trains at eighteen to twenty miles. I remember that Jerry Koosman used to lose five pounds of water whenever he pitched a complete game.

posted by william 12:37 AM
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I remember the slight surprise I felt at the arbitrary relation between my friend Freddy Cooper who played softball with us and who was best friends with Peter Obstler, and James Fenimore Cooper. I never quite thought of the latter as a "Cooper," the middle name counting as well, but certainly Cooper was part of his name. I remember also trying repeatedly to read The Spy which was just too boring, despite the prefection promised by the combination of James Fenimore Cooper and a spy novel.

posted by william 12:24 AM
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I remember the crickets on Abbey Road and not realizing that they were on the record and not outside the house the evenings I played it. It wasn't till one winter night in college, when the sound of summer crickets was utterly incongruous, that I figured out the truth.

posted by william 12:43 AM
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I remember that my mother always asked for sugar cones. My father was fine with wafers. I also liked sugar cones, but didn't really like to ask. I remember also that when we had ice-cream at home as a treat (often when my father was away and my mother was trying to compensate with a touch of festivity, like that of eating TV dinners) we'd have ice cream on Comet sugar cones. Do they still exist? It seemed a little odd that cones and cleansers had the same name, but I shrugged it off, as one did at that age.

posted by william 9:12 AM
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I remember that when either of my parents was away for the night (usually my father, who'd go to Chicago, that fabulous place, once a month) I would sleep in their twin bed. (As I've mentioned, they had separate beds, connected with a hook and eye latch that my father would unhook to separate the beds in order to make them.) I remember that feeling of security you had when everyone was home and the chores and activities of the evening were over, and only lamps were on anymore -- no overhead lights, no TV's, no dishwashers, etc. And how my father's or mother's absence provided an interesting variation on this security: the perfectly made bed that I was about to sleep in, lit with lamplight, perfectly smooth, unmussed by my playing and frolicing during the day, was a perfect version of how everything was in its place. Being able to sleep in the empty, cool, clean, fresh bed was one of the pleasures of their being away, and made it fine.

I also remember some time that my mother was away for a few days or went on several trips in a row when my father told me after a day or two to go back to my own bed. I was shocked by this, and hurt, but he insisted (irritated by my unhappiness). It's clear to me now that my father, amateur Freudian (he had a girlfriend whose father was a psychoanalyst when he was a teenager; the father impressed him a great deal) was disturbed by the oedipal configurations he foresaw developing. For me, this might be my first memory of a realization that home wasn't quite home forever.

posted by william 6:19 AM
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