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 Expos's first season, which was the first season I was a baseball fan -- a Mets fan: the Yankees were ludicrously bad in that era. And the Mets' first game was against the Expos. I remember the Mets always won their first game, and then did terribly after that. (But it might be actually the next season that their first game was against the Expos, and that they lost it.) I remember thinking I understood their logo, until a kid came into school one day with an Expos hat on, and I couldn't resolve the logo into ME (Montreal Expos) at all. I was first taken aback that it was multi-colored. TVs were black and white, or at least the local stations were. I didn't realize, later that season, that the Mets and the Yankees had different caps: not only the slightly different dispositions of the NY's but also that for the Mets it was orange, so that Mets caps were the colors of New York State (as were the license plates too: blue and orange), whereas Yankees caps were (and are) navy blue and white. I had a Yankees cap (but why?) which I wore to a softball game once, thinking it was indistinguishable from a Mets cap, but all my friends cried, "Yankees! Kill him!"

I remember the Yankees wear pinstripes at home. I remember my father showing me the retired numbers in Yankee stadium: Di Maggio, Ruth, Gherig.

I remember the Washington Senators, and Frank Howard -- their great and pointless slugger.

posted by william 7:32 AM
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I remember that there are 23 hours 59 minutes and 56 seconds in the day. I remember hearing this, or maybe hearing 23 hours 56 minutes, from Peter Rogers, who corrected someone's answer to the teacher's question, "How many hours in a day?" I was surprised but not overly: why should the day be exactly twenty-four hours long? And the teacher knew just what he was talking about (sidereal time, as it happens). I recollect this happening at P.S. 166 though, and I didn't meet Peter until I went to Franklin in sixth grade. So either it wasn't Peter or it wasn't P.S. 166.

posted by william 1:59 PM
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I remember needing to fiddle with vertical and horizontal holds on the TV. Somehow I liked the horizontal Charlie-Brown zigzags a lot better than the vertical cycling, even though you could still see what was going on in the latter. I think I liked those angular abstractions.

posted by william 11:17 PM
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I remember being impressed and surprised by my downtown grandfather's spending the whole of Yom Kippur day (and the evening before) in the synagogue (not "Shul" because he was Sephardic), praying and understanding the adult version of the ceremonies apparently as well as the other people of his generation. (I remember there was some issue about Tallises too, wherein the Sephardic and Ashkenazi rituals differed. I think maybe the Sephardim didn't all put them on on Yom Kippur; maybe just the cantor. I also remember the cantor at B'nai Jeshrun, who knew a lot but was sort of powerless to perform real ritual, so I thought, like a vice-president.) I remember that my downtown grandfather wouldn't break fast till very late. I remember once being struck by a wave of weakness while waiting for the elevator near the end of the fast, and my father telling me to eat -- but I took it a lot less seriously than he did. I remember that I weighed about 105 pounds at the time, because I weighed myself near the end of the fast, and I was surprised at the two or three pound difference the fast made. I remember that the delicious yeasty chocolate coffee-cake babka my grandmother made was often marred by being burnt at the bottom, so you couldn't eat one of the delicious buttery layers of pastry. I remember trying to think of all the wrongs done to me so I could forgive them, and also the wrongs I had done, and not doing well remembering a lot of either. Things have changed since.

posted by william 7:50 AM
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I remember the little silver-handed, pointing-finger pointer always up on the podium for reading the Torah, although I don't recall anyone actually ever using it. I got to hold the Torah open from time to time (there are I know names for these implements and offices but I never knew what they were), to be one of the kids gravely head-bent around the podium as the older, more knowledgeable kids or young adults did the reading. And I loved that pointer and wanted to use it or at least see it used. But I never did. I remember the velvet case for the Torah. I remember that if you made a mistake in transcribing it (I remember all Torahs were hand-transcribed) you had to start again at the beginning. I remember the ark and the ritual of taking the Torah out and putting it back. But I loved that little silver hand most.

posted by william 5:06 PM
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I remember "Pantrice is the thing, That you'll feel skin-sational in, da da da da da da da, It's skin, it's skin, it's skin-sensational!" Pantyhose. I think Gentlemen prefer Haines came a little later.

posted by william 10:54 AM
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I remember Mrs. Park, our French teacher, telling us that in France there was no school on Thursdays, but that there was school Saturdays. On Thursdays I thought this was a good idea, but on the whole I preferred having the weekend in a chunk. I was reminded of this reading Hegesias's entry about not having school Wednesdays; things seem to have changed after 1968.

posted by william 1:22 PM
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I remember laughing and laughing when my father read me "You are old, Father William." Part of the laughter was that the name William might be applied to an old man. Part that a poem could be so funny. (He'd read me mainly Kipling.) Or maybe irreverent: that a printed poem should be irreverent, and that my parents should explain and approve of its irreverence. And part of it was how funny the poem itself was.

posted by william 1:45 PM
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I remember how surprised and delighted I was when we started hearing about geology and learned about bedrock. Like everyone else, I knew the term from The Flintstones -- "from the, Town of Bedrock, they're a page right out of history" -- but didn't know it was something real. I remember that bedrock was often about twenty feet beneath the soil, and for some reason this made me think, then, of the sandbox in Riverside Park on the hill around 93rd street, maybe because I thought the hill was twenty feet high, maybe because I'd once thought you could dig down to China through the sand in the sandbox, and now it turned out you'd be stopped after twenty feet.

posted by william 11:21 PM
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I remember that along with desert boots another thing that the cooler kids had were knapsacks instead of the hand-me-down briefcases most of us used. (I remember the tongue-strap that held the briefcase shut, and how I would always overpack it so that it would compress on top when I tried to shut it, how the tongue let you leave a gap if you used the loosest setting, and how the briefcase would start coming apart at the bottom, even though the stitching seemed so tough.) So we went to a store in Riverhead to get a knapsack (no one called them backpacks then), and the salesman offered me a "rucksack" which I absolutely refused. It was too big and it had this weird Lederhosen like name, and it seemed that once again I was to be balked by some ersatz substitute, like Hush Puppies instead of desert boots. Eventually I got something more to my liking, but not just the thing.

posted by william 8:44 AM
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I remember my yellow long-sleeved soccer goalie jersey and the double zero I had stiched on it; a cool number for me ever since my father explained (slightly misexplained) the puzzling 0 and 00 on the roulette wheel. (He slightly misexplained it by saying the house always won if the ball landed on them; but in fact you can of course bet on those numbers.)

posted by william 10:03 PM
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I remember that a plane, an Air Force or Army Air Corps military vehicle, once crashed into the Empire State Building (in the late forties?) killing the pilot, I think, and no one else. Three years ago I called the Department office with some question on my cell phone, and the administrator asked whether I'd heard that a couple of planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I assumed they were light planes and that this would be a fairly minor event. And when the tops of the buildings collapsed, I didn't realize that they'd brought the whole of the towers down with them. I assumed everyone had escaped, more or less, and didn't realize the scale of the thing till later that day. Then I thought of the saying "nine-days wonder," which I'd learned from an Orson Welles movie, and wondered myself whether this would be a nine-days wonder or whether it would be more significant than that. It was. I watched the Golf Channel that night, or maybe a day or two later, and found it very soothing.

posted by william 11:09 PM
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I remember that in the Hering's bathroom in Stormville, which I think had a shaggy toilet-seat cover, they had a shelf which had what looked like Leaves of Grass in it. But when you tried to read it, it turned out to be a metal container with fake pages. Its cover was a lawn-greenish. I don't know whether it mentioned Whitman on the cover. This was the first time I'd ever heard of Leaves of Grass, so I didn't know what I was missing. But I remember liking the title, and later I think I associated Whitman and "leaves" with John Greenleaf Whittier.

posted by william 2:44 PM
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I remember when our teacher said that she had a friend who was a real Indian, and that her friend would come in. A Cherokee! And she did come in, wearing ordinary clothes. She turned out to be a teacher too. She was interesting, but not of course what anyone expected. This was mildly disappointing, mildly because it turned out that the world (our world) wasn't so various as one thought, and lacking variety all disappointments could be was mild. I found the Cherokee teacher likeable. I wondered a little about how much time it mattered to her that she was Cherokee.

posted by william 9:49 PM
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I remember da-DUM, da-DUM, "Sooner or later, you'll own Generals," sung by harmonized voices in which the baritone predominated. They were tires. I never did, I don't think.

posted by william 6:49 AM
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I remember my soccer cletes. They were black with yellow trim of some sort. I remember the pleasure of getting wet, grassy dirt out after playing, the way it would come off in clumps and sheets, rather like the Elmer's glue I used to peel off my fingers. I remember that you really weren't supposed to walk with them on concrete, though I did. They jarred when you walked, and I remember that strange rolling stride they made you take when you walked on cement or asphalt (the walk of an athlete), and the tap-dancing click they made. They were very light, and easily misshapen, but I loved them.

posted by william 10:58 PM
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I remember a couple of times my father did ride in the passenger seat, when we went with other people. Once I think this was riding up the West Side highway, maybe after he'd sold the Pontiac and we didn't have a car any more. (I think of our family as essentially being carless, although they later bought a car and probably they didn't own one for a total of only five years or so, at the most. They were just the right five years.) And I remember a time that the Georges drove us up into the hills above Lake Como -- I was amazed that they'd brought their car from England. It was right-hand drive, so my father sat where he always sat, but it was now the passenger's seat. It seemed strangely wrong, but strangely ok too.

posted by william 3:49 PM
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I remember the first space walk, when I was at the Franklin School. I remember the photos of the astronauts outside their Apollo (?) capsule. But they were floating, not walking; somehow from the science fiction images that we'd absorbed before that we imagined them walking on the surface of the space ship but not falling even if they were walking upside down. I remember also finding it interesting that they had to be tethered. I seem to recall that one of them lost a hammer and that there was no way to get it back as it slowly floated away, just out of reach.

posted by william 8:42 AM
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I remember that my aged cousin, Jack Zadikov's wife, I think, was a "reporter-researcher" for Time Magazine. I used her office and some access she had once, for a school report I did, but can't remember anymore about it. "Reporter-researcher" turned out, I think, to be a term like "sales-associate" at Walmart: a way to gussy up menial labor. I think she was a fact-checker. I mentioned her to Richard Clurman, my friend Michael's father, who was then (a?) vice-president of Time-Life (he of the endless telegram), but he didn't seem impressed.

posted by william 4:53 PM
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I remember ping-pong diplomacy. And I remember a lot about ping-pong: that you're not allowed to touch the table with your other hand (or you lose the point); that you have to toss the ball or maybe let it drop at least an inch or two (or something) when you serve it. I remember the way you lean the racket-wing on the ball when you leave the table, each reciprocally keeping the other stable. I remember two kinds of rackets (I'm sure this is a misnomer): the pipped paddle with the same friction-producing surface that my goalie gloves were covered with when I played soccer, and the three-ply padded paddle that somehow seemed more evocative of ease. I remember that the padded paddle seemed to have a slightly more lacquered grip too, with those stripes on it (corresponding to the tape on a tennis-racket handle holding the leather or whatever twisted round the grip in place). I remember that I could play almost as well left-handed as right-handed. I remember learning the Chinese grip, and picking it up immediately, though it wasn't particularly better (for me) than the American grip I already knew, though my high school classmate Wei Chi was great and used the Chinese grip. And I remember playing strip ping-pong in her basement with Mary C and Jimmy B, an early and gratifying sexual experience. Every game anyone lost, the loser had to take off an item of clothing. Fun to win, fun to lose.

posted by william 1:04 AM
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