But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
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
Saturday, December 31, 2005
I remember a song from my record of songs which I played on my orange phonograph: "Sound off!" "ONE TWO" "Sound off!" "THREE FOUR" After that it modulates in my memory to "Three Blind Mice," and then, "Pop goes the weasel," which I think I had on another record.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
I remember that during the last transit strike people driving just stopped and picked people up going their direction, and how odd it was that trust (both ways) should rise in proportion to animosity (between the strikers and the city).
Sunday, December 18, 2005
I remember the first time I remember trying not to fall asleep when I was supposed not to fall asleep. I was babysitting for some people I didn't know so well, on the other side of the building. The children had gone to bed, but it was getting late, and I was lying on the rug in their living room waiting for them to come home. I fell asleep, woke up, determined myself to stay up, fell asleep again, and woke up to their return. I don't know whether they knew that I'd been asleep or not -- and of course it would have been fine if they did; but somehow I didn't know that. I do remember the pleasure of getting paid on the spot, though.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
I remember how many things that I first saw in cartoons turned out to be real. Mice in the house, for example. A lot of them seemed like cartoon inventions. In particular snow-shoes. The large, netted platforms seemed delightfully ridiculous. I remember seeing them in some Warner Brothers cartoon -- I think Daffy Duck. Then the one time I went hunting (failing to hit anything), the cabin we stayed in overnight had snowshoes hanging on the wall. I was really surprised they existed. What else would turn out to be true?
Thursday, December 08, 2005
I remember sitting in Johnny's Big Red Grill, in Ithaca, with several friends when Paul R. came in to say that John Lennon had been shot. Someone had ordered French Fries with vinegar. We got them to go to the news on the bar TV, but that was pretty much all we knew. A couple of hours later we heard that he was dead. The next day I heard that one of the cops taking him to the hospital asked, "Are you John Lennon?" and he groaned and said "Yeah." And then he was DOA.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
I remember seeing prostitutes waiting on corners as I walked uptown on Broadway. I remember one with a white, feathery mantilla, smoking and looking beautiful (probably she wouldn't look beautiful to me now) and authoritative, but without any self-possession. I think that's because they also looked so cold, in the early winter dark, so scantily clad. I don't know how I came to recognize that they were prostitutes. They were there most evenings, but their look of waiting was just like that of people I recognized at the bus-stops and lights. But then one evening I realized that they were prostitutes, and it seemed like the opening of a whole new dimension in the neighborhood. Later my father, I think, said something about how they were bad for the neighborhood, or people didn't want them around, or something, and I couldn't understand that, since all they were doing was standing there, just like anyone else.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
I remember one of those events which to children seem a tragedy. When I was a little girl in Yugoslavia, I dressed like all other little girls (except for Muslim ones). We wore short dresses with a yoke which had a seam across the chest. From the yoke the folds of the dress fell to the hem, without marking the waist. In other words, little girls' dresses were an unglamorous, flatchested version of Empire- style dresses which a Jane Austen heroine might have worn. We also wore lace-up shoes up to the ankle. My mother was particularly insistent that I wear those, thinking that I would end up with thinner ankles when I grew up. I remember having scuffed brown ones for every day and fancy ones consisting of black patent leather at the botton and soft gray leather at the top.
At any rate, when we ran away from Sarajevo for good, in 1941, we first went to Split, on the Adriatic. We rented a room from a widow with two sons, on whom I promply developed a crush. I tended to prefer Drago, the older, who might then have been 19, and whom I considered more interesting and more suitable to my own age of close to 10; but the younger, Miro, aged 15, was also acceptable. My mother had a dress made for me which for the first time marked the waist. I put it on, feeling grown up and glamorous, and looking forward to the admiration of the boys when they got home. My elation was short-lived, though. My mother insisted that I wear my usual lace-up shoes even though, by that time, I had also acquired a pair of shoes like Mary Janes, the height of sophistication. No amount of begging would sway my mother. I think I was too embarrassed to tell her of my sentimental problems and finally had to obey her. I don't think I have ever hated an item of clothing as much as those lace-up shoes which, in my mind, fairly screamed "Child!" I am really amused now by young girls' choice of work boots which look a lot like my old nemesis, though some have platforms.
I remember the pleasure of warming my hands at the tensor lamp. I would come home from the cold outside, and it would already have been dark a while, or at least it felt as though my room had been dark for a long time. In the winter I wouldn't see it in the light after school and the park, but only come home to its darkness, as though the cold were inside my room as well. But I'd turn on the desk lamp, and feel a kind of safety within my room itself in its cone of light. The light would illuminate my hand, first one, then the other, and I liked the feel of time having stopped as I held my hand under the light, and felt the warmth of the light itself in the chill air of my room. Time meant something like the oscillating rhythm of the warming and cooling of the ambience, the radiators steaming and changing the atmosphere. But my room was just chilly, and yet my hand was warming in the constancy of the light, and I loved the sense of light radiating implacably outward from the lamp, with no sense of modulation, therefore of time at all.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
I remember my world map jigsaw, and being especially fascinated by the new water bodies, or rather, by their names: Bering, Euphrates, Sutlej, Gibraltar. I remember the watermark on the puzzle that said something to the effect of Britannia Rules the Waves. I remember being surprised that Tunisia was not in Australia, and that Singapore was not in India, because that's where the names seemed to belong. I remember looking for a place named Peking, and thinking it was a product of my imagination when I didn't find it.
Monday, November 28, 2005
I remember the servant's buzzer - a flat button under the dining-room table and rug. The idea was that the hostess would discretely push on it with her foot signaling to the maid to come and clear the table. The only thing was, mom could never find the thing with her foot, so after dancing around with her leg under the table she would eventually give up and dive down to locate it...
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
I remember my imaginary cousin Zvezdana (Stella, roughly). I did not invent her. She was invented by my maternal uncles, all of whom were childless and one of whom, Uncle Miko, was not even married before WWII. An elaborate story was concocted about Zvezdana. She was supposed to be the daughter of my Uncle Mento and his wife Rahela, who lived in Belgrade. Zvezdana was a paragon of beauty, intelligence and virtue. She was a close friend of King Peter, who was a little younger than we, and she was a frequent visitor to the royal palace. I never for a moment believed the story - I was a precocious seven-eight year old - but I tried to catch my uncles in a lie. Every time I asked why Zvezdana never accompanied her parents when they came to visit my grandparents in Travnik, I was told my cousin had important engagements back in Belgrade involving royalty.
My father hated this game. He was particularly sensitive to cruelty of any kind and he worried that I would feel inadequate in comparison with my cousin.
The game came to an end when we were together again at my grandparents' house ( I think that was the very last time we were all gathered there before war broke out). My uncles were cradling in their arms a bundle meant to look like a child in swaddling clothes with a melon for a head on which a face had been drawn and on top of which a cap had been placed. I took a look at "Zvezdana" and swatted the melon, which fell to the ground and broke.
I remember our school van was stopped by a bunch of rioters after the Ayodhya Babri Masjid destruction. (I think there was a bandh that day, but it wasn't declared till later in the morning.) It was close to the local mosque... we shouldn't have taken that route in the first place. There was only one Muslim girl among us. I was surprised that she was as scared as everyone else. I don't know if I thought that the crowd would know her religion and not hurt her, or if somehow, I saw her as belonging to the attackers' side, and it was them against us, and it was hence unexpected that she was sharing our fear.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
I remember what might be my first datable memory, my father running around the apartment carrying me on his shoulders; the memory modulates from a tail-end of delight to terror as he threatens to dump me in the washing machine. I start screaming, and my mother realizes before my father that I am really afraid and stops him. He's surprised. She comforts me. I feel obscure (but obvious) guilt to this day.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
I remember the noon siren, which I posted about a little three years ago. You could hear it everywhere, and to me it seemed to be coming from the East, always Parkwards from wherever I was on ninetieth street. (I remember always hearing it on 90th and West End.) It was somehow the sound of the unity of the city. I had (and have) no idea where the sound was coming from: there were no klaxons anywhere that I could see, nor did I think to look for them. It was just part of what filled the air in New York at noon, everywhere, indiscriminately, part of the sense of general, calm, all-embracing security and method and purpose and benign convenience. I miss the noon sirens.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
I remember how I liked chewing on the laces of my mitt, standing in the outfield, bored. I think I got the posture from Freddie Cooper. The laces were leathery, salty from sweat, but maybe brackish is the better word, as though most of the intense taste you'd expect from leather and sweat and mud had somehow leached out of them, and you had to get them saturated with saliva to feel that they were real in the mouth. But this was sort of like a highly attenuated, reasonable, acceptable version of what it might be like to chew on your own shoe laces. I remember that the taste was insipid enough that texture and resistance probably played the biggest role in the oral pleasure of chewing on the laces.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
I remember that a boy lived in the apartment across the courtyard from us and he had a swing in his doorway and we would watch from our kitchen window as he swung out of his room and back in again. He had blond, curly hair and symbolized a "real" family that did things like put swings up in apartments for their kids (I had another friend whose brother had a loft-bed with a fire pole you could slide down!!).
Once my grandmother had been out west and bought me a suede fringed Indian dress, beaded headband with feather, beaded necklace etc. I sat and peacefully ate my Fruit-Loops adornded in my new garb when I noticed the curly-headed boy spying on me across the canyon of the courtyard with a cowboy hat and pistol aimed at me! Yet another proof of his superiority.
I ran out of the kitchen, upset -- how long had he been watching?
Monday, November 07, 2005
I remember that my father kept copies of the Times with significant (banner) headlines in a big drawer in the middle of one of the cabinets we had; later when he got my mother new book shelves they went into a big box in the closet. When they were more easily accessible I used to like reading them. He had the assassination of JFK, I think the moon-landing, although that might be wrong since we were in Italy at the time, and various other signal events. I don't think anything about the Cuban missile crisis. And he had the newspapers from the days we were born. I think the headline on the day I was born was that Eisenhower was reelected and that the Suez crisis was going full tilt, with Anthony Eden either blustering or withdrawing under U.S. pressure. I was born in a Wednesday.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
I remember that both my grandmothers sewed. But my downtown grandmother used a Singer sewing machine (which I would always associate Isaac Bashevis Singer with) at our house, with two pedals. I never understood how it worked. She had a sewing kit which stayed at our house too, large and oval, metal with red flowers, not roses I think, on a field of black. My uptown grandmother had a smaller sewing kit, metal and square, turquoise green and textured. My downtown grandmother used pins with colorful plastic heads: I still associate pins like that with her. I can almost hear her voice when I see them.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
I remember my mother explaining porcupines to me. Very impressive. I think there was a picture of one in the book we were reading. For some reason I liked them -- maybe the tenderness of her explanation. (Not unlike her explanation of the heffalump. "A...Heffalump!" she used to say.) Porcupines were timid and fearful, and that was their one protection. She didn't claim that they could dart their quills, which misinformation might have made all the difference.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
I remember November is the most disagreeable month... That's why I was born in it.
('Little Women'... quote-from-memory, probably inaccurate).
Monday, October 31, 2005
I remember the firecracker hampers seemed to always have one unfamiliar item.
I remember that we put six candles on the balcony, and six on the gate. The one year we had diyas, we ran out of oil.
I remember that no one ever ate the Diwali sweets.
I remember getting old newspapers out for crackers, and reading them instead.
I remember not liking the name for twinkling stars. Till I could read, I knew them by a Telugu name... which I can't recall now. But it implied, more appropriately, something much brighter than twinkling stars.
I remember where we discarded our sparklers till next morning's cleaning-up. One time, somebody (the watchman?) rooted them vertically into the soil. So in the morning: a neatly laid out plantation of burnt sparklers among the vines. And I think it had rained over the night, so vine and cracker were freshly rising up from the fertile, irrigated ground. It must have been evocative enough at the time that I got into a yearly ritual of planting them and then plucking them out in the morning.
Friday, October 28, 2005
I remember that we decided who served first by calling rough or smooth. This explained an interesting feature of tennis rackets back then, which I had already noticed, a nylon thread looped around the strings of the racket near the base of the strung elliptical part. Rough meant the side of the racket which only had loops from the nylon line, and smooth the side which had most of the line. First we spun the racket on the clay, but later it was cooler to spin it in the air while the other person called, and then grab it out of the sky.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
I remember that some time near the beginning of fifth grade, I think, a new girl came to our class for a few days. She was Rumanian (as we spelled it then), and spoke no English. I knew that Rumanian was one of the Romance languages -- the surprising one -- and I offered to interpret for her and to help her out, thinking my rudimentary Italian would be of some use. I remember that it wasn't, and that she wanted to help me help her but couldn't. We got somewhere comparing notes about numbers, but that was it. Then she didn't come back.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
I remember when my dog Jaeger stood up in the morning, or got up from a nap, he shook his body all over, a rapid shuddering that started with his head and ended with his hindquarters. Because of his jowls and his somewhat loose skin, the shaking made a sound like a flock of pigeons taking flight. Or sometimes he would get up from a nap and not shake but stagger, drunk with sleep, to another, presumably still more comfortable spot. He would move unsteadily from the couch to my bed or his, or from a bed to the couch, seemingly without ever having woken up, and then he’d drop heavily, sighing. I loved that in him: that he would heave himself up from one bed to find another, softer bed.
Friday, October 21, 2005
I remember when my cousin Igo came to visit from Sao Paulo. He was seventeen, but I don't know how old I was. Eight? My downtown grandmother talked about him a lot, or maybe she was talking him up to me. His arrival was long-awaited and quite thrilling. I was surprised at how much acne he had; she didn't talk about him as a person with acne. (Maybe I was ten or eleven, which is when my best friend Hugh was persecuted with acne, enough so that he went to see doctors about it; he got boils that had to be lanced. It didn't detract from his charisma one bit, though. It was just another fact about him.)
Igo took me sledding, down the big hill between 89th and 91st. We sat together and ran under one of the trees on the right that you always swerved towards to avoid slamming into the playground fence. (I loved sledding into that little copse, a word I learned in seventh grade I think when I was first taking Latin, and we learned sylvia.) You would go as far as you could into the deeper, warmer, snow, presided over by the dark warmth-gathering trees.) I was sitting in front of Igo and he steered us (it may have been his first time on a sled) under a branch which whipped me over the eye and drew blood. He felt terrible and fearful going back upstairs (I don't know if this was the first time he had met my mother), but she was fine about it, and I was too, though I remember a bandage.
Ah, no, I couldn't have been over eight, since this was in the old apartment, 2-G (I remember Igo explaining things to my mother in the hallway), and we moved to 7-F when I was eight. So I noticed acne already at eight.
I remember also how they explained to me that it was summer in Sao Paulo when winter in New York, and vice versa. (They showed me on my axis-tilted globe, but I think this was before Igo's visit, or maybe well-after, when they repeated the lesson. I don't know when I got the globe, but I remember mu shock when playing, probably with Hugh, we caved part of it in, and it turned out to be made of very sturdy cardboard. This entrance we breached to the underworld, I think near Iceland, is part of my general memory of it now.) But I remember that Igo told me that even in the winter, he never had to wear more than a sweater there, like the one he was wearing (inside) as he told me this.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
I remember the heavy, glass bottle that we had in our refridgerator for water. Once I had a very high fever and was dying of thirst. My grandmother couldn't hear me calling for help in the middle of the night (our parents were in Europe and granny was staying with us).
The fantasy of drinking delicious, ice-cold, NYC water enticed me to make the trek from my bedroom to the kitchen. With 103 fever this was quite a travail - I had to hold on the the doorposts at every room and fling myself a few steps onwards. When I arrived at the refridgerator, an old Fridgedaire with a metal handle that you had to forcibly pull out , I had to muster all my remaining strength to open the door. I took one look at the bottle on the top shelf and knew that I would never have the strength to lift it down.
I gave up and fainted on the kitchen floor. When I revived it was a huge ordeal to make it back to bed, where I lay delirius and thirsty until morning.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
I remember my mother telling me how to comfort myself after a nightmare. (Whisper Sri Anjaneya Swami over and over again till the fear went.) I was always surprised it worked. Praying was different -- you spoke to God, articulated your fears, negotiated your desires. The comfort from prayer, I vaguely understood, was from this kind of introspection, deliberate, admitting. But I didn't care for chants, for bhajans, for invocations at temples -- anything that was pre-constructed and impersonal. So I resisted this trick, this mindless call to faith, for a while, till a particularly bad dream, when I reluctantly repeated the name to myself, and reluctantly fell into calmer sleep.
I remember a map of the Americas my mother and I looked at in a book when I was five or six, which showed footsteps coming down from the Bering Straits through Alaska, down North and Central America to the tip of South America. They traced migration from Asia. I remember my mother explaining this to me. They had that cartoon character look of straight-faced unbewildered purpose that is so bewildering to us real people. Who walked that far? Why?
My mother explained it to me, but the footsteps were just so big and so clear on where they were going -- they knew the Americas the way cartoon characters know their own strange regions and geographies, the way they know where they're going while we have to find out by watching them.
I was interested in South America because my second cousin and great uncle lived in Brazil, evocative place. And the footsteps showed people just walking there.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
I remember that they'd close off 89th between West End and Riverside, I believe, with a sign embedded in concrete closing the street off school afternoons. I'd seen the sign many times before I read it and realized that the street was closed, and it was closed for us so that we could play in the street, as we weren't, I thought, ever supposed to -- though we did all the time: stoop ball, which only sometimes required you to run into the street, and stickball, where cars were bases. So here were the authorities actually abetting us. I liked that sign: it maintained its unsmiling, grown-up aplomb (after all, it was directed to adult drivers, and not to us) but it was put there for our benefit. One time they hadn't moved it into the street, and we tried to, and it turned out its concrete base on was really heavy.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
I remember the surprise I felt at hearing the voices on the first animated Peanuts cartoons I saw. I was looking forward to them -- some Halloween or Christmas special. I loved Peanuts. I had a Linus doll from when I was very small -- where is it now? -- with him wearing a red shirt and holding his blanket and sucking his thumb. But I read Peanuts later, and didn't put the doll and the comic strip together for a long time, since by then the doll was an invisible part of the everyday background of stuff in our rooms. Probably I watched that first animation before I noticed the doll again. And it was the voices that surprised me -- kids' voices (or probably someone like Hetty Galen's voice). Of course the animated characters would have to have kids' voices, but I imagined them as I heard them in my head, which is to say speaking in the completely muted, unbreathed, subvocalized sound of the inner ear or still more inner mind, the sound you hear in thought pitched just higher than the almost inaudible torrent of blood in your ears, the sound just beyond the sonic range of sound, so that it becomes pure reading. I think that was the first time that I realized the sound or silence of reading was different from anything you perceived in the world. This may have been the beginning of my sense of the world as strangely, unpleasantly normal.
Monday, October 10, 2005
John Hutnyk remembers:
I remember the windows of Myers department store which used to be a big draw in December - this is in Melbourne long long ago - I wonder if they are still there now. Then I remember that the "Sportsgirl" fashion chain did that huge window display with a picture of Mao Zedong with the caption 'Women Hold Up Half The Sky' - a twisted way to quote the cultural revolution. Mainly though, it's stores with trinkets and junk that appeal to me most - or the one I looked in yesterday, through a broken up board over the window, that let me see through to the detritus of a store long out of use. Bunged up shopping trolleys and layers of dust...
Sunday, October 09, 2005
I remember that the exciting thing about Diplomacy was the promise it made of pure childish delight in a game with discursive intellectual seriousness. It was the first real game I played where one played at being an adult. Not only an adult, but the kind adult that the news was about -- the political news, not the sports pages. All those ten minute moves of conferring and strategizing, just to move a ship somewhere. And of course we never, ever finished a game -- has anyone? -- which was appropriate too, since it turns out that life is the discovery that all paths towards what you thought adulthood might be are closed. But perhaps one day I will finish a game, and then I really will be an adult.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
I remember the photos of Creedmore in the Times. To a ten year old -- or whatever I was -- they didn't look so bad. But I didn't know then what photos really were or what bad really was.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
I remember that they could always tell if we'd sat on their bed. We could never smooth it down enough.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
I remember that Steve Dorsey was two years ahead of me at school (in the same class as Jim Gleick). He was in Searchers, which I did as well, in eleventh grade. I remember that he was Tommy Dorsey's grandson, or maybe son. Lausanne Merrill, also in our class, was Robert Merrill's daughter. He gave the high school graduation speech. Two types of music.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
I remember agent 86. I remember Marc Bilgray wrote a parody of "Get Smart" whose hero was called "Maxwell House Dumb." I remember 99, and that she was glamorous, so one didn't know why she liked Max, the Chief, the cone of silence, Kaos and Control, and the agent who was always so good at disguises. And Maxwell Smart's shoe phone. I remember that I didn't realize the phone booth whose door he closed in the credits was an elevator until I read one of the books. I thought he was just ducking. But why I didn't know. RIP.
Monday, September 26, 2005
I remember learning about "hands up." I think I knew it from cartoons, and then my mother or father explained that it was so you couldn't reach for your gun. I thought that was really clever. When we played it -- I think it was Cathy and Nina and I -- we'd reach all the way up, as in the cartoons. But later in movies it turned out that you only made your arms into L-shapes. This seemed more mature, more adult, more knowing, competent -- the cowboys who stood with their upraised arms half-relaxed had expertise which I didn't, and which I was now learning.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
I remember "First one in," when you served for the first time in a tennis game, and then a little later adult friends of my mothers whom I would play with called it F.B.I., "first ball in." I remember when tennis was a glamorous and obscure game to me, played on red clay courts, and then later when it was a game I loved, but no longer glamorous and obscure. When it was still a mystery to me, one of the things I loved about the equipment were the racket presses, things people not only knew how to use, but of which they knew what the use was.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
I remember another public service spot with the song : "Don't cross the street in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle of the block!" with a girl playing jacks behind a parked car that then starts to back up.. Or am I condensing too spots into one? The song seems incongruous with the picture, now that I write it down.
At age 12 or 13 I was with my downtown grandfather in Chelsea and he was going to check if it was safe to cross in the middle of the block of a one way street . He had me stay safely on the sidewalk and he walked out to look beyond the parked cars to see if any traffic was coming before he would wave to me to follow suit. What he didn't see (but I did) was that a van parked 25 yards ahead was backing up full speed, for some reason (there were no cars parked between the van and the cars my grandfather was peering behind). I tried to equate if the van would hit my grandfather or if he would make it beyond the parked car in time. The van ended up swiping him and he sent him reeling, completely stunned, and I imagine bashed up a bit--it was a hard hit...But he managed to somehow keep on his feet. I'm SURE because I was in his care and he would never let himself lose control... The driver rushed out to help him-- and my grandfather yelled at him for not having watched where he was going. I was not to tell Granny or anyone what had happened, but of course I told mom later. She asked if I had screamed -- but I hadn't--partly because it would have been embarrassing to scream, which I hate admitting, but at 12 one's priorities were different...But, more comforting to think, I was in such confidence that my grandfather knew what he was doing and everything would be all right. And luckily it did turn out all right.
I remember that the thing about noticing my grandfather violate the family rule about crossing streets was that it was a transgression of a boundary I thought impermeable between our customs and those of other people when they differed from ours. I remember, for example, the Hoges using whipped butter, which we never did and which just seemed wrong, as wrong as still others' use of margarine; that we had fresh squeezed orange juice, where others -- even the Herings! -- had frozen, which my father was explicitly against, or store-bought. I remember seeing Colgate in other people's bathrooms, when we used only Crest (the only one then approved by the American Dental Association). I remember that we didn't eat peanut butter and jelly, when they did, or eat Wonderbread either. I remember that we had salad every night, and rarely had desert (though we had ice cream on Comet Cones when my father was working late and my mother wasn't). I remember that we always ate with our parents when they were home, which other kids didn't. I remember we took baths, and at night; other kids took showers, and often in the morning.
All of this was as right as my grandmothers' phone numbers, and the voices you'd know would answer. And then my grandfather ignored the rules, thrillingly and -- though it's too strong a word -- shatteringly. And those voices won't answer either, though I still remember the numbers.
(I don't remember, I just realized, my downtown grandmother's old number, before they moved to Chelsea. But I do remember learning the new one: AL5-4895, adding Algonquin to the list of exchanges that till then for me only included the wonderful strange Trafalger, and my uptown grandmother's Wadsworth. Hugh's Endicott was next, then Murray Hill, and finally Butterfield, when I met the Sterns. The Chelsea number was the first number I remember actually learning. Trafalgar: it sounded liks something from my uptown grandmother's Austrian language, especially the way she pronounced it, trilling the R. It's association with English history was a real surprise to me.)
Friday, September 16, 2005
I remember we held hands, crossed at the corners, and with the lights; my father was inflexible on this rule, and the rest of the caretakers followed suit. Hugh Cramer was allowed to cross by himself, which he did in the middle, and against the light as well. So our rule seemed one of the family standards of virtue. I was surprised therefore when my downtown grandfather, taking me to Riverside Park once, crossed Riverside Drive in the middle of the block (between 89th and 90th) and against the light, dragging me with him. The transgression was real and vivid, and somehow it made the family members seem at once more impressively like the world at large and less reliable as the very essence of the rules of life, more aware than I knew they were but with the limitations of their authority over the world, or over authority itself, defined by just that awareness.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
I remember that when we went to the movies, the heads in front of me always blocked my view of part of the screen, like a fringe of out-of-focus carpenter's gothic. My father always sat us towards the back in the middle of the row, and I saw no reason (then) for not sitting in the front; but none of the people we disturned in the aisles seemed to mind or even be puzzled by where we were going to sit. But then I'd worry about the heads; and yet somehow when the movie started they became invisible and I forgot they were there.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
I remember the song "Just another day." I remember walking through the plaza between the buildings of the WTC, on some visit downtown, I think when I was in college. I remember how you could see them from way out on I-80 peaking over the horizon behind which was the rest of New York.
I remember to fill goldfish bowls only half-way, so that the water gets maximum surface area at the diameter of the bowl. I found this really interesting. It was also when I had fish that I learned that they don't breath the O in the H2O but rather dissolved oxygen, which is why they need the maximum surface area.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
I remember "This package is sold by weight, not by volume. It contains the full amount displayed on the package. [This second sentence is hazy.] Some settling of contents may have occured during shipping and handling." What one reads at breakfast. Also, "Not one word has been ommitted," from Pocket Books, which seemed impressive to me at the time.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
I remember the blind man who lived in our neighborhood. He tapped with his cane on the curb --his way of "asking" someone to help him over the street. When I was young I always avoided him, my bad conscience painfully visible, I believed, even to the blind man two corners away. But finally I matured enough to approach him and ask if he wanted help crossing the street. He was very charming and said I had a beautiful voice and asked if I was a singer. His friendliness made me glad and the next time I saw him I did not hesitate to help him. "Oh , you are the singer!" he said in recognition.
Here in Sweden the traffic light-posts have a clicking sound which tells blind people when the light is red or green. I always think of him when I hear the light turn green-- he wouldn't have needed me here in Sweden.
I also remember the old lady outside the nursing home in a wheelchair with a plaid blanket on her knee and silver hair in a bun. A classic old lady. She was always so glad when I came from school and said hello. I'm not sure that she spoke English, but I think she called my schnooksy: She smiled and pinched my cheeks - I always assumed she was a relative.
I remember not seeing her for a long time and wondering where she was. It took me until I was an adult to realize that she must have died.
I included this memory of her in a lecture I held about mentors, and the blind man was in a poem I once wrote. Now they are both remembered in the same blog.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
I remember Gilligan, little buddy.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
I remember New Orleans. I remember my mother taking me to there. We stayed at the Monteleone, and I took a black ashtray. I remember Royal Street, Bourbon Street, the Garden District (where Andy Apter, Michael Kelley and I stayed on Freret street with a friend of Michael's, a slide guitar player, after my mother had flown back to New York), Buster's, Antoine's (where back then they took your order without writing it down, though that changed later), the Court of the Two Sisters, Preservation Hall (where we watched some people ahead of us in line looking at a mouse in the gutter staring back at them), and Brennan's, Jackson Square, the French Market, some addict fiddle players whom Andy played with, the street cars, the above ground cemeteries, the magnolias, the "neutral ground" between the two directions of the avenues. I remember walking from the Garden District to the French Quarter with Michael and Andy, past where the Superdome was being built, and having kids throw rocks at us from maybe fifty yards behind us -- a weird and serious but not quite real danger.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
I remember when I was about 8 years old, my downtown grandparents were taking care of us and my grandfather was supposed to walk me the ten blocks down West End Ave to school. But after a few blocks he said he had an appointment and wondered if I could walk the rest of the way myself. I was surprised, ambivalent but also encouraged by this sudden acknowledgement of my capability, so I said OK. I walked on and stopped diligently at every corner waiting for the light to turn green. There was almost no traffic. At one corner the light was red but as no cars were in sight, I finally crossed anyway. When I had almost arrived at school I happened to glance across West End Ave and saw that my grandfather was walking on the opposite side of the street, a few feet behind. When he saw he had been discovered he came over and revealed that he was just checking to see if I was able to walk by myself. This little test was a wonderful lesson on responsibility and trust - for us both!
Monday, August 29, 2005
I remember learning about Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam, and Amsterdam itself. For me Amsterdam was the name of the avenue I crossed to get to P.S. 166, wide and different from the more familiar North-South avenues I knew because it was one-way. It was odd to think that a feature so much a part of my daily routine should be related to a city in Europe, one that still existed but also stood for the past. My sister found $20 in the Amsterdam airport, in the men's room where my father took her, but I have no memory of the airport at all.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
I remember 'Maaza is veri veri extraordinari.' I couldn't figure out why it was spelled so badly, or why the tagline was so lame.
I remember that Maaza was considered less unhealthy than carbonated drinks, so people generally bought it for their kids while drinking cola or orange soda (Thumbs Up, Gold Spot) themselves.
I remember my parents would give me Limca ('lime-and-lemony-Limca...') when I got carsick on long drives, because lemons are good for nausea. I doubt they actually use lemons in the soda -- at any rate, it usually made me feel worse.
I remember that a distant uncle owned (or had a large share in) the Thumbs Up-Gold Spot-Limca-Citra-Maaza brands, before they were bought by Coca-Cola. He was (is) known as 'Gold Spot Sathyanarayan.' I wondered why they picked that rather than 'Thumbs Up S...', since that was the most popular drink of the lot. I guess 'Gold Spot' had a fortune-making ring to it.
Monday, August 22, 2005
I remember the subway ad for the Roach Motel "Roaches check in but they never check out!" It was one of those collective jokes which united New Yorkers in the common cause against the enemy. "We're pretty sneaky, aren't we?" it conveyed. Us against them.
I also remember the public service spots on TV with the kid jumping on a diving board several times to get height and the sound off splashing water and laughing and playing, but then cut to an empty swimming pool and silence - the message being "don't use drugs--you don't know what you are jumping into..."
I also remember the spot with a little girl calling "here, kitty, kitty, kitty!" and it turned out to be a rat she was coaxing with her piece of bread.
These two spots most probably contributed to me deciding to work with film.
I also remember begging my mother and brother to let me go with them to see the film about Sacco and Venzetti who were unfairly tried and sent to the electric chair.
My mother and brother thought I was too young for the film, but I loved it and was outraged at the injustice.
I also remember seeing the Apu trilogy with them and loving it. Satjajit Ray has most definitely influenced my film career and I mention him and the Apu trilogy in a book I wrote a chapter for as well as an article.
Glad mom and Billy brought me along!
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
I remember when Kismet was showing, roughly the same time as Man of La Mancha. I seem to recall the taxi ads, with a heart over the i in the word, and of course I thought it had something to do with kissing. Only years later, reading Merrill, did I realize it meant fate. I have no idea what the musical (?) was about. I wonder whether Merrill used the word because it was plastered all over New York contemporaneously with his writing.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
I remember / je me souviens
I remember walking past my son and downtown grandmother as they sat at the table at our country house and played the card came "Tatch" (a yugoslavien(?) game which my grandmother played with me as a kid, and which I loved).
From across the room I smiled at them playing, but suddenly I got all choked up and had to hurry out so they wouldn't see I was crying. I KNEW that this was the last summer I'd see my grandmother. I KNEW that she wouldn't live the whole year till the next summer.
The next summer came and we boarded the plane to come over to the States, as usual. I remember feeling glad my intuition had been wrong, and that I'd see Granny again...
My father was waiting for us when we arrived at Kennedy. He had a solemn look on his face and pulled me aside as soon as I was within reach to tell me that Granny had died while we were en route...
I've always KNOWN certain things like that, and another time I KNEW was when Billy had his life threatening water-skiing accident. Our parents had to make the decision to fly him by helicopter to NY for surgery. I was about 13 and Granny and I stayed in the country. Looking back now I can see the degree of torment she tried to hide from me back then. I remember lying in bed and she stroking my hair to comfort me. I remember feeling that she didn't need to console me since I was sure he'd be ok. I said, "I KNOW he'll be fine". I must have conveyed the conviction I felt, because she asked, somewhat provoked, "How can you KNOW?" "I just KNOW". This soothed her.
I remember / je me souviens
I remember when we would drive to the country house in the winter or colder months and arrive late at night. I had usually fallen asleep in the car and I remember the contrast of leaving the warm, dark car and entering the cold, lit-up house. Groggy from the car trip, I'd wait in my jacket for the house to warm up enough for me to take off my clothes and get into bed, the sheets of which were still cold. When they finally warmed up, I could sleep the night.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
I remember the swings in the houses of older relatives. Usually on the porch, but sometimes in the drawing room. The idea didn't seem right to me. Swings belonged in the playground, and were meant to go far and high... they weren't consistent with these staid pieces of furniture with cushions that were rocked frustratingly gently. And the adults would sometimes tell the kids to go play on the 'swing' if they looked bored -- which again seemed like they were confusing the kids' ideal of a swing with theirs.
Which makes me remember a poem in our English reader in 3rd or 4th grade, about swinging so high that it felt like moving forward in space, like running over the fields and traveling to distant countries. There was an illustration of a girl standing up on the swing (which was a lot more fun, once you conquered the initial hesitation). And a poem in the Hindi reader the same year about swinging, but with not the same exhilaration, illustrated with a porch swing. I loved the song, Dil Kya Kare from the 70s' Julie movie, but hadn't (still haven't) seen it, so 'julie' in the lyrics brought to mind a swing (jhula) instead. I imagined they were on one during the song. I guess I ended up making a language as well as an age separation for the swings.
Friday, August 12, 2005
I remember that the one compensation for getting back home in the summer was going through the tons of mail that had been kept for us downstairs, looking for the brown-paper-wrapped comic books and New Yorkers that had come in the interim. At that time there wasn't any other mail that I was really interested in, not even the Sports Illustrateds that I subscribed to but read somewhat half-heartedly because I was only interested in the New York teams, and besides the news was all out of date. I thought the swimsuit issue was the most boring of all -- everything frustrating about Playboy, with none of the good parts. But the comics and the cartoons were worth looking forward to.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
I remember sitting in the car going to the country and Billy showing me a black and white photo in his (biology?) book of two hands -- with six fingers each. I remember not noticing that there were six fingers until he pointed it out to me, and how awed I was at how privledged being older and having a textbook could be (they never gave US that textbook, I may add).
I also remember watching the Twilight Zone and Creature Features at the Hoges' house on 2H. All of which was over my head, but I was determined to stick it out. The Hoge boys had a triple(!) bunk bed and we used to jump from first the second bunk, but then the top bunk, onto a pile of cushions. After a while we took the cushions away and jumped onto the bare floor.
I also remember Billy teaching me how to jump down from a high rock in Riverside Park at around 82nd street. A feat of utmost proportions.
I also remember in Quogue with the Hoges how there was a sand depot and we used to play on the piles of sand and run up and jump down. It was so incredibly fun and adventurous. I was SO disappointed when the adults said it was dangerous and we weren't allowed to anymore....I still resent that they took away such fun!!!
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
I remember that the adults sometimes used to sleep with their knees up, making a pyramid or cone -- a triangle, I thought of it -- with their sheets or blankets. I was surprised they could sleep without lying entirely flat. When I was a teenager I discovered this was comfortable; but maybe it wasn't before.
I remember / je me souviens
I remember the small dishes with balls of rolled butter and melting ice they served in Bellagio, and eating breakfast out on the terrace in the sunny mornings. Crispy white rolls with that sweet butter and fragrant strawberry jam. Runny golden honey with crystalized grains on the rim. The sound of the sleepy waiter pouring hot cocoa from silver pitchers. White starched tableclothes reflecting the bright sun and the weight of the thick linen napkins on my bare legs. Swatting away the bees which always landed yellow and black on the red jam.
The mornings always felt like walking on tip-toe in reverence to the evening before, when the same terrace was full of adults' talk and laughter and wine glasses clinking and music and ballroom dancing. The breakfasts were more hush, a pretence at starting anew, but the dizzy evening somehow lingered there.
Monday, August 08, 2005
I remember / je me souviens
I remeber how you told me about a man who had tried to fly into outerspace in a regular airplane and how the air got too thin and he crashed to the ground. I remeber we were at Granny's house in the living-room when you told me. Maybe I remeber it because my body felt what it was like to be up high since Granny lived on the 11th floor and we were used to the seventh. It was vertigo to be on her balcony and look down at the playground and wish you could just fly down there.. Anyway, the airplane story made me sad since he was so close to, in my mind, succeeding in penetrating the atmosphere- much closer to heaven than to earth, and then plummeting all the way down. That the air was too thin is what made me sad, and that we was so close...It was my first Icarus story -- it still makes me sad.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
I remember / je me souviens
I remember how my older and wiser brother Billy would challenge me to race him up 90th street between Riverside and West End Ave. I got a horrible stitch in my side. Billy insisted that the best remedy for this was to keep on running as fast as I could. Brother knows best?
Saturday, August 06, 2005
I remember one time I was particularly unwell, and being taken to get blood tests done, and feeling so weak and out of breath I couldn't change to go out, or even move or talk easily while at the clinic. It was a little scary that something essentially like fatigue could paralyse my body so much. I was a little delirious too, so there was a contrast between (what felt like) light and clear thinking and my physical sluggishness. But I was pleasantly surprised that the doctors treated me so normally, didn't react with either contempt or sympathy to what I imagined must look like strange behaviour.
I remember the little flies (or large gnats) that used to get into the bath-water, floating on surface tension, and onto the porcelain or marble fixtures and into the soap dish and the soap, in Bellagio. I haven't thought about this for decades. I hated them; there would only be two or three, but there would always be two or three. They seemed to pollute the otherwise pure and clear water in the large white tubs in the luminous spacious bathroom, and I kept wanting to try again, but they were always there. I could feel very clean after a bath, and after my parents dried my off in the white towels of the hotel, but it took avoiding the flies, thinking somehow that if I didn't touch them not only would they not affect me, but I wouldn't dirty them; that contact was what had to be avoided, since somehow that would vitiate the whole bath; but that if I avoided contact then somehow they would be clean in the water too, and everything would be o.k. They were probably ephemerae (are they called?), and now the whole thing strikes me as so young, young like myself, and like the young flies that somehow stand for that long-ago youth, untouched and so sustained, at least during those days, those evenings, those early-evening baths.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
I remember that not only did I get versions of current movies that I hadn't seen from the MAD Magazine parodies that were good enough for me to be in conversations about the movies themselves, but also that my first introduction to some Shakespeare came from MAD. In particular I remember versions of Shakespeare speeches updated to contemporary lingo -- well maybe not quite contemporary but a Beat parody of contemporary. I remember Brutus's speech turned into one with this refrain: "But Caesar was a real cool cat." Except, that, now that I think about it, it must have been Antony's speech, addressed I think to "Brothers!", and that "But Brutus is an honorable man" was rendered "But Brutus is a real cool cat." Now I think I remember it this way, that is that I am recovering the accurate memory, but I didn't until now.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
I remember that my parents had two pillows each, and my sister and I had one each. I thought two pillows was another mysterious perquisite of adulthood, like wine or beer: something they got to have but which didn't seem particularly enticing to me. It did make their made bed look beautiful, though, under the satin bedspread my father gave my mother one year in the old apartment (2G).
Thursday, July 28, 2005
I remember when our class, or grade maybe, went to visit the school for the blind. We played a version of softball or kickball against them; they ran down the base paths guided by waist-high string they touched with their fingers. We were out if they fielded more or less cleanly (by sound); they were out if we fielded and made the play. I think I expected them to be better than they were, and of course not nearly as good as they were. We'd been told that they were really good at negotiating the world, and not to make the mistake of being patronizing. I thought this would mean that they carried their heads like the sighted, but they still tilted their heads and cocked their faces upwards, to hear the world around them. I think we might have played blindfolded too or done something blindfolded, and of course we were absurd.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
I remember the vinyl toe-caps (I just learned the term from Cormac McCarthy's new novel) of my Keds, and of my Converses, where I would write things in magic marker, my intitials I remember, and then later bits of phrases from books I liked, Stephen-Dedalus like quotations, often Beckett; eventually I wrote them in small letters on the sides of the soles too. I remember black, green, and red sneakers that I owned, and different colored markers, though I don't remember what color they were.
Monday, July 25, 2005
I remember going to see my newborn brother, and being worried, because the first things I noticed were the bluish tone on his skin, his surprisingly long nails, and the general wrinkled appearance of six-hour-olds (but he was the first I'd seen). I wasn't convinced when they said the blue was from the sudden cold... it was summer and scorching. I was afraid he'd hurt himself with his nails, and wondered if it was possible that he'd scratched my mother with them before. I remember the dream I had a couple of nights later in which he'd suddenly grown up, and was talking down to me as I imagined an older sibling would, and my keen sense of disappointment: the only person who didn't have authority over me, and now even he did! But it turned out to be a dream-within-a-dream: I woke up in it to find that he wasn't grown up at all. The funny part about it is (and this must be false or overlapping memory), his infant face had much sharper features in the dream... he looked like he did a month or two later. I remember that when I finally stopped worrying about his skin and nails, he had to be treated under the bright lights for his newborn jaundice, and I was worried again - nearly terrified - that the light would burn him.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
I remember "Born Free." It was a paperback book we had. I couldn't read it, or thought I couldn't, because it was not a children's book. I looked at the photographs in the middle of the book. One in particular puzzled me, a picture of chlidren sitting on an elephant. The caption listed their names; I read & read but I always ended up with one name more than the number of children.
The caption was: "Atop Margie, left to right: Frank, Betty, Oscar,..." etc.
My misreading also caused me to mispronounce "Margie," when I said it in my head. The stresses of the 'first' name, "Atop," sort of forced a flourish onto the last syllable of the 'last' name, "mar-GEEE."
Monday, July 18, 2005
I remember Peter Rogers's string of phrases of false enthusiasm: "Whoopie doo, hoo la la, climb a ladder, pull a rope, swing a vine," all with studied boredom. Later when I read the phrase "Woop de do" it felt wrong to me.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
I remember trying to teach my sister to ride a bike. I also remember trying to teach her to read, at much the same time. I remember, or condense, two memories: trying to get her to say B-O-Y really fast so that it sounded like "beoye", almost "boy" and trying to get her to stay up by the cannons in Riverside Park at 88th street. I remember her panicking and grabbing for the small cannon as we went by it instead of holding on to the handlebars, and falling. But I think I was saying B-O-Y really fast to her as I was pushing her along before that. I remember when she fell the frozen feeling of strange impotence that I felt her having as the solid cannon turned out not to help keep her up, as it always did, but to be the thing that would implacably resist her desire not to fall. I remember Hugh and myself actually teaching her to ride on the promenade, maybe a few days later. I would run after the bike after she'd gone a few feet alone, and grab the back of the seat, and I remember puncturing my hand on a wayward spring when I grabbed it. But she didn't fall.
Monday, July 11, 2005
I remember deciding who chose first in softball by tossing a bat into the air and alternating hands contiguously up the grip -- whoever couldn't get their whole hand on the bat lost; the other captain chose first, the loser got the next two (I liked this compensation), and the first team got last licks.
I remember that when my father taught me to throw and catch a softball I was disappointed -- it seemed like such a feeble substituted offered to kids for baseball -- but then it turned out that softball was what everyone played in the park (on the street it was stickball, with a broomhandle and a Spalding). Baseball was strangely not an option -- strangely I mean because it was the only game really that we couldn't more or less just do ourselves. It was too hard to play catcher, and too dangerous, and too hard to hit the ball, and we didn't have the space for it anyhow. When I played JV baseball in high school I was surprised by the way we could play it, just like the football players actually tackling each other.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
I remember the London Bus my parents brought me from London when I was six. It was a double-decker bus. I wished we had them in New York.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
I remember sweet, smart Rick Fortgang who was in tenth grade with me. (He was the first Richard I knew as Rick and not Dick, and the first Rick I knew who was a Richard and not a Fredrick or an Eric.) The next year he went to Exeter, where you could learn Greek. I remember him sitting thoughtfully in the dining hall, telling us about Exeter and the classes you could take there. I was sorry that he was going, since I just barely knew him. I still am.
Friday, July 01, 2005
I remember my mother knew who Parnell was. I was reading Potrait of the Artist, and assumed that the stuff I was interested in was arcane if you weren't interested in Joyce. But lots more people turned out to know who Parnell and Kitty O'Shea were than had read Joyce.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
I remember the always unexpected pleasure of peeling off the bits of paper that stuck to a popsicle after you unwrapped it. They looked like they'd have to be picked off while the popsicle melted, like napkins from syrupy fingers or utensils (or wrapping somehow stuck to the chocolate cake-wafer part of the ice-cream sandwich), but they just came off easily. What a pleasure!
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
I remember the last day of school! I think I remember it from third and fourth grade. I remember how much I looked forward to it, but how when school was over that day, it wasn't quite as much a pleasure as I had promised myself.
I remember, though, "No more pencils, no more books, No more teachers' dirty looks." My father taught me that, and none of my schoolmates knew it (they knew: "Glory glory Hallelujah, My teacher hit me with a ruler, I ducked behind the door With a loaded .44.... And she ain't teaching no more"), and I was a little disappointed by the discontinuity this demonstrated between him as a kid in the New York schools and me as a kid in the New York schools. But then I read a version of it in Bazooka Joe, or something similar, and that made me happy. I remember that I thought "dirty looks" meant "objectional appearances." I didn't yet know what the phrase meant (as in "She gave him a dirty look").
Sunday, June 26, 2005
I remember my surprise when Hugh Cramer unpeeled the red vinyl handlebar tape from his bike. I thought of the tape as part of the whole thing, and it seemed liberatingly wrong to be able to take it off without detriment to the mechanism. Hugh set a style for us of riding with bare metal handlebars. Later he would strip fenders and chain guards from his bike, to make it more efficient. (He had just the mechanical aptitude I lacked.)
Saturday, June 25, 2005
I remember being surprised and delighted by the screen door in Stormville, when we first rented the cottage there in the summer (when I was five or six). I don't remember ever seeing screens before that, certainly not screen doors. In the city we didn't need screens (this has changed a bit since my childhood; there are more mosquitos in New York now. Is this because they used DDT then?) Screens seemed so elegantly clever, the mesh allowing air in but keeping bugs (especially bees) out. At first I was surprised that the house had two doors, but as soon as I understood I was captivated. I think I still am.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
I remember copying the Our Father from the blackboard, probably the first passage we were made to write. It seemed so long then; it filled nearly two small notebook pages (my letters must have been really large). I remember that it was the first time seeing the words, 'hallowed' and 'trespass'. No one else seemed to understand 'hallowed' either; they said 'helloed', or just 'hello' (hello be thy name!). I wasn't comfortable with 'hello', so I checked with my mother, who said it was 'haloed', and explained what a halo was. I had been watching The Mahabharata on TV, so I associated it with the halos on Krishna, which then resulted in my visualizing the Father who art in Heaven as a Hindu god (which wasn't the first time). I don't think I realized it was actually 'hallowed' till I came across the word much later in, I think, a P.G. Wodehouse story.
I don't know how exactly my mother explained 'trespass', but I understood it as stealing -- forgive us if we steal as we forgive those who steal from us. I thought it was too mundane a line to be included in something that spoke of things like power, glory and forever. (Because... what do first-graders steal? Pencils. Lunch boxes. But that had some connection to 'daily bread' too...)
I remember the little white crescent-flecks that appear on your finger nails when you injure them somehow -- smash or crush them. I think that's where they came from. They were like a little echo of the edges of your nails in the middle of the surface. I didn't like them very much, but found it interesting and curious how they would grow towards the tip and eventually merge with the edge and disappear when you cut them. As with prune fingers in the tub, I don't think I've had this bodily experience in years. I remember how Spalding-pink and -rubbery my baby sister's feet got when she took a bath.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
I remember seeing Danny Schneider's fencing shoes when I first thought about fencing at school. They had treads that went up the heels, which I thought was really cool. This had to do with advancing, which you did heel first. I never got shoes like that, but they were for me the shoe-equivalent of my pip-palmed goalie gloves.
I remember, thinking about how I came to love playing goalie so much, another one of the three or four best times of my life: the day we played field hockey in the gym at Franklin School, with plastic pucks, and I played goalie and stopped every shot. It was an hour of pure energetic pleasure. I decided to be a soccer goalie because I thought the soccer goal was as small as the hockey goal, and then the soccer ball was so big, it would be easy to stop. At some point I saw some pictures of an amazing European goalie, maybe the Soviet one -- I think the World Cup was coming up -- all in black, his black long-sleeved jersey especially stylish, and perfectly horizontal as he made a diving save, his face coolly expressionless, which added to my desire to be a goalie. I remember that Howie Grunthal praised some saves I made when I played: he was fullback and impressed. His way of talking was to negate with sarcastic emphasis. "Oh, no, that wasn't a good save, uh-huh; uh-huh you're not a good goalie." I was very pleased.
I remember that Hugh and I used to play soccer in my room with a playground ball when I was about eight or so. Sometimes when not too many people were home we'd do it in the hallway and living room too (they flowed into each other). That was also fun, since the quarters were so close that his superior athletic ability didn't mean that he could just dribble past me. Plus, I think, I imagined that soccer was my game; until in high school I tried to block the shots of Nicky Tocksig (?) who was Danish, and Egbert Perry, who was I think Jamaican. Boy were they scary.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
I remember that the Bloomsday bookstore, I think it was, sponsored all day readings of Ulysses on Bloomsday. I remember Judge Woolsely's decision, and my surprise that there was a letter from Joyce to Bennet Cerf thanking him. My downtown grandparents had a book of 1001 after-dinner jokes by Bennet Cerf, and here he was being thanked by Joyce. I think he had just recently died when I became aware of his connection to Ulysses.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
I remember "last night's games not included" or "yesterday's games not included" in the baseball standings, which always frustrated me. "Last night's games not included" more than anything else, because sometimes they would have some scores, and you wouldn't know whether those scores were included in the standings or not.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
I remember in Stormville once (so I must have been six or seven) discussing corn with my mother, and the difference between the dry corn kernels that (for some forgotten reason) I was aware of and corn on the cob. Aha! I think maybe Barbara Hering, friend and landlord of the cottage who did a lot of gardening, was planting corn. (Can this be?) Or at any rate, maybe we went to the seed store with her and I saw seed corn. And my mother explained where the kernels came from.
At any rate, what I remember is my mother telling me I could get those kernels and perhaps plant them (perhaps she told me that I could plant them) if I scraped some corn into a dish and let it dry in the sun. I did this, leaving it out in the sun in front of our door. I did this on a hot day, mid-morning. Maybe my father had gone to the city? When I looked at the kernels in the later afternoon (my mother wasn't there either -- maybe she'd gone to the city with my father?) they were dry all right, but covered with black flies, whose greedy buzzing fascinated me and horrified me a little. I had an idea (never put into action) that next time I could use my sand-seive to cover the corn, and then the flies wouldn't get to it. That's what I remember: heat, bright sun, yellow corn, black flies, seive visualized over the corn, and also behind me the wreck of the stone barn or silo which the adults mowed one day and where a giant wasps' nest looked like a giant stone in the wall (and which I mentioned here.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
I remember, again, what I posted about over three years ago, since I am so struck by what my father just told me about the day they heard of his brother's death (reported in the comment on the last entry). My uncle had to stand up to dig into his pocket to give the soldier next to him some ammunition (which they were short of), my grandmother said. He stood up (I imagined him not taking the shelter behind a tree in a kind of pleasant Northeast forest as he might have) and was shot by a Japanese soldier. Thinking about this now, I realize that my picture of what happened was implausible. I remember the immense frustration of getting something out of your front pockets when you were lying down . Your pockets were flattened against the countours of your thighs. You had to wriggle and force just two or three fingers into your pockets, and could never reach the thing you were trying to get. This made getting coins out hard; was ammunition similar? I thought also that it was the kind of thing where a large object down in your pocket cinched the top tight. But that's not where you would keep ammunition. I remember also that this was really a dress-pants problem -- creased, iron, woolen, uncomfortable, and so I imagined him in the kind of pants I hated most, frustrated, getting up, fumbling, and then mortally wounded.
I think I already knew that phrase -- mortally wounded -- from the kids' edition of Beowulf my mother read to me which had an illustration of Beowulf squeezing Grendel's wrists fo tightly that he was "mortally wounded." I don't think that edition actually showed Beowulf pulling off his arms, and I was fascinated that Beowulf could kill Grendel simply by squeezing his wrists. Somehow I associate thinking about that moment with my grandmother's lobby, which probably comes from associating the phrase with my uncle as well.
Monday, June 06, 2005
I remember that today, D-Day, is my Uncle Willy's birthday. I've mentioned this before, here and here. Today he would have been eighty. But he was killed in action two days before D-Day. It seems odd to think of that not-quite-nineteen year old, whom I know from pictures and a few anecdotes (see links above), as King Lear's age -- like JFK at 88. I am named after him. I remember that my twelve-year-old father wrote him a letter before his family got the news (at the end of June, I believe) asking didn't he think it was terrific that D-Day was his birthday? I remember my grandmother telling me, with an awe that in some sense must have compensated for her loss by valuing the living courage to do his duty of my grandfather at a scale like that of the dead courage of my uncle, that my grandfather went back to work three days later. I remember that he got the news first, somehow -- at work? Or was she shopping? Or maybe before my father but not before my grandmother? -- and that he informed her (or my father), with the words "Willy je pao" which means, in Croation, "Willy has fallen."
I remember that we used to get custard at Carmel. I think this was real custard, but later when we went to get soft ice=cream at Carvel on 95th street my parents called that custard too. And I confused Carmel with Carvel, especially since I knew that carmel was somehow related to caramel. I think this was a confusion that persisted for years, and I'm not sure whether we went to Carvel in Carmel or some other place.
I remember that Carmel was also a Biblical name, though I didn't realize that the lake in New York was named after it. It seemed more like an unremarkable coincidence. (Is it a Biblical name, I suddenly wonder? Or did some burnt over thing take place somewhere near there or near some other Lake Carmel?) I remember the slightly guilty fun that such coincidences made possible, as when I used to put my finger over the last three letters of Shittim when reading the Bible.
Friday, June 03, 2005
I remember that you need to moisten the needle before inserting it when pumping up a ball, and also that basketballs and footballs were absurdly more expensive than you'd anticipate, but that professional footballs were even more expensive than that.
I remember, maybe from the Hardy Boys, or a comic, or even from a fun fact on a Bazooka Bubble-gum strip, that your handwriting looks the same, no matter what part of your body you write with, so that cheaters who try to disguise their signatures by using their other hands or feet or mouths still get caught.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
I remember how cold our floor felt on coming home after a long vacation, how tall and dark the doors, how steep the staircase, how black the fans. These drew a line between home and other houses or hotels (for some reason, everywhere else seemed to have smaller, lighter fittings, and of course, everywhere else was usually warmer), so there was some excitement in returning -- a kind of recognition, in anticipating the mild shock of cold under feet, the mild surprise when opening the doors and looking at the ceilings. But along with that was the mild mustiness, which was also a surprise, and not something that was permanent or characterized the house like the other things did. And just as the air grew fresh quickly, the doors grew smaller and the floor warmer overnight, without our noticing it. I remember thinking once that I should consciously try to notice those things the next morning, but I couldn't.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
I remember that after breakfast and after my father left for work my mother would call her mother every morning. Her bright and happy greeting -- "Ciao, Mamina!" -- was part of the morning hubbub in the house, along with vacuum cleaner, clattering dishes, doorbell ringing with the delivery of shirts or dry cleaning, windows opened to traffic noise and radio and TV from other open windows, all somehow the sound of bright morning sunlight in the city apartment. The sun seemed noisy, and the noisiness was that of getting things set right during the revving-up part of the day. My mother went to work a little later. I think this must be a summer memory, that I must have been out of school for summer vacation, so it was all the hubbub of waiting around for things to die down so that I could see my friends or go out with them or watch the TV shows I wanted to watch. But I liked the happiness with which she greeted her mother every morning. Those sounds seemed so permanent and natural a soundscape, and now the apartment itself is gone from my life.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
I remember "So good it shouts with flavor: chocolate, Chocolate, CHOCOLATE!" But what was?
Saturday, May 21, 2005
I remember, barely, the cop on the beat whom I would see on West End and 90th, and who somehow reminded me of our doormen -- or maybe the doormen reminded me of cops. This was in the days of Officer Joe Bolton, and before the police started cruising in squad cars. I remember him as kind of over the hill, gangly, goggle-eyed (I think he wore glasses) Adams-appled, a little bit like Don Knotts, only more so. I remember the police call box on 90th and West End, and have a vague memory of another, beefier cop, calling in one day, talking into the lamppost, into the box at mouth height. At the time, lampposts had all sorts of gadgets on them -- fire alarms, call boxes, other electrical boxes, maybe junction boxes, maybe occasional small mail boxes.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
I remember getting (maybe shoplifting from The New Yorker Bookshop) Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock, because all my friends had seen The Birds and I hadn't. The book was green with a shot, from Psycho, I think, on the cover. Unfortunately it didn't plot summarize the movie, and I couldn't make head or tail of it.
I remember more: that you were asked to "please stand by for station identification."
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
I remember radio station's pausing for "station identification." I was never sure why or how, though I knew it had to do with the call letters. But I loved the phrase, the quiet and reasonable way that it rhymed, the way it held the rhyme off for four syllables and then reprised station in -cation. Do they still pause for this rhyme?
Saturday, May 14, 2005
I remember Duffy Dyer (and how I kind of thought he was the Daffy Duck second stringer to Jerry Grote. But I liked his name better.) I remember thinking of him somehow as his mask and chest-protector. His name was so iuntransparent that it seemed to correspond perfectly to his shell of protective equipment. They represented the name, and the name represented that. And he seemed so game and cheerful and uncomplaining about being that equivalence with his equipmental surface, being, as it were, defined by his back-up catcher equipment.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
I remember learning about the great Brooklyn-born matador... Franklin? Do I remember that because I was at Franklin School? I picture him -- accurately -- with glasses, sort of like Buddy Holly or the kid murdered by Leopold and Loeb -- ??. Stephen Grotsky, our favorite history teacher and track coach, admired him intensely, and told us about him when in a spellbinding reverie about matadors in general (but maybe it was Mr. Donahue, since he was the one who had us reading Hemingway, I think, and taught us the word aficionado and told us about Death in the Afternoon; I now realize he may have just been reading it), and how they would kneel with their backs to the bull, and try to get two ears and a tail, all information relevant as well to The Sun Also Rises.
Monday, May 09, 2005
I remember two interesting news items from when I first started reading the newspaper. One was that a Japanese soldier had just surrendered, decades after the end of the war. He'd been left on some remote (though not uninhabited) island with orders to stay there, and stay he did. He lived in caves and ate bugs, roots, and rats, I believe. He was finally found, a very old man (how old? maybe not as old as I thought of him as being then), and informed that the war was long over, although Hirohito was still Emperor. I couldn't imagine this Rip Van Winkle / Gilligan's Island private war.
The other news item I remember was the scientists were looking for a very heavy element, one they thought was stable (unlike all those bizarre elements I'd somehow space out about at the bottom right of the periodic table), in medieval Russian stained glass. They thought that the medieval stainers might have found some and used it. I don't think this ever came to anything.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
I remember being puzzled that my parents wanted me to call my grandmothers on Mother's Day. After all, they were their mothers. Now I wish I could.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
I remember: "At Beneficial, you're good for more; at Beneficial, you're good for more. No matter where you may be borrowing, or had a loan before.... Call Beneficial, See Beneficial, ____ Beneficial! At Beneficial, you're good for more, badadadadoop!" I think I remember this mainly from the Yankees broadcasts, maybe even on the radio.
Monday, May 02, 2005
I remember that public bathrooms in New York City playgrounds were called comfort stations. I liked the name -- somehow it reminded me of my downtown grandmother. (Or maybe that's because there were comfort stations on the grounds of the Union cooperative housing development where she lived in Chelsea. I seem to recall them, and recall very well the masonry lattice work of the wall separating the grounds from the truck driveway between them and the Cooperative supermarket where she shopped, where they had Cooperative Milk and cheese and such like.) I knew immediately what comforst stations were, and I liked the idea that they provided comfort -- that you could comfort yourself by peeing ot that it was a comfort to know that they were there, or that the grand and gigantic city of New York was offering to comfort you. They're still called comfort stations in New York, but I don't know whether they have that name anywhere else. I don't think the subway bathrooms had that name; at any rate I remember that the bathrooms in the 96th street station were always closed.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
I remember that my great-great-grandmother had one or two large torches (flashlights) always with her. She'd use them if she needed to get up at night, although she could have just flicked on a light switch –- I suppose she was more comfortable with having light at hand, after using lamps and candles to light her night way for most of her life. For a long time, I associated flashlights with her, because I didn't see them much in any other context. Also, having interacted with her so little, I probably needed an object association to remember her at all.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
I remember my mother telling me about going under Niagra Falls on a boat, and that you had to wear a raincoat. (This is associated for me with the I Love Lucy episode about Niagra Falls, if there was one; and also the Three Stooges Niagra Falls routine: "Niagra Falls! Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch...." and then Moe or Larry falls upon Curly, who's said the dreaded words.) I wanted to do that, but I also felt disappointed; I thought it must be like showering. I thought you let the falls hit you directly. I was interested in waterfalls, maybe from James Fenimore Cooper or maybe from movies where people went over falls, and I'd never seen any. And somehow I wanted them to be more than just a tall shower.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
I remember that one of the things that was so interesting about the time my mother and I chased the gerbil around the house and rescued it when it darted out from under the fridge was that we were both trying to do the same thing without her being any better at it than I was. I liked the fact that we were doing this as equals, that she didn't know any better than I did what would happen or how things would end up. And then when the gerbil appeared and we grabbed it, it was great that we, both of us together, had succeeded! (I think my father was in Chicago at the time.)
Sunday, April 24, 2005
I remember people saying "Uy-ya-yai." I remember having a vague sense of how to spell that -- really like the Hebrew double Yud that stands for the Lord somehow, maybe -- rather like in Borges's proof for the existence of God: he imagines a small flock of birds rising, fewer than ten but not 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9; God alone therefore can know the number, and so God must exist. God alone knows how to spell Ah-yi-yi? Which maybe is a little closer to how I imagine spelling it. Anyhow, do people say this in any more? Where did it come from? Where did it go?
Thursday, April 21, 2005
I remember that people used to soak their feet in water with Borax dissolved in it. I remember the big blue bottle of Borax crystals (or I think it was a jar), and that old people had such jars, and that old people in cartoons soaked their feet. I have a very vague sense that I once saw my uptown grandmother soaking her feet, which really seems a taboo sight (and I may not have seen it), partly perhaps because of the universal adult disapproval of going around barefoot, and the fact that they always wore at least slippers, and my grandparents socks or stockings. Certainly in cartoons and movies the people soaking their feet were old.
Friday, April 15, 2005
I remember hating hard candy, but often forcing myself to have it. The candy rage in kindergarten was this orange and white disk with a string through the center that you held and spun, and licked the disk as it rotated. They were ridiculously cheap – a bag of five or so for less than a rupee. Five-a-bag was economical, but it meant, unfortunately, that having at last yielded and bought them, I had to finish all five though they were making me quite sick. Then there was my fifth birthday cake – a train engine and driver, and someone suggested generously that I eat the sugar driver. A privilege – since all the kids seemed to want it. But it was a struggle to finish it... I’d look around enviously at people eating cake, but it seemed like I was expected to love what I was given, and I couldn’t very well give up and declare that I didn’t. (I did, eventually, after an eternity of nibbling through the head. But by then, there was no more cake.) Then there were candy cigarettes, but I had realized that you didn’t have to actually consume them – just carry them around and suck on one occasionally, so people knew you were up on the current candy trends. But even sucking was near-unendurable. I remember the cigarettes got banned in school after a while, which was a relief from my point of view...
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Agoraphiliac remembers:
I remember the only time I ever fainted. I was in my mid-twenties. It was a hot summer day, and I had been sick, had been taking codeine for a bad cough. I was standing in a long line at an un-air-conditioned health-food store.
When I got to the cashier, he said "How are you today?" I was filling out the check and my vision narrowed; I could see only part of the check and everything else was swirling black and green. It seemed important to answer the cashier's question. How was I? It was so hard to say. I said, "I feel...." and I paused, struggling to find the right word. And when I found it, I was so pleased, I said it decisively and with great satisfaction: "Faint!"
Then I was on the floor, looking up.
--Cross-posted from Agoraphiliac's Livejournal
Monday, April 11, 2005
I remember my cowboy hat, which I think I had before I got the rest of my cowboy regalia, and my Indian Chief feather dress cap. I remember being surprised, a little later, that most Indians only wore one feather, not the whole train. (And later still, a Cherokee came to visit our class, in civies, which was really interesting.) I remember getting the regalia, the revolver, which I liked, the belt, which hung too low, and which had bullets which I didn't get since it was a caps revolver. I remember that I thought the holster and belt would be like that which belonged to policemen, so I think that's what disappointed me. I remember the string on my cowboy hat, and the pleasure of sucking it, and I remember the bordering worked on the edge of the brim, and how I didn't understand what that was for.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
I remember that in 1978 when Pope Paul VI died the New York Times was on strike. John Paul took his name as a tribute to his two predecessors. (I remember when John XXIII died and my father's genuine grief, since he was humane, liberal, humble, penitent, all of which was part of the architecture of Vatican II.) I remember that there was comment on this two-named Pope. The he died a month later, and John Paul II took his name as a tribute to John Paul I. And the Times was still on strike. I remember an executive of the paper lamenting that they had missed the death of not just one pope but two!
I remember learning from a friend's brother that if you filled hot water over cold in a bucket and plunged your hand in, you could feel the layers of different temperatures... intense cold at the fingertips to near-scorching warmth above the elbows. I was skeptical till I tried it myself... but then it made sense... we'd just learnt about land and sea breezes in geography: hot air rises up, cold stays down. But this wasn't about air, it was water... yet, obviously a similar concept. I guess that was when I realized there must be a better explanation than the slogan-like 'hot air rises', and the fact that it was easier to think about mixing and diffusion in liquids than in gases gave me some vague, intuitive idea about thermal energy.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
I remember Mr. Donohue, in Seventh grade math I think, ragging on my friend Fred Cohen. He had said something wackily wrong, maybe intentionally. Mr. Donahue, said, "God is that silly. What were you, born on April Fool's Day?" Fred, triumphantly wielding the truth in response: "No -- I was born ten minutes after midnight on April 2." Mr. Donahue, without missing a beat: "See, you couldn't even do that right." I was astounded with how quick and funny his comeback was.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
I remember the loud pop of the free ball on pinball machines. Sometimes free games got you that pop as well. It was a mechanical sound, and it wasn't clear to me whether the machine was signaling the free ball or whether that was just the sound that it made when it shot another ball into the queue. The sound was peculiarly satisfying, partly because it wasn't the standard, informative buzz or bell. The pop made you feel how solid the metal was, the dense materiality and heacy substance of the free ball you'd won, shot forcefully into some below-surface ball-slot for your benefit, as though it were an object that belonged to you and not just the conferral of another evanescent and ephemeral turn.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
I remember an attitude to seesaws I had related to one I already posted about. Kids -- slightly older girls mainly -- would sing the words to "Seesaw, Margery Daw" as they seesawed. I didn't really know the words, and I couldn't really seesaw the way they did. It was like their knowledge of hopscotch and of skipping rope, an expert knowledge I would never have. Hugh and I and several others occasionally played some version of hopscotch we didn't understand. In particular, I had and have no idea how the key was used. And I remember a champion rope skipper who could skip two ropes at once, held by her friends and going in opposite directions. I remember that rope-skipping also had to do with some boxes chalked on the sidewalk, which I didn't quite understand, though they seemed more intuitive than hopscotch. I remember the lovely, beautifully contoured wooden handles of skipping ropes, the rope pulled through a hole drilled lenght-wise and tied into a knot at the end which fit a recess at the end perfectly so that the handle was compact and smooth.
Friday, March 25, 2005
I remember singing Away in a Manger in the choir for a kindergarten Christmas show. Perhaps we hadn't had formal scripture training yet, because the newborn Jesus was to me just a child-god, not exclusive to a religion, not tied to a story, not different from the God I worshipped at home. At "the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head", I'd picture Lord Vinayaka as a child laying down his head, his elephant, precocious, loving, sweet head. It's strange that I pictured this even with the explicit naming of Jesus in the carol; maybe I thought 'Jesus' was another name for the same god, because how many charming divine infants could there be?
Thursday, March 24, 2005
I remember my red toy cable car. I think my parents brought it to me from Switzerland, or maybe my uptown grandmother. I'm not quite sure -- I think that like my London Bus it came from a place I hadn't been, but I remember it from a time when I would have already been in Switzerland. Anyhow it went from my dresser, or maybe my orange couch, up steeply to a corner in my room -- the cable was heavy black nylon. I liked the way it stayed vertical even as it climbed the steep angle of the string. I don't remember what it was anchored to up there. A nail? I remember playing with it with Hugh Cramer, and that it was the kind of toy that would look good in a store or in theory, but that you would never be able to set up in your own house so that it worked right (like the German steam engine of the same vintage). All those sorts of things did work right in Hugh's house -- balsa wood models, the go-kart he built. But my cable car did work as advertised or anticipated, which was great. When it derailed, it was easy to fix, and it didn't derail much.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
I remember my mother always making me wash my hair the night after I got a haircut. I didn't notice what difference doing that made, but I guess she did.
I remember "How dry I am! How dry I am! Because I use Ban! How dry I am!" I know that the lanky, gloating, successfully dry woman sung it, operatically, to a famous song or tune, but I can only bring it to mind as the song from the commercial.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
I remember my father telling me, the night before we took the train below the St. Gothard pass from Switzerland to Italy, that the tunnel was a triumph of engineering. (I was eight.) He said that they had tunneled from both sides and met in the middle, and that when they met they were only off by an inch, which really impressed me.
I think being off by an inch always impressed me. An inch meant that perfect accuracy was hard; an inch meant that near perfect accuracy had been achieved. I remember that after the Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the moon, NASA could determine the moon's distance from the earth to within an inch.
I remember the day we got to Zurich we all tumbled into featherbeds and slept the afternoon away, and then that night my sister and I couldn't sleep and played cards till 3 in the morning. (She was three? Could we really have been playing cards together? Or what were we doing?) I remember that the third year we went, I insisted on staying up till bedtime, and this worked much better.
I remember I would get sick from Milanese water every time we got to Milan; and then better in a day or two.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
I remember learning about the Ides of March when my father read me some speeches from Julius Caesar, my first real exposure to Shakespeare (my mother was listening too), and I was very impressed by the way first Brutus was convincing and then Mark Antony was. He read the speeches in the study, and I was interested enough that I listened to their multi-LP of the play; I remember lying on the couch in the living room and listening, where a while earlier -- months? years? -- I had tried to listen to the album of Under Milk Wood that my father brought home one day. (He loves Dylan Thomas and I think went to his last reading.) I remember being puzzled by the title, which seemed glamorous, and by the idea of all the voices. This seemed interesting adult knowledge. And then I was lying on the couch, and I think my mother had explained the Ides of March to me. This must have been a few weeks before it actually was the Ides of March, because I remember being puzzled to learn that there were Ides in other months also. I'd thought Ides of March was somehow a compound term for a single day in the year. I was surprised that other kids -- I think this was fifth grade, Mrs. Brenner's class -- knew about the Ides of March, and then that the textbook or maybe the teacher told us about other months with Ides in them. I remember there was some rule about Ides and their relation to the fifteenth of the month, but I can't remember what it was. And I remember "Et tu, Brute."
Monday, March 14, 2005
I remember a tufted bedspread -- whose bed was it on? Maybe mine. I think I only remember one, a kind of green. It was some sort of knit with tufts arranged in a lattice all over it. I liked getting the tufts in the spaces between my fingers, pushing to the skin and then closing my fingers with the tufts appearing between and above them. I also remember the record-cabinet with its interesting, flexible sliding front. You could open it, with a kind of sense of roughness, by pulling it around and to the back of the cabinet. The front was made of many hinged verticals of wood, and I remember the feel of it when I moved my hands on its roughness. There was something not quite right about the fact that pulling at this surface from the handle at its front really meant pushing the verticals, which is why opening the thing seemed odd. You felt that you were pulling but you were really pushing. And yet the thing -- like cars and bikes where (as my father explained) the back wheel pushes -- worked pretty well.
Friday, March 11, 2005
I remember learning the word "loot" from the Hardy Boys (where I also learned the word "chums"), and I remember learning the word "evaporate" in third grade, long before I knew the word "vapor." I knew that clouds were formed by evaporation, which is also why things dried up. I remember from seventh grade that what you see coming out of a kettle isn't steam but condensed water-vapor, and that steam is invisible. And I remember my surprise when I learned, maybe during some fire hazards lesson, that steam (the ordinary kind, the kind you can see), isn't smoke. This had something to do with what smoke from a candle was made of: burnt particles of wick and wax.
Monday, March 07, 2005
I remember that when adults got down on all fours, to be horses or elephants or other animal conveyances that you could ride or butt into or race, they kept their arms very straight, elbows more or less locked, so that their shoulders seemed awkwardly high, their carriage brittle, and their motion and grace highly limited.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
I remember the Plaza Hotel. There's still no need just to remember it. But on April 30th it's closing! How can that be? It's as though New York were closing, or as though The Catcher in the Rye were being revised to take place in Kansas City. Not that The Catcher in the Rye mentions the Plaza. But...Eloise! Brunch at the Palm Court. Drinks at the Oak Room, with Tommy Fenerty. Before we broke up I had reservations to take Margot there for her birthday. The room was $55, all that I could afford. She said they had black onyx tubs.
It would be fifteen years before I actually stayed there, for a night. It was of course not quite the same as one imagined walking around downstairs, with that glamorous thirties movies hustle and bustle and snow and warmth and good cheer of everyone having anything to do with the Plaza. But the corridors were as wide as in a European hotel, the ceilings as tall, the doors as tall, and as thick. The bed was canopied, with many different strata of lacey bedcovers, so that you didn't know which were decorative and which you should pull over yourself. The view.... well, it was a cheap room. But it was the Plaza. The bathtub was ordinary white porcelain, but as good as black onyx to me.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Agoraphiliac remembers:
I remember reading, or trying to read, a book called Autobiography of a Schizophrenic. I must have been 14.
I think I was hoping for a more thrilling version of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The back cover, I think, said that its author had been in psychiatric treatment since she was five years old. I took this as an objective measurement: she was a good eight years crazier than the main character of Rose Garden; it had to be that much better a book. --In the first pages, her psychoanalyst feeds her an apple; she cuts a piece of apple, holds it to her breast, and then gives it to the eponymous schizophrenic. My feeling was at once, eeew, and also disappointment at the lack of resonance the image had for me. I wanted to recognize the schizophrenic's thoughts and be terrified by their similarity to mine. I never got past those first pages, though I tried more than once.
Mary Barnes's autobiography was important to me, too, years later, and also disappointing in its way. Now I was nineteen? twenty? and still wondering why there was craziness, and whether I had it. (That's pretty much the limit of my philosophical mind: no "is there a God?" or "why is there evil?" or "why is there something rather than nothing?" Just, what is craziness and do I have it or am I it?) Mary Barnes lived in R.D. Laing's Kingsley Hall and she had gone completely mad, had given in and reached the ultimate--I don't know what, I had to read the book and find out. I remember being more than disappointed, outraged, that at the end of the book she announced that she was a painter. I can't entirely articulate my outrage; I felt cheated. It's like having the Ancient Mariner tell you, "yeah, so but anyways I'm a poet now, actually. All that torment? Pure poetry. I got a million of 'em."
I remember that I read Mary Barnes while I was living at a commune. Where we did have a member who was pretty crazy, E. I thought of E as our success story; here was one thing we did that the outside world couldn't do: happily make a crazy man a real member of social life, not just tolerate him.) One day he came through the accounting office with a Walkman on. "What're you listening to, E?" the bookkeeper asked him. E gestured to the tape player, to show that it was rewinding. "Going back, huh, E?" asked the bookkeeper. "Oh, yes," said E, both grave and mock-grave, "I'm going all the way back."
[cross-posted from her livejournal]
|
. . .
|
