Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember the 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.

posted by william 3:23 PM
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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.

posted by william 7:13 AM
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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?

posted by sravana 12:37 AM
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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.

posted by william 7:48 AM
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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.

posted by william 9:09 PM
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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.

posted by william 7:27 AM
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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.

posted by william 9:37 PM
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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."

posted by william 8:50 PM
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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.

posted by william 12:42 AM
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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.

posted by william 6:25 PM
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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.

posted by william 12:08 AM
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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.

posted by william 6:01 AM
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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]

posted by william 10:05 PM
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I remember "You have a friend, at Chase Manhattan." I also remember my mnemonic for spelling Manhattan; "The Man under a hat had a tan." That would be how to remember the double-t. And I remember an illustration of Peter Stuveysant (was it?) and others getting out of a small boat -- a rowboat -- and buying Manhattan from the Indians for $24 plus some trinkets. Trinkets for me meant (still mean) what you get out of gum machines (like my Peace Sign ring).

posted by william 12:04 AM
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I remember the Purple People (were they the Purple People Eaters? Or what was that?) -- the couple in the Park always dressed in tie-dyed purple and doing and distributing purplish things: a part of the landscape or ambience of the park; they had purple bikes and other purple implements. He was considerably older than she was, but seemed a convincingly free spirit, when most people didn't seem that way to me. They were part of the landscape, and now they're not there, and I don't know how many years it's been since I last thought of them, but somehow since then they've slipped out of the world, of which they had become an unremarkable feature.

posted by william 12:50 AM
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I remember that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and some detergent commercial that had to do with that.

posted by william 12:53 AM
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