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 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!

posted by william 7:44 AM
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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").

posted by william 3:12 PM
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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.)

posted by william 9:02 AM
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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.

posted by william 9:09 AM
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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...)

posted by sravana 3:20 PM
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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.

posted by william 11:11 AM
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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.

posted by william 11:30 PM
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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.

posted by william 10:20 PM
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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.

posted by william 9:01 PM
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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.

posted by william 2:55 PM
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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.

posted by william 7:00 AM
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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."

posted by william 3:12 PM
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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.

posted by william 7:19 AM
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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.

posted by william 7:25 AM
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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.

posted by sravana 8:07 AM
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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.

posted by william 12:28 AM
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