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
Thursday, December 21, 2006
I remember how the people who had authority in my cohort were the ones who were funniest (as long as they were in control of when they were funny). I remember onbe kid, a friend of a friend who didn't strike me immediately as charismatic, telling a joke on Riverside Drive about why Texans have pale thumbs. Well, he said, "It's a long story, son," hooking his thumbs onto his jacket. His timing was perfect, and I liked the sudden economy by which it turned out not to be a long story. I recognized the Texan gesture, either from Lyndon Johnson (or parodies of him), or from Yosemite Sam.
Monday, December 18, 2006
I remember learning a little bit about debate in junior high. We got a mimeographed sheet to take home and study with a lot of whereases and then finally a resolved. But it didn't seem resolved to me, and I didn't really get how this was all supposed to have been concluded. My mother explained how to debate, how you weren't just saying what you believed but arguing on an assigned side, but I didn't as her about the terminology. Later that same year -- maybe later that week she received a resolution thanking her for being President of the building, which also had a page of whereases, followed by a be it resolved that the tenants were very grateful to her. I sort of liked and was sort of puzzled by this way of doing things.
I remember watching a little debate on TV too, with very clean-cut college adults, but it was boring. I did like watching (with similar participants) the show called "It's Academic." I could do the literature and social studies questions pretty well, but I was amazed by how good their math and science was.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
I remember Christmas break at my Jewish grandparents' big house in Jacksonville. I remember the citrus orchard in front of the house and the river behind it. The enclosed porch that looked out over the river was too cold to really spend any time on in December, but I remember trying to sit on the wicker furniture and getting very cold. I remember feeling surprised that my grandfather made our breakfast, and that he always started with grapefruit, which we never ate for breakfast at home. We would get in late at night from our drive down, and my grandparents would give us something warm to eat and then we would go to bed and wake up early in the morning for grapefruit. There were strange things in that house, like a sewing room. And my grandfather's electric shaver. My father always had a beard, so I didn't know about razors until my grandfather let me try his, and I felt the buzzing tickling on my face.
My grandparents had beautiful clothes and a big bedroom with an ensuite bath, and my favorite thing was to stay with them when they got dressed in the morning (if I was up early enough) or in the evening while they dressed to go out somewhere. Their closets were mirrored on the outside, and I could open two doors around myself to make an infinite mirror, and I would dance in the middle of all those girls, all of us matching, dressed alike, moving in time together. The incredible satisfaction of that symmetry and coordination, that perfect choreography.
My cousin Roger and I used to play downstairs, under the pool table. This must have been a concerted compromise on both our parts--my four- or five-year-old need to play house at every opportunity joined to what possible game for Roger, at eight or nine? Something about bad guys, life on the run. We also played a lot of hide and seek. I remember the beautiful tree in the living room and sitting in a circle with all the family--my mother's siblings' families and my grandfather's brother and his children and their families, and opening presents together. I remember waking up in the morning and watching Christmasy cartoons with Roger and looking through our stockings, comparing our loot and eating a lot of cracker jacks, and for a moment feeling confused. Was this or wasn't this mine? We were Jewish--we, my family, my parents and me--but Roger believed in all this Santa stuff. I think my parents read my grandparents the riot act that year--I think it was the last time they had a tree.
I remember going out for meals in Jacksonville with my parents and grandparents and great grandmother, Babette (my grandfather's mother), and my mother's siblings and possibly our great great aunt Margaret Benjamin, who called my mother Joanita, in from Chicago. These were unspeakably fancy events; the whole family sitting down a very long table, and my great grandmother and Aunt Margaret holding court, wearing long white gloves that went up to their elbows. I felt like a princess, partly because I was dressed up, wearing a fancy frock and white tights and black patent-leather mary janes (my ideal of beauty), but more because I knew myself a part of this grand thing, this royal family, this group of important and imposing people. And the restaurant had a soft ice cream machine.
We went and returned in convoys of cars--I didn't necessarily travel with my parents--and one time I remember sitting with Roger in the back seat while he spun me a horror story about some secret association between telephone poles and scorpions. On the way home, I sat between my grandmother and my great grandmother, and, frightened, I told them Roger's terrible tale. They comforted me and taught me a coy response: mock anger that Roger would tell such a fib. Then my grandmama asked me about my likes and dislikes. All I remember from this conversation was some consideration of polka dots, about which, I confess, I had no opinion. And then we dropped my great grandmother off at her home (in retrospect I recognize her complex as assisted-living apartments), and I fell asleep on the way back to the big house.
Friday, December 15, 2006
I remember how funny it is that judges have gavels. I think I learned this watching Perry Mason with my mother. Or maybe she brought a gavel home that she'd got as a testimonial of some sort; or we saw a movie in which there was a judge gaveling the court to silence. And I remember just thinking the incongruity of the hammer among all these people in sober clothes -- a hammer that wasn't used for pounding nails but just to kind of hit the table in a way that made sense to me but that I couldn't imagine adults doing -- was hilarious. It was as if whenever the judges got bored they could just pound away to pass the time, and everyone had to pay attention. It seemed like an improbably great idea.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
I remember that Contac has thousands of tiny time pills, so you only have to take one capsule every twelve hours. Also that there is no t in Contac, which surprised me. (And that there is no e in Mobil, which fact is indicated on their stationery.) The initial and final C looked more elegant, though, once I saw it, as though they were icons of the curve of the capsule.
Monday, December 11, 2006
I remember Andrew S. parrying insults by saying "I know you are, but what am I?" I didn't see how this could be effective -- he'd just repeat it whatever you said to him -- but I thought that the very fact that I couldn't see why this would be a good retort gave him the high ground. He did it well. I was reminded of this years later, when Pee Wee Herman got the same tone to a T.
Monday, December 04, 2006
I remember the pleasure of scraping the yellow paint off the sides of a pencil and revealing the pure, strangely good wood beneath. It was hard to get all the paint off, but easy to get a lot of it off.
I remember the feel of a chewed pencil, the roughness of the toothmarks, and also the pleasure of chewing. You went too far if you got to the crunch of lead or graphite.
I remember later the fun of placing pencils parallel to the incline on our inclined desks and trying to get them to roll down their hexagonal sides. You'd have to bounce the desk or blow -- a good way to pass the time in boring classes.
I remember once getting into trouble because I kept dropping my pen. This was accidental, but I now realize the teacher thought I was doing it on purpose. At the time I thought I was in trouble just for being clumsy.
Friday, December 01, 2006
I remember when relatives used to visit us in Brookline and in Sharon, I'd pretend I was asleep as they got up early to return to New York. I couldn't bear the thought of watching the car pull away, saying goodbye, even when I knew I'd see them a few weeks later. I'd hear my parents say "she's still asleep" and felt guilty but also felt like I'd done a good job fooling them. Now I can't picture saying hello, though these are different relatives (the parents and uncles and aunts of the NY crowd). Saying hello: I've been calling Israel a lot this past week, preparing a huge trip in less than 2 weeks. It's so strange to talk to my family. It's a pretty emotional experience, because the last time I saw some of them (Feb 2005), the ones I'm closest with, I didn't expect to be spending time together ever again on account of various illnesses, and here we are, about to reunite, talking about such mundane things: train stations, sleeping arrangements, timetables, and traffic.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
I remember confusing the First Lady and Wonder Woman. I couldn't keep the names straight--Rosalind Carter and Lynda Carter. And since I didn't know how to spell their names or my own, Roselyn, only knew that My Name was That Name and that I had dark hair, red lips and a Wonder Woman leotard (underoos?), I wasn't certain if I were meant to be the First Lady or Wonder Woman, or both. What might these affinities signify?
I remember when Mom, Billy and I went to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey - a huge endeavor since Daddy wasn't with us for some reason. I don't remember how we got there, if we drove - something Mommy didn't do too often. I think we drove. I was only about 5 years old. But, to our dismay, the amusement park was CLOSED! We were completely crestfallen, and I remember sitting in the parking lot on a railroad tie (is that what they are called? The heavy wooden slats that the rails lie on?).
I remember the commercial: "Palisades Amusement Park, swings all day till after dark,....Ride the coaster get cool in the waves in the pool, you'll have fun! So come on over."
We never went back and eventually it closed down.
So, all I have from the promise of accepting the commercial's invitation is the memory of the splinter.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
I remember Yossi falling down the stairs at Locke Street. They were wooden stairs, the stairs from the second floor landing, the stairs that took you from the living floor of our apartment down to the outside. Somehow they were of a different quality than the steps to the upstairs (the sleeping floor, where the bedrooms are)--darker, scarier. Probably we weren't allowed to go down them ourselves, since they led to the front door. The stairs to the third floor were safe and fine, had a landing of their own and ugly green-patterned wallpaper that I once improved with some crayon--though I was not encouraged in that pursuit. But the dogs would tumble down those lower steps every day when the mail came, roaring and barking hysterically at the postman. You would never have thought them so old, such old dogs, 10 and 14 or so, the way that they barked, passionately, with gusto, with purpose. I remember Yossi falling down those stairs right onto his face, remember feeling terrified about it--when he stood up his face was all bloody and my mother was clearly frightened. He'd fallen right onto his face, never blocked his fall with his hands. It's the first of three memories of his falling on his face, right onto his mouth, bloodying himself because his body couldn't seem to get that that's what hands are for: to protect your face.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
I remember, also, that you had to be really careful not to get your Hush-Puppies wet. A drop of water would ruin them. I remember sometimes getting some drops on them and trying to spread and massage them into the whole surface of the suede with the sole of my other shoe -- a feeble shift which never really worked, and was always vexatious.
Monday, November 27, 2006
I remember my parents' umbrellas in the hallway outside our door, where they would leave them open to dry out when it was raining. This was another sign of their competence -- a sign of their competence because the umbrellas with their air of self-possession, the serene reasonableness they projected in just being open, on the floor, inside, leaning inscrutably on their own ribs, not protecting anyone, seemed just like my parents themselves, knowing more about what was appropriate than I could have guessed. They clustered around the door; sometimes my grandparents' umbrellas were there too, and they would present a tableau like the kind of all-adult conversation that they would all sometimes have when they came over. Umbrellas were like coffee and showers to me, something part of adult life to which I was not yet initiated. I had to wear galoshes (especially with desert boots!) and a raincoat. So the umbrellas clustered together, studiously presenting their backs to me, seemed very mysteriously knowing in their adult opacity, and that opacity was their very nature, designed as they were to block and deflect. (I think for this reason I was always shocked by broken, wind-capsized umbrellas when I saw them on the street.)
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
I remember that when Mrs. Eben came on the intercom to tell us that the President had been shot, the light were already out in the classroom. It was almost 3, and I was coloring my Thanksgiving feather in the dim natural light. We were sitting in our coats in rows at the tables in the part of the room facing the classroom door. The other part of the room had the blackboard, and I remember this part as a kind of holding or transitional area. And so I suppose it proved to be, that day when I was just 7.
Monday, November 20, 2006
I remember wearing smocks for art. You put them on backwards and they were dirty! "Smock" also meant for me a girl's shirt, so it was all triply backwards. I remember having this puzzling feeling first putting on a smock at an easel in Kindergarten. It made me feel so big.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
I remember the Jethro Tull song "Wondering aloud." Also that you cannot petition the Lord with prayer.
Monday, November 13, 2006
I remember flying seagull kites on the Mall in Washington D.C. We were down visiting the Herdrichs, as we did over February vacation for many years, and for some reason we met up with Aunt Roz, my grandmother's younger sister. I imagine she was in D.C. because Uncle Arthur must have been at the Department of Energy for one reason or another, but maybe she was in town visiting her other sister, Aunt Ernie, who lived nearby in Virginia. It was a sunny day and not cold, and someone, probably Aunt Roz, bought us the kites from the man selling them there, one for each of us (no sharing!), and we stayed and flew kites in the middle of the city for a long time. We squinted painfully to watch the white paper birds flap in the too-bright sky and felt powerful holding the string, holding the wind, tied to a bird. The memory is of extended, empty, powerfully fun time, time like the big empty Mall. We stayed and flew kites until we began to feel cold in the late day. I also remember Yoss chasing pigeons all over D.C. that visit, stalking them by adopting their walk, bobbing his head back and forward, disconcerting them with his imitation or his little boy interest. Each one he followed tolerated him until he got about 3 feet away and then flew off.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
I remember the only time I flew kites during the festival (in Hyderabad, when once we overstayed the winter). I cut about half a dozen kites. I felt a smug sense of victory -- for one thing, it was fascinating how sharp the string could be, and for another, I guessed that most of the other kite flyers were boys, and probably more experienced than I was. But I also felt a little guilty, like I was doing something slyly cruel. Everytime I brought one down, I felt for the owner -- the movements of a kite being trapped are so desperate and sorry. And I probably personified the kite itself, in its struggling. Of course, my kite was eventually cut too, but I didn't care much, mostly because I was tired and was waiting to stop.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
I remember writing in my graph-paper Composition book journal "Sixteen today," with a kind of wistfulness, on my sixteenth birthday (November 7th). I was wistful about Belinda. It was a few weeks after this day which of course didn't pan out. By now she was going with the close-on-the-attendance-sheet Bill F, and not me. I remember seeing my cousin Zlata that day. She'd just started at my school, a year or two back. I was sitting in the common area, at the top of the stairs with my journal open, writing the "Sixteen today" entry. She had a nice smile, and was just about to be part of her own group there and not need me to be nice to her any more. I registered how pretty she was, but I was more interested in being saturated with hopeful melancholy about Belinda. I think I got the tone with which I meant to infuse "sixteen today" out of Death of the Heart, which we read in a class that I took partly because a lot of Belinda's group was in it: "So I am with them, in London." (I mention this in the same entry.) It was a good tone for the writer I wanted to be writing the journals of.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
I remember that one day my parents and some friends of theirs (with kids) decided to take the Circle Line around Manhattan. It went up to West Point, which I thought was hours away (since it was "upstate.") We didn't really see much there, though -- nothing I remember. Maybe the Tappan Zee bridge, but I'm not so sure. As we came around and back to where we had started, we could see that my mother had a sunburn. We checked ourselves too; I had a minor one. I was more interested in how it felt than in the pain, which was minimal. The peeling was fascinating too. I think my mother's bothered her more than mine did. It was certainly more dramatic.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
I remember watching Aliens at my Florida grandparents' first house on Little Torch Key when I was 12. They had cable, and whichever channel it was repeated Aliens several times, so that I remember seeing it in one evening sitting with my whole family, and then I remember catching a few minutes of it here and there when my brother or I turned on the TV to see if anything good was on while everyone else napped.
Then as now, I was a coward about visual media, so I'm sure I wanted to leave the room more than once, and I'm sure my father teased me about it. I remember sitting through much of it, though, watching the team be killed off one after another, but steeling myself to it by promising myself that the movie would spare the woman and the child, and maybe even one of the men. If I refused to care about any other characters, I would be ok. I understood that they would have to live because they stood for a family, without which it wouldn't be a happy ending.
I thought about this memory when I heard the news of the car bomb that exploded outside a bride's house in Baghdad yesterday, destroying so many lives. I thought about this when I heard myself wonder, did the bride and groom survive? I realized that if this were a movie, the deaths of her uncles, aunts, and cousins, their families' and friends' children would not matter to me. I would be satisfied with only the main characters' survival.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
I remember the bathtubs in my grandparents' houses, which I would use when I slept over. My uptown grandmother's tub was bigger than ours -- taller, just as her ceilings were higher and the after dinner fruit she put out bulkier. The water filled more quickly and deafeningly. There was a blue streak down the porcelain where the water crashed into it from the spout. The feel of the porcelain was rougher, less glossy, more matte. Her tub all seemed older, not statelier like her curtains, but erect and somewhat joyless in a way that would have been stately and patient if our own tub hadn't seemed so much more obviously how things should be. I guess a place for the flow of water should not look pursed, as hers did. Or maybe the tub just seemed that much more appropriate for my grandparents to take a bath, but not at all appropriate for a kid. It had no knowledge of me or what my bathing would be like. Floating toys would have made no sense to it, with its strange soap (again bulkier than the Dial we used) and odd rubber non-slip soap-holders, and narrow ledges (here it offered less than our did, in keeping with the way it just wasn't accommodating).
I remember when my downtown grandparents moved downtown the thing I was surprised by was their tub. It was small, and had only two faucets and not four. It was the first tub I'd ever seen where you had to pull up a piece of metal (on what's called the "diverter spout") to take a shower. It light blue and not pleasant to take a bath in. She had a rubber mat so you wouldn't slip when showering, which also meant that this was basically a shower not a bathtub. There wasn't much light if you sat in the tub either, so it was hard to play in and hard to read in as well. She also had a reservoir toilet, as opposed to the toilets at home and in my uptown grandparents' house, which was the standard flush of water from the building itself -- you never had to wait for the reservoir to refill. I liked my own bathroom best.
Friday, October 27, 2006
I remember spending the week with Nina and Yossi at Rae and Celeste's house in Lexington while my parents packed up our Cambridge house and moved us to Sharon. I remember some level of jumping on beds, pillow fighting, but I may be mixing memories; I spent such a lot of sleepovers there. In general, I was happy enough to be with my best friend (Nina), and I didn't mind having my brother along too much. But by the week's end, I longed for my mother, and I remember one telephone call with her, telling her how much I missed her, crying, asking why she hadn't called me more often. As best as I can make out, she'd figured that if she spoke to me less, I wouldn't think of her as much, wouldn't miss her as badly. During that phone call, somehow it came up that they had seen Tootsie, and that it was not an appropriate movie for children.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
I remember not understanding why Casper the friendly ghost had a round head when all the other ghosts had a little triangle of sheet jutting upwards where their cowlicks would have been. (I now realize those triangles must have been meant to represent the corner of a sheet. Or maybe not?) Casper couldn't have been bald -- he was too young. And it turned out the angled ornament could be found on other juvenile ghosts too, friends of Casper's, and not just adult ghosts. I liked Casper's cue-ball smoothness, which went with that sense he gave of always smiling. But I just didn't understand the iconography on a purely surface level.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
On memory:
My almost-five-year-old daughter just informed me that, "It's complicated, because grownups can remember when their babies were babies, but children can't. And it's funny, because it's so close to them."
Monday, October 23, 2006
I remember being among the last three to finish the red workbook in first grade. I remember not caring about this; my teacher and others (parents? classmates?) wanted me to feel shame, hoped that this or something would motivate me to work faster or more consistently, but I didn't care. What would be the point of working faster? If you finished the red workbook, you had to do the blue one. Why rush to the next boring job?
I remember finding red dots on my stomach when I went to the bathroom one day, sometime in the spring. I showed my teacher, and I was sent home with Chickenpox. While I recovered, my father made me finish the red workbook and some horrible textbook from Hebrew class, too, where you had to copy the letters in script over and over again.
What I really wish I could remember is what I thought about, what I daydreamed, instead of working. This was before I began reading, before I sneaked books into classrooms to read under my desk. I wish I could recover the activity of my mind before I loved books. What was in there?
I remember my friend Miri Midlo saying, "I'll come to you," when she meant, "I'll come to your house." I remember working out that she and all my Hebrish-speaking Anglo-Israeli friends must have imported their syntax from Hebrew: avo eilaikh. I remember knowing that this was not English, that it was wrong. And then I remember hearing myself say, "I'll come to you," when I meant, "I'll come to your house."
Friday, October 20, 2006
I remember holding grudges against literary characters. Specifically, I found Jo's rejection of Laurie so painful I could barely tolerate reading the story. Even years later when Laurie married Amy and Jo married Father Bhaer, I was still bitter, still brokenhearted. The other case I remember was a lasting and murderous grudge against King David's general Yoav son of Zeruiah. I hated him for killing Avshalom and making David cry. I have since realized that as a general and statesman, Yoav did the right thing: He had to end the civil war and reinstate David. But back then I cared nothing for strategy or politics. I loved David. Only his feelings mattered.
I remember that on the first plane trip I took, when I was eight and we crossed the Atlantic, I noticed a fly on the back of one of the seats as we were getting off of the plane. I thought of it flying at six-hundred miles an hour in the plane, as though I were a seasoned denizen of what for the fly would be a science fiction world. And I thought about how strange it would be for it to be four thousand miles away, an awe-inspiring distance for the fly -- and yet here it was, across the world, on a different continent, still buzzing around. And here it is, being remembered decades later, in a different millennium, that particular fly.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
I remember leaving the camp social early so that I could be up to see the hot air balloon festival. The fantasy of the social--that we would get dressed up and go to the ball, that like Cinderella we'd be recognized for the hidden beauty usually masked by our clumsy, clunky, everyday selves. Unlike the wicked stepsisters, our whole bunk was in it together. In the hours after dinner and before the social, strange alliances arose. Girls who never normally spoke put up one another's hair. We shared blow-dryers. We voted on each other's outfits. Even the squeamish took off their glasses and put in contact lenses, exchanged application tips and makeup, and drew on blue, green, brown, black, grey, or purple eyeliner. We had all seen those John Hughes movies, so we knew how it worked: you were your undesirable, ordinary self until some opportunity or crisis (in our case, the social) arose and then you transformed into a different, truer version and found yourself loved by the one you liked best. Apparent losers had the most to gain, but somehow their stylishness became a cause for the cool girls, a measure of their power to transform, their ability to become Pygmalion or, for us, Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club.
With regret, I left the ball with my mother before midnight, before finding a prince of any kind, and dutifully went to bed. In the cold before dawn I dressed in a new long-sleeved dark rose dress made of sweatshirt material. It kept me almost warm as I stood on the hill in the shocking chill, watching with my family as the balloons and the sun came up. I was thrilled to see them, felt myself heated and alight and floating as one by one they ripped their colors away from the grass, up past the trees, brightly up into the colorless sky.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
I remember my mother telling me the the stories of The Merchant of Venice and Maupassant's The Necklace, while we walking somewhere in the neighborhood. (Why were we walking? My father was the one who took us for leisure walks... I don't think my mother ever did by herself.) I think I had asked her who Shakespeare was, and she was introducing me. I remember thinking that it was perhaps not impossible to avoid shedding a drop of blood or overweighing the flesh -- one could collect what spilt and put it back into the body. (!) So I wasn't as fascinated by the story as my mother was trying to get me to be.
There is a set of late ninteenth/early twentieth century stories that I associate with my grandparents' house, because I read them there, from my mother's books. And Maupassant is in that set, but I'm pretty sure that I read him only in Bangalore, and a lot later than the other stories.
Monday, October 16, 2006
I remember spending a long summer afternoon with a young woman who asked me a lot of questions. I was about five. She was a member of our havurah community. I remember hearing some of her conversation with my parents, some murky yet light notion of these being tests, her wanting to learn something [from me? was she in graduate school?], and then I remember spending time with her in her apartment and on her second-storey porch. She had a table the shape of a spool of thread, possibly a telephone-wire spool. I loved this. It reminded me of dolls' houses or of the scene in Dumbo with the mouse's things: a spool for a table! But this spool was grownup sized, and I could be the mouse. I liked all the things she asked me, all the things she wanted me to do; I liked her; I liked having her attention all to myself all afternoon. Her warm focus felt like sunlight.
I remember that in the winter she killed herself, and I overheard hushed, lost talk at the havurah about car exhaust and the note she left, and where could she be buried, and about her parents' grief. I remember asking my mother why she did that and my mother saying that sometimes people hurt and feel sad in a way that they think will never go away.
I remember refusing to wear sandals without socks. On my left foot and foreleg, I have and had a pretty big hemangioma, and I hated it. I wanted so much to be symmetrical. I remember drawing on my right foot with purple marker to try to even things out. I remember the bitter realization that I loved toenail polish on my right foot, that toenail polish made the right foot glamorous, grownup, perfect, but that even with toenail polish, the left foot could never be redeemed. I remember refusing to go outside without socks on, knee socks on in the heat, and my father calling me in from upstairs, calling me in off the street, sitting down with me and talking me out of the socks. I don't remember what he said, but I do remember sitting on his lap and crying.
I remember walking with my mother along Mass Ave by the new bus depot, crossing the street, making up rhymes about the unfortunate foot and the kinds of questions people asked me about it:
Did you go into the kichen with a very careless cook?
Did you get jam on it or other sticky gook?
Did some purple bugs come sit there for a look?
And there was one about kicking a train, or something like that. I don't remember it. I remember sitting down and writing out each of the rhymes on half a folded piece of paper, and illustrating them. On the front I wrote, "Roz's You and Foot Book" in big letters, and decorated the title with flowers. My parents photocopied the pages, stapled them into booklets, and I colored in some of the copies. My first publication.
I remember a summer morning eating Rice Crispies for breakfast at the little wooden table by the wall in our kitchen on Locke Street. I couldn't have been more than 6 years old, since we moved before second grade started. Somehow I realized (read it? mom read it to me?) that there was a competition in which children were drawing and submitting their pictures of the Rice Crispies box, and I decided to enter. I drew the box--Snap, Crackle, Pop, smiling around a big bowl of cereal--with colored pencils. Sitting still and doing this, out of the blue, on a whim, and working from start to finish without interruption felt luxurious. Summer meant that my mother didn't insist I had to go anywhere or do anything; on the contrary, she lent me her fancy pencils to color with. I remember feeling proud of my work. There was a surprisingly fair resemblance between what I had made and the image on the box. I knew that older kids would probably send in better pictures, but I wrote my name and age on my picture and felt that for myself, it was a good job. I must have finished at least kindergarden, for I remember addressing the envelope myself. When, sometime later, I received bike reflectors and decals with Kellogg's characters on them in the mail, I felt delighted that my picture had won the contest.
I remember fingerpainting with my mother. This was a big deal, so we must not have done it all the time. She put down newspapers on the kitchen table, and then she rolled out a long strip of thin off-white paper and got several jars of gloopy paint out of a box (but I have the feeling there weren't all the colors--I'm remembering green and blue and black, no red), and we proceeded to make a mess. I remember feeling surprised that one could do this at home.
I remember shrieking "yikes" on the playground in nursery school. Four of us played superheroes together (I was Batgirl, and Justin was Batman, but I couldn't tell you the names of the other two, though Supergirl was my best friend at school). This mostly meant we ran around and tried not to be trampled under the feet of the big kids, the kindergardeners. Yikes was to be shouted breathlessly and gleefully after any near miss. We thought it a grand word.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
I remember the first time I read to myself. My mother had been reading Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry* to me, and I lost patience waiting for her to have time free to read, or maybe I lost patience watching the words over her shoulder, waiting for her to finish the word, the line, the page. I took the book and sat in my father's big green chair in the library and read the rest to myself. Crazy freedom, needing no one, to read all alone, so fast, to fly through the words light as my eyes would carry me. I remember finishing the last page and bursting into angry tears: too short, too short! Where was the rest of the story? For a long time, my parents would ask me how I liked a book by inquiring whether it was a chapter too short.
*Around the same time, I remember sitting in the bathroom with my mother while she explained that it was important to remember the names of the people who had written the books that you loved. I didn't understand why this was, but I believed her.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
I remember thinking of time in increments of one and two. So, an estimate of a period longer than two days but shorter than a week was '(the day after)(the day after)+ tomorrow', and so on. I think I did know how to count, but hadn't formalized the idea of addition. Also, the Telugu words for 'the day before yesterday' and 'the other day' are the same, and perhaps I generalized this as a conceptual rule.
Monday, October 09, 2006
I remember another episode of pure and amazing fun. (I think this was at the Dollards' house, or maybe a friend of theirs, somewhere in upstate New York. This was when I thought "the country" and "upstate" were synonymous, so it might not have been there. The house had a cat in it, I remember.) With some kids I sort of knew, but not well, and some friends of theirs, we went running through a large field of grain. It was amazing and wonderful to get lost in this grain forest (sort of like Carey Grant hiding from the plane). We played hide and seek and chased each other -- I think the cat might have joined us. We could hide completely and sneak around and run and trample the grain too. It turned out we were out there for what must have been several hours; it got dark which seemed part of the whole experience of manic secrecy, of delightful and slendidly unexpected ways of hiding. Eventually the grown-ups came looking for us. I think they were a little upset, but not nearly as angry as we might have expected when they did find us. I think our good humor was contagious. I seem to remember that after supper -- hot dogs and soda and potato chips and desert! -- the other kids got to go out again. But my eyes were completely swollen. I sat on an overstuffed armchair, itching and half-blind as they examined me -- it turned out I was seriously allergic to something. I couldn't believe it. It might have been the cat; no one was sure, but I wasn't allowed back out in the grain, so now the day really was over and night had come. We went home soon after.
I remembered this day years later when we read Catcher in the Rye. I understood Holden's not feeling like one of the kids anymore, not just being allowed to run around in the grain.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
I remember watching Osnat and Duby's dachshund deliver her six puppies. I don't remember how my brother and I ended up in the back room of their apartment, standing back but still right over her nest box, trying both not to crowd her and to see everything. How were we summoned? Were we home that day or did it just so happen that she delivered after school, at a time we could be called? I had a sense of this being generous on their part--unnecessary and broadening and kind of them to allow me to witness the event. Yossi was friendly with Duby, and we were all very excited, but they didn't have to include me.
In memory, it seems so brief. I think she had already had one of them by the time I arrived. She was a beautiful red color, proud, wily, and affectionate with Osnat and Duby but not with us. I can't remembere her name. Pilush (peeLoosh)? The image I have of the births was that they blooped out like those water tube toys--long little cylinders of puppy, each in its own little sack. She licked each pup off and then got on with birthing the next. It looked easy, which now strikes me as completely amazing, but seemed ordinary, obvious, at the time. The first and the last, both girls, looked just like her, but the four in the middle (three boys, one girl) were black with tan edging, like their father. The eldest was very soon the biggest, noticeably stronger than the others. The youngest was my favorite. Once their eyes were open and they began moving around, I played with them nearly every day until, one by one, the puppies were sold or given away. When spring came, they were gone, and I went back to my normal life running the streets and playing house in the entrance to the Cardo with my beloved friend Miri Midlo.
I remember not knowing what an acorn was. Which is to say, being confused about what everyone else seemed to know--that acorns came from Oak trees (which ones were Oak trees?) and that the twirly-whirlies came from Maple trees. What were those really called, and why did acorns get to have a special name that everyone knew when the twirly-whirlies, which you could spin from a height (the top of a wall) to the ground like a helicopter or open and stick to your nose to become a rhinoceros, did not?
Monday, October 02, 2006
I remember one Yom Kippur when my mother and her mother-in-law (my uptown grandmother) weren't speaking. My mother consented, for the sake of family harmony, to come with us to break fast, but declared in advance that she wouldn't talk to my grandmother. When we were there my father expostulated with her: "Come on, honey, it's Yom Kippur." We were standing by a breakfront in the hallway just between the dining room and the living room, which we were about to enter: my grandmother had gone to the kitchen to do something for a minute. My mother thought about it for a moment and relented, much to my surprise. It was a happy ending!
But it turned out it wasn't a complete ending: my mother was now willing to appear on good terms with my grandmother, but it also became clear to me that it wasn't like when she forgave me, when whatever she'd been angry about was over. And even more to my surprise, since I thought of my grandmother as wonderfully open about all her passions, it turned out my grandmother continued to harbor resentment of my mother, about which she would hint darkly to me. (Things went along ok for a while, until a bigger blow up a few months later, after which my two sets of grandparents wouldn't talk to each other at all, and yet they both spoke Yugoslav; and my grandmother and mother broke for many years.)
Friday, September 29, 2006
I remember the needle on my light meter (in my Honeywell Pentax). I remember that if I wasn't sure that it was working right, that the batteries were working, I could radically decrease the f-stop or the shutter speed, and then the needle would shoot down towards the minus sign in the view-finder, like a gull striking a fish. When the camera was off the needle would be just below the acceptable range, so I really noticed when it jerked downward so hard. It moved like something living, and it did so to tell me about the difference between the light I could see and the light it could record. Its message was urgent and eager. We were in it together.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
I remember my yellow jack-in-the-box. I remember it from the one time I played with it. This was either at my pediatrician's, Dr. Steffy's, office, or at my uptown grandmother's house, which was a couple of blocks away from her office. Both my grandmother's apartment and Dr. Steffy's office were old Washington Heights pre-War buildings, and they shared an ambiance. Dr. Steffy's office struck me as an apartment more than an office, which was unusual for me, since I always believed what designers wanted me to believe about interiors. Dr. Steffy had a waiting room, a consulting room, and a room with the instruments where she'd give you shots and listen to your lungs. The consulting room was what I am now unable to distinguish from my grandmother's house when I try to picture where the jack-in-the-box sprung open and terrified me. I think it shocked me away from feeling secure where I was -- for an instant I could have been anywhere, even the 93rd street sandbox where I'd sift sand. Somehow I thought the jack-in-the-box would be like my sifter and pail. But it wasn't.
Monday, September 25, 2006
I remember driving to school with Jane, one of my kindergarden teachers. She would leave her little boy (Adam?) with my parents, who took him to his school, and she would pick me up and take me to school with her. I think my mother got him in the afternoon and she would pick him up when she dropped me at home. I remember her Birkenstocks, her feet in those sandals. I thought the shoes so ugly, could not understand why she wore them, but this was not a question to ask. I remember her feet on the pedals. I sat in the front seat and watched every part of her driving. I hypothesized that she put the indicator on, but that somehow the car turned it off automatically. I didn't know how the car could know we had turned, but I never once saw her turn the signal off, so that must have been it. I was pretty sure which pedal made us go and which made us stop, but I could never be positive, for I couldn't understand the third pedal, and not knowing about the clutch threw me off. I looked out the window so much, learned my way to school more or less, so that even now when I drive in Allston, I feel a residual pride at recognizing the houses, the corners, the way.
Mostly we listened to the radio or were quiet, but sometimes we sang on the way to school. Jane was a terrific storyteller, a dramatic storyteller, and my favorite part of my kindergarden day had been when they darkened the room and we sat on the big rug, and Jane alone took the stage and told and acted out the Goosegirl or whatever fairytale she might. But I don't remember Jane telling stories while we drove. I remember her teaching me a hard but pleasing song that I can't now remember. I remember singing "Miss Mary Mack" and liking the silver buttons just fine, but worrying about the black dress and the mother's displeasure when Mary broke that comb. I enjoyed singing with Jane, and, though I was never convinced that it was a pretty song, I was happy to sing it--better than not singing. One day she asked me which was my favorite song, and I wasn't sure, but I sang "Esa Aynai." And I remember one morning Jane came to pick me up dressed in very fancy clothing--a shiny, formal black or black-burgundy dress like women wore in movies. She looked terribly wrong for a school day. I could see she was troubled, possibly she had been wearing those clothes all night, and crying, and my mother soothed her before we left for school.
Friday, September 22, 2006
I remember the street performers in Harvard Square. Going to see the jugglers, magicians, acrobats, and hucksters was a big deal; I'd get dressed up (dress, tights, mary janes) just as if we were going to a fine or formal evening affair. I remember the rhythm of their patter, the young men's edgy charm, the delicious possibility of being singled out, the thrill of staying up late and of watching the amazing feats: they kept so many pins in the air. He swallowed the torch again! I remember sitting in the bathroom by myself, days after, still humming their silly songs, "If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake."
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
I remember walking the narrow ways of the Old City up to Shaar Yafo to catch my bus to school. Often I walked with my brother to get the bus, so maybe I'm remembering walking home from the bus stop? Sometimes I must have walked alone, though, for I remember going from the top of the Jewish Quarter, where we lived, through the streets that divided the Muslim Quarter on one side and the Armenian Quarter on the other out to the ring road that led to Jaffa Gate. I remember the stains on the walls, the occasional whiff of urine (which didn't bother me, felt recognizable and familiar), the garbage, newspapers, that sometimes collected in the corners (which did bother me--I would erase them in my mind, but not touch them lest they were a hefetz hashud--a suspicious object). The streets were walled--that is, the Jerusalem stone buildings, the 2 or 3 storey homes that lined the pedestrian and donkey-cart walkways [not paths, not roads, more like stone-paved alleys?--but we'll call them streets] came straight down to the street, lined the street, walled off the street--so the sound of footsteps bounced around, echoing forward. I remember hearing the sound of approaching feet, and guessing the height and gender of the man or woman walking, and carefully timing my steps to match his or hers, changing the rhythm of my gait to fall in with whoever was coming or going.
I remember coming home from school to our apartment and knowing that my brother was in the house somewhere, and knowing that he was hiding, and searching for him. I remember calling to him, "Yossi, come out, please don't boo me. Please come out. Don't boo me." But he would never come out, and I could not find him, and eventually I would give up looking. "BOOO!" he would shout, as he jumped out of his hiding place. No matter what I did to steel myself, I would always jump, startled, terrified.
I remember feeling the perfection of our courtyard. Perfectly symmetrical--two ground floor apartments, and two upstairs apartments, all with outdoor entrances, a big square court in the center, and terraces outiside the upper entraces. I remember the lemon tree growing in the pot on the terrace outside our door, its pungent flowers and impressive green lemons. I remember the beautiful purple-blue, magenta-veined morning glory flowers that blossomed up along the steps and over to the entry of the apartment. I remember hanging clean laundry on the umbrella-style clothes-lines that stood on the wide part of the terrace outside the window to my parents' bedroom. I could smell it from the small window seat inside. The smell was the smell of fresh field, the scent that brought Jacob's blessing out of Isaac.
And I remember the day that someone left an empty milk carton on the steps to our courtyard, and I was afraid to go in, afraid to go near, could not make myself even step up to the gate and buzz up to my brother. I don't remember if I had a neighbor call the police or simply waited outside for my parents to come home. Was it a hefetz hashud? Had anyone checked it out? Two bombs went off or were destroyed in controlled explosions down the street from my school that year--we could hear them from the playground, from inside our classroom. Whether the police detonated them or whether they went off by themselves, the noise was so violent we had no question as to its origin. The milk carton, though, was just litter.
I remember Tommy Hoge counting by twos. I think we were counting pennies. I didn't understand what he was doing, but when he showed me it made sense, and was so much more fun and efficient than the prosaic way that I thought you had to count.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
I remember taking the public buses to school in Jerusalem—no. 3 or no. 20. I remember that there were the new buses, with buttons you pressed to request the next stop, and the older buses, which had a pull-string running along above the windows. I couldn’t reach the string, though I could reach the buttons, and I remember sitting on an older bus with increasing anxiety as we got closer and closer to the center of town and nobody rang the bell, debating with myself which grown up to ask to pull the string for me. And I remember hearing American pop music on the buses—music I never listened to at home because my father played only classical on the radio—songs like “Morning Train” and “Brass in Pocket.”
I remember that in two-person Ghost, g loses because your opponent will say h and then the only words to follow are all odd-numbered: ghost, or (as my inadequate cleverness made me discover) ghastly or ghastlily or ghastliness.
L also loses, since your opponent will force you into llama.
Friday, September 15, 2006
I remember that my father never got tired of this joke: we'd asked him about doing something or going somewhere, and he would reply "'No,' he explained."
Or maybe that should be, "he would reply, "'"No," he explained,'."
I remember learning the word "impossible" from my father. That is, I remember his way of replying "Impossible!" when he doubted a claim someone was making. My father always said it with good humor, so it had for me the tone of absolute but genial, smiling authority. He knew when something was impossible, so it was just a matter of knowledge, not of demand, and he was serenely in sync with knowledge.
I liked the sense the word gave me of the truth being both easy and uncompromising. It was his word: the truth was as authoritative as my father, and deep down as kind. I learned impossible before possible, which struck me as a surprising word when I did come to learn it. It opened a whole new world for me, but one that was maybe not quite so secure.
Monday, September 11, 2006
I remember that the days after September 11 there were no planes in the skies except the odd formation of fighters, and how subtly different that was, as though the gods had left and the skies were now empty of the human presence they sponsored, or that sponsored them. But I remember that everyone drove very slowly and courteously, which altered but neither intensified nor depleted the human presence on the ground.
For a week or so there was no road rage. I remember that everyone knew what everyone else was thinking as they drove, that day and in the days that followed. And that it was as if we were all trying to slow down, to temper and moderate the speed of the planes after the fact, by a kind of body English, decelerate the rate of deceleration.
I remember being haunted for months, replaying the attacks, by not knowing where to place myself mentally: in the interior of the plane? In the buildings? Those two interiors, two spaces, which were (like all spaces) so external to each other: from which one could I cope with what had happened as I tried to imagine the experience? The World Trade Center, as seen from the planes, was a sheet of glass. Its exterior had no connection with the lobbies and offices that I'd once seen. Or the planes, as seen from the twin towers were streamlined metal. Not a place of seats and tray-tables and and lavatories. How could those spaces collapse into each other, or rather annihilate each other? What point of view could I imagine it from, since any point of view was absolutely external to the others?
At least knowing what people in the other cars were thinking made it possible to remember another relation between spaces: each of us knowing what was going on in the sacred precinct of another person's little sheltered place -- even the interior of a car -- and (for a very brief period) respecting it wholly.
Friday, September 08, 2006
I remember that there were two kinds of waterfountains in the park -- older, rougher concrete ones with lots of little pebbles mixed in, and newer sleeker cement ones: just the cement, no concrete. The older ones had larger spouts, the newer ones again seemed more modern because their spouts were smaller, more tapered, more advanced, less like a shotgun, more like a ray-gun. Although I didn't make the connection at the time (perhaps because these two ways of shaping the outside environment -- especially of the park -- may have seemed like natural kinds to me, eternal types) I remember too that park benches were of both kinds of material. The older ones were concrete and had larger slats; the newer ones cement, more rounded (like the water fountains), and with thinner slats, more stream-lined bolts, painted a darker khaki green.
Friday, September 01, 2006
I remember "Breakfast time is here! Let's spread a little Skippy cheer!" And the youngest child in the commercial outdoing its mother's verve in putting healthy Skippy on anything by lisping "Even on bananas!" to which she agrees (or maybe it's the announcer who does).
Thursday, August 31, 2006
I remember how stately the curtains at my uptown grandparents' house were, especially in the dining room. They were gauze, and fairly sheer, but somehow substantial anyhow. They never moved, except perhaps with a kind of unhurried, transcendent competence to the motion of the breeze that came through there. Their motion emphasized the stillness of the room they were in -- no one rushing through, not much happening, daylight and shadows in the unlit room. They were part of the furnishing of the room, dark like it, and light like the daylight in the window. It felt safe there, as though time weren't passing, as though my grandparents' old age were a permanent state, what they'd settled into for good now, and what I could rely on.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
I remember seeing my father walking through the apartment one day with his hands clasped behind his back. This was the first time I'd ever noticed this way of walking, which I asked him about. It seemed really interesting and unintuitive, and I tried it for a while. Thinking about it now I realize that I never walk like that. But he certainly did, and not just when he was thinking.
Monday, August 21, 2006
I recently found an old dial-type telephone and installed it in one of our jacks. Dialing is heavier on the index finger than I remembered it to be but the pleasant clicking of the dial as it winds back is worth the effort.
My 8-year-old had never dialed a phone before and didn't know how to do it. This was one of my first encounters with an extinct technique so familiar to me but completely obsolete for her.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
I remember that when my uptown grandfather got a new car, the back seat, on which I always lay full length often on my stomach, had a hole in it near the edge and the seatback. I think, now, it was burned by a cigarette, and this makes me think my grandfather might have gotten a used car. It's the second car of his I remember (and not the Granada I eventually took my driving test in). The weave of the seat seemed older than that in his earlier car, more like the straw seats on the old IND lines (which I've mentioned before) than like the seats on the faster IRT. I thought of tighter weave as more modern, and the dilapidation of the hole seemed to confirm this. I used to stick my finger through it, feeling the sharp nylon edges and the plasticized padding below.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
I remember the pop-up buttons when you took the phone off the hook. I remember the first time I noticed them. I wasn't allowed to play with the phone at all, but either by playing with it, or by watching my parents, I saw those buttons, which I hated. It was like looking upon the phone in its nakedness.
They were supposed to be hidden. I was interested, when I was allowed to play with them, that they both went down when you pushed one of them. Also that you could press them below the level of their recesses. They still seemed strange to me, though -- vaguely malevolent in the paired but inscrutable way they came up when you lifted the phone. I remember them as beige and somewhat translucent, maybe more translucent if the phone was black.
I remember sometimes trying to make the phone look hung-up, by curling the cord under the bracket for the receiver so that if anyone -- a teacher say -- called it would be busy.
I remember -- once I was ok with the desk phones and their two buttons -- being a little bit unhappy with the Hoges' kitchen phone, wall-mounted, with the receiver hanging from a genuine metal hook, which it pulled down. That seemed to me like a Captain Hook hook, compared to the more elegant aesthetics of the desk phone. The desk phone, off the hook, looked like a self-effacing amputee; the wall phone like one with a particularly prominent prosthesis.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
I remember the first time I ever tasted a bagel. I was in my first year of law school and my classmate, Barbara Aronstein (who later under the name Barbara Aronstein Black became dean of Columbia Law School), invited me to spend a weekend at her family's summer house in Monroe, NY. We were having brunch and I was offered a bagel with cream cheese. I did not know what it was, but when I tasted it I thought it was ambrosia. I think bagels are one of the great contributions of Russian Jews to civilization.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
I remember crossing our backyard to play basketball with Michael Clurman on his driveway, one Saturday morning. (He was great at foul shots.) As I crossed over I could hear the smack of the ball on the pavement as he slammed the ball down in his dribbling, waiting for me. I was far enough away that the sound and the sight were perfectly out of sync, the ball hitting silently, and the bang only coming as it reached his hand again. We'd just learned about the speed of sound, and I loved this confirmation of it. The only other time I've seen so perfect an illustration was watching someone hammering from half a street away, so that I heard the bang of the hammer when it was at its zenith. I think I liked the way the distance from the activity to me mirrored the distance the ball or hammer traveled, so that the sound I heard was like the displacement onto a much elongated horizontal axis of the vertical movement that produced it. (I can also concentrate on a similar but less obvious effect if I'm seated far from the stage at a concert, and especially in Family Circle at the Met, but then I'm not listening to the music.)
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
I remember feeling something stronger than surprise, though not quite shock, when my parents' present for me after a trip they made to Britain was a tartan kilt. A skirt! What were they thinking? The intensely interesting fact that I learned at the same time -- that in Scotland men wore kilts -- wasn't interesting enough to make me want to wear it (it didn't quite come to the level of my Lederhosen), but was enough to make me think of the present as intriguing rather than awful. Later I saw Sean Connery in a kilt. One of the women writes her room number in lipstick on his thigh. When he goes he drops his kilt and she cries (we only see him waist-waist up, from behind) "It's true!" My parents explained the no-underwear lore.
Monday, July 31, 2006
I remember my father reading me a version of "The Song of Roland." I was surprised, the first time, that Roland died, that he could successfully blow his horn and die, that he could succeed and die, so that success wasn't escape from death. (I wonder what he was reading me -- it was highly literary, at least for my age). I was surprised, as well, that the heroism or audience interest was so divided between Roland and Charlemagne, since I was used to one hero or one team of heroes, as in the Superman comics my father introduced me to one morning in Stormville, when I was seven or younger.
That morning he wanted to show me something, and I still remember the surprise that what I thought was going to be some kind of educational chore -- reading and learning -- turned out to be Superman. He'd gone out to get the Sunday Times, and (as is his habit) had gotten back into his pajamas and into bed, and so he had the papers spread around him, than which nothing could be more boring. But he also had Superman. (He must have bought it at Connie's, with the paper). I still remember the sunny morning, and the drab bedroom in the cottage with its large but plain wood bed and sheets and coverings, and then the spectacularly colored comic books.
"The Song of Roland" must have been later, and wasn't like Superman at all. But it was still stirring -- in some ways more stirring. It was the kind of story or myth that my mother usually read me or told me, and it was (and remains) interesting that my father was the one who presented it, a part of his literary constitution that wasn't a part of hers, like his speaking German when she spoke Italian, but which seemed so much more like that Italian. In a way, it differentiated my parents unexpectedly, like Roland and Charlemagne.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
I remember that today is the anniversary of the day I came out of surgery, arm intact. The nurse the night before had said there was a chance it could be amputated. I had dreams (on various medications) of skiing with one arm, left poll tucked beneath the remaining stub. I wondered how it would affect my balance, but in the dream I did all right.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
I remember my uptown grandmother predicting how things would be, as she put it, "When I am no more." She spent a lot of time showing me the various objects in her cabinets that I would inherit. They seemed to belong only there, though, and the idea that I would inherit them was so remote that the thought was comforting, since they would obviously stay were they were forever.
Monday, July 24, 2006
I remember the white, foldable wooden ruler that we had. It was, I think, six feet long when fully extended, and a foot or even eight inches long when folded up. Its sections were held rigid by metal hangers or clasps that went around each one allowing the wood of the next to warp over it and then snap into place. When it was shut I liked snapping the top piece out and back. The ruler swayed a little when fully extended, and if you held it horizontally it would buckle -- it was a game to guess what section would go first: the torque was greatest on the section you were holding, but if you shook it right you could get it to collapse half way down instead. I liked the stepped effect it gave to measurements of length.
It snapped shut in the same way as it snapped open, and when it was fully folded up it was about an inch or so thick, considerably thicker than it was side. I liked the way the two dimensions became three when it folded up into a secure brick of wood.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
I remember that I used to think of trees as being more or less the height of adults -- a little taller, obviously, but with their crowns or heads (I thought of them as heads but didn't use the word) starting roughly in the same region as where adults' heads were.
The exception to this rule was the giant weeping willow behind our house in Stormville, with its yellow rubber or plastic anchoring loops wired to some of the branches and which my mother told me were lightning rods (and which may have been -- I guess I still don't know -- certainly my image of a lightning rod is this U-shaped attachment to a tree. There would have to be more of course, and I don't remember seeing any more on the willow. I remember feeling safe though because it was right behind our house, a limit to the driveway and the place where we could play easily, and it towered over the house and so would protect us from lightning. (This place, this area, is one of my most intense and archaic memories -- I think it belongs to my first explorations of the world beyond the limits of my caregivers' immediate scope, and so the world first seemed separate and large and indifferent to me. I recorded my memory of it a little here but I can't come close to the sense of strangeness of these primordial elements of the world "that did not live like living men.")
Back to the trees: the willow was the tall tree, and all others I thought of as being simply on the scale, more or less, of adults. Then much later I came to realize -- somewhat to my surprise -- how much taller trees were. (My mother had told me about redwoods, but they were -- to my imagination of them -- the exception to the general run of things. She told me of seeing one which a road passed through, which made me think of the Lincoln tunnel in New York, so I thought they were really big.)
I think I realized the height of the trees -- a height I still am sometimes surprised by -- when we moved from 2-G to 7-F. The tops of the trees in the park across the street were almost as high as the window I looked out from. Seven stories! I think at 2-G I thought of trees as coming up to the second story -- adult scale, that is. But these were much taller. They towered, in ways I hadn't imagined from walking underneath them.
I think also that I've become aware of how trees loom since growing to adult size myself. I'm on the same scale as my parents now, but the trees are still much taller. Now they seem part of the strange indifferent outside world, and not (as they once did) the community of care-givers. Trees have become much stranger to me, even as the rest of the world has become less so.
Monday, July 17, 2006
I remember that my downtown grandfather would, in courtly mode, preface requests with the phrase, "Be so kind." "Be so kind and open the window." "Be so kind and pass the salt." I liked it.
I also remember a story he told about being in New York, I think, or maybe it was Sarajevo and hearing a woman say "Cerise" when she saw the new cherry-blossoms. She was Hungarian, maybe, and he was Bulgarian, but the word was the same, and he told me that when she said the word he struck up a conversation with her. She was a stranger, and grateful; but somehow also this was the only word they had in common. It might be that they'd already failed to communicate, until she said "Cerise," and then he could show that he knew what she meant and it was all ok. I remember that there was something of an achieved and lovely innocence about the surprising transparency, one that made him happy and made his face glow with pleasure when he told the story.
Friday, July 14, 2006
I remember my mother telling me about ambrosia and nectar -- food and drink for the gods! I was surprised, a few years later (when I was eight or nine) to find that you could buy peach and apricot nectar in cans, and then that bees sipped nectar. Ambrosia has come to mean for me the noun from which a mild adjective of overpraise derives; and nectar next to nothing; but sometimes the word can remind me of the thrill it first had for me when my mother told me about it.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
I remember that window shades used to have strings at the bottom from which hung a circular tug, so that you could pull them down or let them reel up without soiling or wrinkling the shade itself. (I don't know whether they still do: I can't picture them as being still around, but maybe they've just become invisible to me. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled.) What I remember though is the shades before I knew what the pulls were for. I wasn't allowed to touch the window shades, and I thought of the dangling circles as a combination of decoration and mysterious function, and therefore a siglum of esoteric adult knowledge: the circle with a line extending straight up.
I remember going to see Superman with my dad at the Dedham movie house when I was young, probably 5 or 6. And the line was really long—it wrapped around at least half the building, and it went slowly. We started hearing rumors that it was sold out as we got closer and closer to the ticket booth, and, finally, when we were face to face with the person selling tickets we found out that it indeed was sold out and that we could get tickets for the next show, 3 hrs later, if we wanted to. My dad turned to me and asked what I wanted to do—I could tell he was putting me in charge of making whatever decision I wanted to, and I was very nervous about doing the wrong thing. But I also thought that 3 hrs was a long time; I couldn't imagine waiting that long, so I said I didn't want to wait, and we walked out of the theater and back to the car. I thought he'd be mad, even yell at me (even though that wasn't, and isn't, his character at all) for wasting the time we spent in line. But amazingly, he didn't yell-- we just calmly went home. I wasn't relieved so much as puzzled, and disappointed in myself, like I'd let us both down, ruined the outing in a way I couldn't have imagined. (I asked my dad about this episode and he doesn't even remember it at all.)
Sunday, July 09, 2006
I remember Shep Messing, the brilliant, eccentric goalie for the Cosmos. He was supposed to visit our soccer camp but didn't, since it was a World Cup year and he was playing for the U.S. The second-string Cosmos goalie was our coach though, and he was really likable, and really good.
I remember becoming a goalie because on a train or plane in Europe I saw a great photo of the Soviet goalie, all in black, making a completely elegant beautiful, gloved, horizontal save, his face completely impassive. And being a goalie was one of the most fun times of my life.
Friday, July 07, 2006
I remember "We are stardust, we are golden, / We are ?, you know we are, / And we got to get ourselves back to the Ga-a-a-arden."
I sometimes thought the second line had the word "devil's" in it -- "devil's star?" maybe.
And only recently found out it's "billion year old carbon."
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
I remember where I got the firecrackers I remember. From the Hoges, who got them when they went to visit their grandparents in Pittsburgh (they also said they got them in Chinatown, which the Chinese characters on the stickers on the thrilling purple or green tissue-paper wrappers made plausible); and then later from Fred Cohen, who had access to M-80s, cherry bombs, and even a Roman Candle. I was very cautious with them, since there was always a Fourth of July story on the radio about a kid who'd blown off his hand with a cherry bomb. Fred would twine two or three together. I remember setting an M-80 off with Fred in Central Park. We climbed some granite and put it in a cleft in the rock, lit it and ran off. It was really loud.
Fred brought a Roman candle to our house for the weekend (I would have been twelve). I was very anxious about setting it off, since it was so much bigger than anything else I'd tried. I was afraid it would be loud and obvious and dangerous -- that we'd be caught or hurt. He said it was no big deal, just a series of eight or ten bright fire- balls that flew into the air, not so high as to attract much attention. I kept temporizing and we ended up not setting it off that weekend (relief!). Then a few weeks later, I tried setting it off myself, but it was a dud.
I remember that fireworks were the kinds of things you read about in school books about Americanana, but that I'd never seen them in reality, in New York. They were like farming or Little League -- things done in most of the rest of the country, but not where I lived. I think my parents may have gone once or twice in Stormville. But they weren't a city thing -- not until I was an adult. I think I may have first seen them in college.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
I remember "Take a tasty break with Tastiecake!"
Sunday, June 25, 2006
I remember how much I liked calling my mother at worked. I also called my father at work but he was in the office far less often than she was. I knew her direct number and then when she changed offices I knew her secretary, who almost always put me through. It was reliably exhilarating to be able to reach her in a space I knew from having been there several times as hers, but not home. (I remember its being slightly eerie to see her on the phone in her office -- as though I was on the wrong side of the connection.) It wasn't home, but wherever my mother was, her voice was home to me; and so being able to talk to her in her office was like a promise of her presence, always available even when far away. It was like the happiness of talking to her through the bathroom door when I was little: home was on both sides.
Friday, June 23, 2006
I remember jellybean-counting contests. Were there that many of them? What were they all about? When submitting my name and guess and phone number, I envisioned myself at home, weeks or months later, receiving the call that told me that I'd won. Then, after leaving the store or restaurant or wherever, I'd forget all about it.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
I remember wondering, when I first got a toy gun, what the sighting tab at the end of the barrel was for. Hugh explained that guns recoiled, and that the tab allowed you to compensate for the fact that the barrel would rise when you fired. I remember being surprised to learn about the recoil, since in the TV shows and movies I watched they were just like magic wands, almost: you aimed and the other person either dodged out of the way or went down. I wonder now whether he was right that the tab wass to compensate for the recoil, rather than just a way to judge more accurately where the barrel was pointing.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
I remember how surprising "When I'm 64" was the Seargant Pepper album. I think we first heard it on Long Island; it was new to me, but if we heard it on Long Island it wouldn't have been entirely new I don't think. Two of my grandparents wouldn't have been sixty-four yet, and two would have. So to me it seemed a grandparental age, which it is in the song too. And yet the Beatles seemed sufficiently adult that it was reasonable for them to anticipate being 64, although unreasonable for them to anticipate being anything like my grandparents' age. (I didn't then distinguish between them song by song, and so didn't know this was Paul's song.)
In high school one of the year book quotes was from Mick Jagger about morality, I think, that it was invented by old men, men afraid of dying and therefore bugged about religion. Now he's pushing 64 too, but he seems reasonably true to his younger self. So I guess does Paul. But neither seem quite true to my younger self, that is to what I imagined they were then.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
I remember that some people said "Gesundheit" when you sneezed, which we never did. I think I may first have heard "Gesundheit" from the Hoges or the Schubins. This was one of those early introductions to markers for other practices, other familial cultures. Then in sixth grade or so I met kids -- Ronnie Rogers, I think, first -- who told time using "of" rather than "to." Ronnie was one of those kids who had a watch (as well as a Cross pen), and once I asked him the time and he said "a quarter of one." I adopted that formulation, which seemed somehow statelier and more old-fashioned than my father's more dynamic "quarter to," the abbreviation he'd always use since we'd know roughly what time it was, what hour we were near. "Quarter to" had the modern dynamism of Pepsi and the Pontiac he once owned (or maybe once rented). So I guess through sixth grade, anyhow, and probably later, I hadn't yet begun thinking of my parents as retrograde. That may have come with long hair, which for me begun with Ronnie's cooler twin Peter, whose hair was the first boy's that I knew to go beyond a Beatles mop. He was also, I think, the first kid I knew to wear desert boots instead of the Hush Puppies that were as far as the school really wanted kids to go.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
I remember when my hair was long enough that I could chew on it. Barely. It was always a struggle with my mother about when I had to have a haircut. I was one of the shorter-haired kids. But if I pulled it straight down over my forhead, down past my eyebrows, plumb down past my nose, I could first just touch it with the tip of my tongue, and then occasionally, if I could delay the trip to barber long enough, actually chew it, although this took some jaw-stretching articulations of my teeth. My hair never got to be long enough that it was as satisfying as chewing on the laces of my mitt. But it felt like a symbolic achievement to be able to get it to my mouth.
Monday, June 12, 2006
I remember that Judith Crist lived across the street from us. She was reviewing for Cue, which the Hoges got and which I first saw there, and then she started reviewing for New York, and then she turned out to live at 180 Riverside.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
I remember that I learned the phrase "on purpose" from Tommy Hoge. I guess it was something they said a lot in their house, that for some reason we didn't say in ours. I remember it first as an accusation, not a defense. It's one of those phrases that Austin should have analyzed: always in the negative in the first person ("I didn't do it on purpose"), usually not negated in second or third person ("You did that on purpose!"). I think Tommy accused me of doing something on purpose, and I associate learning the phrase both with his bunkbed (shared with Ken) and with their father's den, where we would hang out. I remember that I was struck (as with shirk) that the word struck me as incongruous and funny, because I already knew the word porpoise.
My mother loved porpoises, and made me love them. Since after Flipper I tend to prefer using the word dolphin, as sounding more streamlined, I always associate the word with her, and her porpoise-like kindness and love. So it was odd to have that word flung at me in distorted accusation, odd to hear it come out of Tommy's mouth. (I think this same oddness still distantly haunts me when I read in Paradise Lost how God placed Adam and Eve in Eden "with purpose to assay" if Satan can pervert them and make them fall. How unlike my mother!)
Friday, June 09, 2006
I remember that when I was having trouble memorizing the spelling of Manhattan in third or fourth grade my father encouraged me to figure out some mnemonic, and I came up with "The man under a hat had a tan" (which of course doesn't quite make sense).
Thursday, June 08, 2006
John Crowley remembers:
I suppose journals should be all about the day as it passes, but my days are not mostly worth cataloguing -- the new toilet seat put in today -- the weather dreadful, cold and rain -- etc. -- so my mind travels back. One hot sunny afternoon, one of few lately, I was at the University nearby and I remembered summer at college, not my own college days but summers at Notre Dame, near where I lived in high school, and where my father was the doctor at the student infirmary. I had an old Schwinn English and in the summers (I think I'm remembering best the summer after sophomore year in high school) I would bike over to the college in the late morning and stay most of the afternoon. Most of that time I spent in the library, looking through old books and albums of theater history and stage design from the 20s and 30s (I didn't have a clear conception of how old they were). Gordon Craig. Max Reinhardt. Norman Bel Geddes. Then I would eat lunch at the Student Union, and drink Cokes in the dim under parts of that place, cool there though I doubt it was air-conditioned. I wanted to be a stage designer myself -- or rather that's where for the most part Iocated this intense inward visionary feeling and urge. It was my land, as others located theirs in poetry or the movies (which I loved too, both). Anyway that somnolent campus (UMass) was a Proustian ticket to that older one (ND) and the interior of the person I then was.
I remember "And your sunshine of love keeps me warm ? my relative rescue." A treacly pop song, but all I remember is this repeated chorus.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
I remember that I pronounced hundred as hunderd, which is how Tommy and Ken pronounced it too. (Also it turns out how Tennyson did, as you can hear in the recording of his reading of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," where he rhymes it with "thundered" and "blundered.") I seem to think I learned the word from them, and I know that I was surprised that there was terminology for higher orders of magnitude, which I learned much later. I thought that the hundreds were as high as anyone bothered to go.
I think my mother told me about infinity, later; and I remember my father's Encyclopedia's proof that there were an infinite number of numbers: assume y is the largest number. Consider y+1. Y+1 is greater than y. Therefore there is no largest number, and the numbers go on infinitely. This was gratifyingly, stunningly easy, compared to all the other math stuff I looked up with their sigmas and double-integration signs.
Learning how hundred was spelled was as surprising as learning that idea didn't end with an r. But this seemed a little stranger about a number since the Magoo-like numeral 100 was already very familiar to me. I was a little puzzled by the relation of a hunderd to one hundred, though.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
I remember that dad used to hold me upside down with my feet around his neck and I was his necktie.
He'd also play King Kong with us and carry us over his shoulder jumping around and screeching, then throw us down on the bed. Scary and fun!
Friday, June 02, 2006
I remember that we would sometimes practice with the two kids who were two-stripe green belts. (We were all thirteen or so). They talked mainly to each other, in low voices, clearly of things beyond my comprehension. Sometimes we'd be instructed by the brown-belt, who was a soldier, a marine I think, and big. He was really good and really nice. They listened to him carefully, too. I now realize the fact that I could tell he was really good is what distinguished him from our sensei, who was far more subtle. I remember vividly watching the sensei drill the green belts. They were just advancing and retreating, but one of them was weeping with the effort. I couldn't see why -- these were just the same drills we did, and were no effort at all -- which made it impress me all the more. Both the kids broke boards during some open house demonstration day at the dojo, and I think the other one of them broke a brick. That was more obviously impressive.
Monday, May 29, 2006
I remember a movie my father took me to, in which the adult who is helping the hero through his exotic adventures somewhere in the East -- and who might have been Yul Brynner -- fights an enemy, the King's champion, in a contest watched by the King and his minions, which takes place on a rope web over open barrels of what my father said was boiling water. The enemy falls halfway into one, and tries to get out, and fails and sinks and dies. I was puzzled -- how could hot water kill him? Later I realized it was boling oil. It was a thrillingly puzzling movie, and I don't remember much else about it. But I do remember the fight, the balancing on the web, the fall into the barrel and the victory of the person we were rooting for, and my father's explanation (like his explanation at the end of Limelight that Charlie Chaplin was "very sick" when they drew the sheet up over his face after what had been up to then the hilarious last act).
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I remember several things that I only got to see once, and then not entirely, on TV. The movie of The Secret Garden, which I ended up pursuing by getting the book. But it wasn't the magical movie. Part 2 of the first episode of Batman. The Mutiny on the Bounty, which Hugh and I were really looking forward to watching one night -- he'd seen it before. But then it turned out to be on too late, or I got in trouble and wasn't allowed to watch it. I remember my bitter disappointment at that.
And the cartoon version of "Who killed Cock Robin" (" ' 'Twas I," said the sparrow, / 'With my bow and arrow' "), with the chorus of birds and animals singing the question over and over again. I came into the cartoon a couple of minutes late, but I loved it immediately, and looked forward to seeing the whole thing. I never have.
Monday, May 22, 2006
I remember there were many typically "kid things" that seemed to belong to other kids-- but not to us. All the things listed in the other blogs like kites, balsa planes, messages in bottles, etc belonged to another magical kid world that we didn't have access too. This is not because we never were given these things-- it was more that even having them, we didn't really know how to use them or relate to them. I think this was true for Billy, too. Is this otherness due to not being Anglo-Saxon or is it related to the way the world of play was/is portrayed on TV?
I think that was part of the magic of the Sterns -- a big family who played tennis, swam and belonged to the material world in a self-assured way.
One typical kid thing I did manage was to catch a frog in our pool. Billy bet me three dollars that I wouldn't be able to pick it up. But I could (he was sure it would hop out of reach) and it took mom's intervening for him to cough up the dough. But I think his grave miscalculation was part of us not knowing things kids are supposed to just "know".
I remember sonic booms, one or two anyhow, in Stormville. They were very loud, and like a combination of thunder and lightening, a huge and sudden bang, and then they were gone. I think my parents were warned that there were going to be some, since my father told me about them before they came. (I guess that planes don't fly over populated areas faster than sound any more at least in the U.S.; I might have heard some sonic booms in the Lake District a few years ago).
It was the silence of the approaching plane that seemed amazing in retrospect. No motor noise, just a kind of invisible shattering of the silence from the depths of the sky, and then silence again.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
I remember that my mother wouldn't let me say "Hey." Hugh and his family used the word a lot, which was part of his dangerous charisma for me, on a par with his going to bed as late as 11:00.
I remember that, but don't remember when he began using the language that so surpised my parents and thrilled me, language his parents both used too. I remember his mother saying "Oh, shit" once, mildly, when she was looking for something in a bookshelf. (My parents didn't believe me.)
By then "hey" had lost its edge for me, but I remember that it still had that edge when there was occasion (maybe at Stormville, maybe at the Claremont stables) to talk about hay.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
I remember kites. I remember trying to put a kite together, once in New York, once in Stormville. I knew, vaguely and from Peanuts, that they were supposed to have tails. I didn't understand the principle of the knots, nor their length, nor why they needed one at all. I remember slotting the light wooden frame together, the pleasure of that flossing-feeling of sudden success when the string got pulled into the notch, but that the tail wasn't included. How was one supposed to make one? Of what? And the kite didn't fly without it. In fact I didn't successfully fly a kite until college. I remember that box kites seemed more solid, but that the box kites sold at Connie's, the general store in Stormville where we got all our balsa airplanes and candy cigarettes, were much too expensive.
But I did successfully fly these silver, flexible plastic bird- or plane-like kites with revolving wings that the wind would spin, helping them aloft, in Milano Maritima. They didn't need tails, and they seemed perfectly designed to fly, unlike kites. We used to fly them way up high over the beach. I remember many beach chairs with tanning adults lying on them, the string reels plunged into the sand or tied around the frame of the beach chair as the bird glinted merrily far up above. I remember one father showing us how to "send a message" up to the kite, taking a piece of paper and tying it in a simple knot around the string at the bottom where we were holding the reel. The paper just climbed up the string all the way, which I thought was amazing, amazing.
But not so amazing as to make me stop wondering what the message to this inanimate, unmanned kite could possibly be. Somehow, it seemed, the message would be relevant to the kite, now that it was in another sphere, one that was inaccessible to us. It mattered that it could only reach the kite as a message. But what else could it convey? I still wonder, sometimes.
Monday, May 15, 2006
I remember that the trainer who hit tennis balls with us in Milano Maritima always had a cigarette in his mouth, the ash always on the verge of falling. He didn't need any wind, though, since he would always be just wherever the ball was coming.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
I remember that after swimming I would get in the shower sometimes and dropping my cold swimsuit to the concrete floor I would use my toes to pull it off from around my feet, feeling the grit that had got into the suit against its fabric. It was a struggle, sometimes, to hook my big toe around the band and somehow get it off from where it was clinging around my other ankle -- and them sometimes I'd get my toe entangled in it when I succeeded. But it was worth it not to bend down and out of the warm water cascading down, worth it to avoid the goose-pimples (as my mother called them) just the other side of the stream of water.
I also remember getting in the warm tub with my bathing suit on (much harder to pull it off with my toes than in the shower) and the kind of substantial belch of cold water that would billow out of my suit, reminding me again how warm the water I was bathing in was.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
I remember that the first time I saw a real wheelbarrow was in Stormville, at the Hering's house. Barbara is a maniacal gardener (a category I didn't know until then). I'd seen wheelbarrows in cartoons, but hadn't realized they only had one wheel. (I think I hadn't actually counted how many wheels they had till just now. Which shows you can count to 1, contrary to some basic theories of mathematical knowledge.) To see a real wheelbarrow was like seeing a real version of a cartoon animal for the first time -- a real lion or giraffe or ostrich. I noticed they were far less stable than I'd thought (like my training wheels), and that they required more skill to use than I'd imagined. They were also bigger than I'd realized. I was surprised that they were used for dirt. I was surprised that there were more than one of them, since I'd somehow only seen them as single, Platonic forms in cartoons. (One was older than the other, and I got to prefer first the newer one and then the slightly larger, friendlier-seeming older of the two, with its smoothed down wooden handles.) These wheelbarrows seemed to know more about the world than I did -- after all they'd already known all about wheelbarrows.
Monday, May 08, 2006
I remember being fascinated by coins in fountains. There was a fountain with coins in it at the Chinese restaurant in White Plains that we used to go to with the Schubins. It had several tiers, and there were coins in each, though most on the bottom. I thought, of course, of how much money I could have if I fished them out. But I was also fascinated by the way they were evidence of adult savoir-faire. Adults, people with money in their pockets, people with enough money in their pockets to toss some away knew the appropriateness of tossing these coins into the fountain, and the appropriate way to do it. The coins stood for this knowledge. There they were, emissaries of the adults who had thrown them, cool as cucmbers, imperturbable in the rightness of their being there. The coins were adult too, took on the adult quality of those who knew to toss them there. They weren't an index of childish desire, for candy or comics or baseball cards. They were completely themselves, self-sufficient and at home in the world, and they represented the competence that made them this way.
Friday, May 05, 2006
I remember the reason I thought both my parents smoked. One night at a party when my father was smoking -- I think this was in Stormville, but it may have been at someone else's house, since I remember a lot of my parents' friends being there -- my mother took a drag from my father's cigarette. (I remember that she was sitting below him on some stairs near where they turned a corner and I can't quite figure out where this could be. )
My mother took a drag from my father's cigarette, and I remember how beautiful she looked, how beautiful her act looked. The ember got bright. It was as though she was transferring some of her beauty into that ember, so the act, and the gaiety of the evening, and the elegance of her movements and the radiance of the ember and the good fellowship all around came together and it was all focussed, as was absolutely appropriate, on her.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
I remember that there were three light bulbs in the fixture of my room, over a frosted glass reverberator, I think it might be called. I remember my father bringing the step-ladder in to change a bulb. Later, I could do it myself, but I would usually wait until only one bulb was left. I could easily get used to two instead of three, but one made the room seem really dim. Then I'd put two in, and suddenly it was brilliantly, even sterilely, lit again. But my eyes got used to the very bright light quickly as well. Later I got a standing bedside lamp, and I liked to read by its light. I remember rocking it back and forth a little bit to position it perfectly, and to cast the light just the way I wanted (when I rocked it towards me), and just for the pleasure of rocking it.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
I remember the pleasure of putting the paper cigar band from my uptown grandfather's cigars on my finger, like a ring. I remember that at first it was loose, but as I got bigger it got tighter and tighter, until eventually I had to be careful lest the strain pull the glued overlapping ends apart. I liked the feel of slipping the band on my finger.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
I remember when my sisters & I were teenagers, my older sister and I thought our younger sister, B, quite conventional. (Unlike ourselves; we had thoroughly conformed to the "stoner" culture of high school and were therefore rebellious.) We were in on something she was not.
As an adult, these distinctions did not hold. B turned out to have the quickest wit of all three of us, especially in conversation. When B and our mother came to visit my older sister and me in Seattle, we were riding a city bus one day, and we passed a store that specialized in caviar. "It sells only caviar!" my mother said, ready to be awed by the big city. "Oh, no, I'm sure they sell other things," B demurred. "Toast points, for example."
I remember another song from one of my story-telling records: "Toby the tortoise and Max the hare / Met one day at the country fair." Toby of course beats "Max Rabbit." I remember the perky melody. I knew the story before I got the record, so essentially the setting, names, and rhymes that the song gave it functioned more or less like the melody, as ornament, and I realize, now that it was interesting to discover that things as basic as names or places could turn out just to be ornament.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
I remember that today is my sister's birthday, and that I posted about her birth here. I remember further that on that Passover meal at my uptown grandparents' my mother was sitting to my right, and that she pushed away the matzoh ball soup, on the fancy lace my grandmother had spread over the dining room table, and said she had to go. I remember findinv it noteworthy how quickly -- not hastily but quickly -- she and my father left to walk to the hospital. That was the night of April 18, and she was born the next day. Happy birthday Caroline!
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
I remember the Sterns had to "sell" their Windham house for Passover. They sold it and later bought it back for a dollar. Geoffrey explained that they were purging the chometz, and of course it was obvious to me that they weren't really selling the house. But I did somehow imagine that they were selling the chometz -- boxes of flour and mixes I imagined crowding their kitchen shelves -- and that somehow this all belonged to the guy they were selling it to, with the house more like a conveyance, moving not through time but through exchange (like that giant rock used as immobile money on a South Sea island), from the Sterns to their friend and back again, delivering the chometz to him. What would he do with all this chometz in an empty kitchen? Well, he was as notional, to me, as the imaginary chometz was, so it all made sense.
I remember the first time I ate middle-eastern food--falafel, hummous and babaganosh. I was 14 years old and a friend took us to a hole-in-the-wall on Broadway on 81st or thereabouts.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
I remember the beginnings of my obsession with Samuel Beckett. I read and loved Endgame and Waiting for Godot some time in high school, and bought and read his Proust essay at the Gotham Book Mart my senior year (before I’d ever heard of Proust—I figured, if Beckett wrote that, Proust must be pretty important). Then sat in on Ricks’ Beckett class my first semester of college, which was an amazing experience. Once he wept after showing Eh Joe and then he dismissed class. The following fall, I blew off school for a week to go to a Beckett conference in Dublin where they put on all the plays and showed all the films. When a professor I’d just met asked me to send a postcard, I thought, wow, my circle of fellow Beckett readers is expending. I remember getting Guy Davenport to talk about his afternoon with Beckett, at Les Deux Magots, and how Beckett was treated as a regular and not a celebrity.
Oddly, as I wrote the above, my mom came over with a copy of today’s Times and pointed out the two pieces on Beckett. I don’t remember her knowing of my obsession. (Oh wait: I do… I took her to see some Beckett plays, including Footfalls and Krapp’s Last Tape, in college.)
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