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

I remember "Hercules [?] too-do-do-do-do-too-do-do-do, Hercules!...With the strength of ten / Ordinary men / That's the pride [?] of HERcuLES [?]." A weekday afternoon cartoon, of the Astroboy, Gigantaur, Tobar the Eighth Man ilk. Weekday afternoons were far different cartoon-wise than weekday mornings. I had a dim awareness that this was because they were aimed at a different audience (school-age kids). But for me that difference really felt just like a difference in time of day.

I remember Marc Bilgray's high praise for the animation of Bugs Bunny. He rotated his hands around each other really fast and said that in Bugs Bunny that whole rotation would be animated. In Johnny Quest not.

Evening cartoons I remember mainly as the Flintstones, also badly animated. But I think he might have been disabusing me of my love of Johnny Quest.

posted by william 7:56 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember Don Knotts. I remember his bobbing Adam's apple. I remember I preferred Andy Griffith, sheriff to his deputy. I think it was watching the Andy Griffith show that I learned that a deputy was subordinate to a sheriff: I had thought of them before as like marshall and sheriff, two powerful officers of the law.

posted by william 8:18 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember falling asleep in the car while coming home from an evening out. My mother would drag me up the stairs to bed, and make me wear a sweater buttoned up at the back (to maximize chest warmth). I didn't like inverting it like that, so she could only do it when I was in that sleep-heavy state. If we hadn't had dinner yet, I would be fed, hurriedly, rasam rice. I remember it dripping down my chin, and hating it, but too paralyzed by sleep to feed myself or prevent the dripping.

But there was also something relaxing about this semi-awake helplessness...

posted by sravana 4:27 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that another phrase I wasn't sure of was "toe the line", which I thought was "tow the line". We had a view of the Hudson river from our house and Mom and I would watch from the window when particularly eye-catching boats were afloat. "Look, a tugboat!", Mom would exclaim. They were so cute pulling their huge and heavy loads. I think that's why I associated to towing.

posted by caroline 6:00 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that our piano had three pedals, and that the middle one wasn't official; you could push it down and then slide it left so that it would stay down. It brought a layer of felt between the hammers and the strings, so that the sounds were deeply muted. This was so you could practice in an apartment and not annoy the neighbors. I hated what it did to the sound, though I couldn't have said why. I didn't worry about the neighbors, because we could never hear them (except for the kid who used to run around the apartment above us, making the chandelier shake and jangle -- one of the few sounds to drive my crazy, or maybe it was waiting for him to make his next circuit, and hoping that he was finally done).

Because of the neighbors my mother wouldn't let me practice after 9:00, so if I could string the evening along until 9 or so I wouldn't have to practice. Every minute I temporized after 8:30 was one minute subtracted from the half hour I was supposed to do.

posted by william 12:35 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the old men coming out of the steam room at Grossinger's, getting massages, and standing in the needle showers, all off limits to me, which was fine. They were all big and vigorous and knew all sorts of things about physical culture that I'd never dreamt of. The needle showers were particularly interesting to me. Later, when I learned the word rake, I think in a James Bond novel, I thought of the needle showers as being like the rakes that the novel explained the courtisans stimulated the elderly rakes with. (I should check if that's what rake really comes from.)

posted by william 8:32 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember my first post here, four years ago today. It was a frigid night, and there was frost on the windows. Since then a significant percentage of my life has passed. Some of what I remember is harder to bring back than it was when I posted it, and I'm sometimes surprised by earlier entries.

posted by william 7:32 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember coming home and using the backdoor from the courtyard that you entered on 89th street. You went down a ramp and past a triangular green area with a birdbath in the middle and nothing. Nevertheless we weren't allowed on it. The birds didn't seem particularly interested either. I remember riding my bike around the triangle once or twice which brought me to the angle of the triangle that I would otherwise never go to, the part not between the entry to the courtyard and the door. That was slightly spooky; an area in the courtyard like all the others, and yet not part of the flow of my life. The windows and walls seemed blanker there somehow. The perspective was not the usual one. It was like taking an unaccustommed exit from the Henry Hudson Parkway.

On the way home from school we'd go through the yellow back door into the lobby. Then one day they decided to lock the backdoor -- just when they also decided that visitors had to be announced. (You used to just walk into buildings, if they had doormen, your own or others, and go upstairs.) We could still exit through the back door though, and ring when we got home and the doorman would come and open it. But I remember frustration when they didn't come; we'd ring and ring and wait and wait. Still, it was nice when they came; it was a ritual of arrival. Then eventually I think the doormen complained about the chore, and we had to go around to 90th street and through the front door. Tremendous and towering 89th street, somehow pegged to the morning sun as I walked east to school and the afternoon sun as I walked west and home, was replaced by 90th, which must have been angled slightly differently. Or maybe now I was taller, and those days were over.

posted by william 9:09 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember one Sunday evening in Long Island when we were playing softball. It was summer and lovely to go back to the city early Monday mornings, because it meant that this evening could be similar to Saturday, that we didn't have to pack up and go right away, but that it was more precious than Saturday because the end of the day meant the end of the weekend anyhow.

As we were playing the fire-siren went off, and one of the fathers, who'd been pitching, ran hell-for-leather from the mound to his car. His kids kind of followed him, and the game broke up, so we got into -- whose car? -- and started driving home. We saw the pitcher get out of his car at the volunteer fire-station, which was on the way, and hop onto an engine which went racing ahead of us up Montauk highway. It turned into my street! It turned into my driveway! My family was standing outside the house with a firetruck there and a bunch of firefighters in raincoats investigating. It turned out there was some propane leak, and that the exposed copper wire under the house could have exploded the whole thing. No hot water that night, and getting to the city the next morning was a relief.

posted by william 2:35 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that my mother shocked me when I was about 8 years old by saying that she believed that Jesus had existed. I felt totally betrayed! Was she a Christian? But then she explained that she meant he probably existed as a person and had been influential, but that she didn't believe he was the Messiah.

This was my introduction to a more nuanced way of thinking.

posted by caroline 4:40 AM
. . . 0 comments