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 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).

posted by william 5:54 PM
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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.

posted by william 10:42 PM
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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".

posted by caroline 3:36 AM
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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.

posted by william 12:10 AM
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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.

posted by william 7:41 AM
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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.

posted by william 4:14 PM
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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.

posted by william 10:33 PM
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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.

posted by william 9:46 AM
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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.

posted by william 11:24 PM
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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.

posted by william 8:37 AM
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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.

posted by william 11:43 AM
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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.

posted by william 11:39 PM
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