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
Friday, December 21, 2007
I remember some hybrid illustrated coloring books that involved a scroll that you spun under a clear and flimsy clear plastic window. You colored on the window, so that you could erase it when you scrolled up another page. It was really interesting as a piece of cheapo technology, but nothing about the content was interesting and it didn't work anyhow. Now my main sense of it is that it jammed and bunched up in the cylindrical canisters where the rollers were and unspooled and went crooked. I think it was more a conveyer belt than a scroll -- that is it went around again to the beginning. But I may be confusing two similar toys, since I also remember that feeling of forcing it when you scrolled it out to the end, and the glue coming undone from the roller.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
I remember a snow day when my mother took us to sled on Pettee's hill. So many kids were there, swooping down that hill. A hill the shape of a normal distribution curve: such a long sharp way down, with a slow evening out to flat right there at the end. I couldn't believe it. How was this place set aside for sledding, for kids, and how did everyone know about it? Was this permanent or only on snow days? What was this hill for in summer? We sledded and sledded, flying down and trudging back up. It was so fun, I don't remember if I got snow in my boots. Then she pulled us up the hill of the end of Pleasant street, walking right up the middle of the road. Though there were almost no cars on the road, I felt scared and strange--so exposed in the middle of the road and so low to the ground, invisible and craning to see what was coming. The snow was so thick on the roads that there were deep ruts where tires had tried to move. It was hard going, walking, but a dream on a sled.
The two favorite things I loved best about childhood were: 1. The instantaneous alliances that play made possible with kids whose names you didn't even know. [When do adults make such alliances? Is this what one night stands are really about?] 2. The feeling of total belovedness brought on by unexpected permission and by hot cocoa.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
I remember how fascinated I was by the whirlpool of water going down the drain in the bathtub. I'd sit watching it all drain out. I connected the beaded chain of the plug to its image in the water once the plug was pulled, the dancing downwards pointed elongation.
I remember this experience was disturbing and even frightening when I was very young. The way opening the drain could dimple the top of the water several inches above it. The dancing dervish seemed to me like a malevolent spirit which just showed up as the water left -- which therefore could show up at will. The water seemed innocent to me, harried by the whirlpool dervish. Finally it would all be gone, but with a loud draining sound that seemed a slightly monitory echo.
Often my mother would swoop me out of the tub before I had to experience much of the whirlpool, and her counterpull into a towel and love would completely compensate for the anxiety caused by the draining water. She had power even over that.
(I remember that at my uptown grandparents, though, the water drained even faster, the whirlpool was even more pronounced, and I really didn't like taking baths there.)
Friday, November 30, 2007
I remember how happy I was when I got Tommy. It was expensive, a double album. I had heard, on the radio I think, "Tommy" itself, but many of the songs were revelations. "Got a feeling twenty-one is gonna be a good year." And I'd had no idea -- hard to believe now -- about "Pinball Wizard." I think Hugh had a copy first, but of course none of us had seen Tommy and we put it together from the songs. Hugh as usual seemed to have expert knowledge. But there were all these songs that I discovered entirely on my own, just from listening. I remember that I put the records on my father's stereo, in the living room where the piano that I didn't practice that night was. What a treat to listen to Tommy instead of practicing.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
I remember asking for a horse for my sixth birthday and really meaning it. I didn't bother asking my parents; I asked Cherie and Everett, who had lived downstairs from us in our two-family in Cambridge when I was very little.
Perhaps because of my middle name, Cherie taught me to sing, "Alice, where are you going? Upstairs to take a bath. Alice with legs like toothpicks, and a neck like a giraffe. Alice stepped in the bathtub; Alice pulled out the plug. Oh my goodness, oh my soul, there goes Alice down the hole!" Though I remember singing it with her, and though I remember associating it with her and knowing she taught it to me, I can't remember the first time. She must have taught me that song in the pre-history of my mind, at a time before I can remember my memories. Everett told me (repeatedly, I'm sure) my favorite fairy tale, which was The Frog Prince, and resulted in my thinking of him as the Frog. They gave me an immeasurably beautiful ring set with a delicate pink oval gem that sometimes looked purple in the light. I promptly lost it, but would find it again among my things from time to time, always with immeasurable joy; it was a thing I coveted although it belonged to me.
They also catalyzed my family's introduction into Jewish practice, and I remember making Challah with my mother and Cherie in Cherie's kitchen (my only memory of that downstairs flat). I remember their involvement in my parents' wedding (the Jewish wedding, when I was about 4, after my father converted)--did my mother alter Cherie's wedding dress? I remember something to do with Pesach, but again I don't know what. Still, my feelings about Pesach come partly from associating them with Pesach, an air of Cherie and Everett, so there must have been a Seder together at some point. Eventually they moved out of the downstairs apartment, but I stayed connected with them: Sometimes I slept over at their new house in Brookline, or was taken for a trip--bowling, or the zoo, or something similar. I knew their phone number by heart, would call and chat with them from time to time.
I knew that they loved me, so I asked them, really, seriously, sincerely, for a horse. That was what I wanted. And on my birthday my parents brought a pinata to school (the first birthday in first grade), and sometime that day someone gave me the lovely (I say now, with adult eyes), sock-headed stick horse from Everett and Cherie. Oh the insult: How could they have misunderstood me so badly? And why would they give me something so ugly, a caricature, with yarn hair for a mane?
Saturday, November 10, 2007
I remember splatting Norman Mailer with a jelly donut, the result of a high-spirited accident, when I was visiting colleges and he was giving a talk. This was closing one loop in my life, since I remember my father's big fat copy of The Naked and the Dead sitting on the shelf at eye-level across from me when I sat on his recliner in his study to read.
Friday, November 09, 2007
I remember getting my first zip-up coat. My earlier winter coats used buttons. My mother knew -- again with that adult savoir faire that was so impressive to me -- and remarked to my father that the zipper on this coat was very different from the zippers I was used to (on my space-suits), since you had to bring both sides together and then zip up. The zipper wasn't already attached at the bottom. I couldn't even conceive of such a thing. But she knew all about it, and even knew how to zip up my coat, which she'd do for me until I learned how myself.
(I remember also being amazed, probably before this, that zippers worked. I think Hugh tried to take the apart to see how they worked. My attitude was -- and still is -- that if you dismantled it enough to see how it worked you'd never be able to get it to work again.)
Thursday, October 25, 2007
I remember how black it was in Sharon when we would get up in the morning to go to school. We got up at 6:00 to get to the bus for 7:00. I remember that it made no difference if you opened the shades or kept them closed: the only light was yellow, incandescent. The dark made the house feel colder. I never set out my clothes the night before. I remember in second grade, after we moved to Shaorn, I had a pair of school shoes, for once, that I liked: navy blue ballet flats with a bow at the top. I think Leah Schachter had similar shoes, and I loved her and loved to have anything in common with her.
I remember bad days in first grade: the day my crayons melted, being last to finish the red workbook, the day I got chicken pox, the last-minute struggle to find the right kind of black, ruled notebook. But second grade feels more obscure; The quality of the light in these memories is off, a green-tinted glare on everything. For Hebrew, we had that Israeli teacher, Shoshana Cohen, who made us copy long poems in script off the board. For English, we had Ms. Simansky, who had beautiful red curly hair and freckles and a soft lovely voice [the color of the memories changes here: she is in the light, always in daylight, in the sunlight standing in the doorway to her classroom, standing between the shadowy corridor and her big windows to the yard], and who was altogether what you would want a teacher to be: beautiful, kind, upright--she could speak gently to lions and dissuade them from roaring. She made us work in groups on contractions: haven't, isn't, couldn't, won't. I didn't like the group: two boys and two girls. Massa was the other girl, but I don't remember who the boys were. She read _Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing_ to us, and Elisheva, who wore her long dark hair in a ponytail tied at the nape of her neck and pinned it up on her head, neat and straight as a stripe, drew such a good likeness of the real cover on her book report that we all agreed she was our artist. I had a crush on Dani Stein in those days, and I remember looking at the months of the year train, posted across the top of a wall, with our birthdays on them; I remember, but I could be wrong, that Dani's was in April.
Ms. Simanski made us learn verses by heart, but I never learned anything by heart willingly--not then and not in third grade when we had to learn the times tables by heart and I didn't, wouldn't, learned it only piecemeal, over time, learning each number through use, figuring them out one at a time. I probably had the nine times tables by the time I was in 5th grade. I could probably fill in the boxes in that grid (1-9 along the top, 1-9 along the side) in seven minutes now, but I couldn't do it then, and I suppose I only know the twelve times tables now because I've had to do a lot of measuring in inches over the years. The parts of the day in which other kids learned these things were invisible to me. Or I couldn't bring myself to care.
Anyway, the only poem I remember learning that year, second grade, was by Robert Louis Stevenson: The rain is raining all around / It falls on field and tree / The rain is raining on umbrellas/ here and fish at sea. I'm not sure, come to think of it, where the line break is between ll. 3-4. I learned that one because Leah Schachter and I sat together on the bus on the way home from school and we practiced it, and we sang a bunch of affecting songs from Annie (Maybe far away, and maybe real nearby . . . ), and then I made up a tune for the Stevenson poem, and we sang that the rest of the way home.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
I remember, for the first time in decades, commendations! We got them in first and second grade. (Mrs. Comiskey, our second grade teacher, had a name that I thought was related to commendations.) They were obviously important, but they were purely abstract. They weren't stars or anything. They were just something you got for being good, as though stored up in some scholastic abstract treasury. But we thought they were important. I think this was my first introduction to abstraction. It was fascinating without my quite knowing that I was fascinated. (Fascination was an abstraction as well, so commendation led to the whole ramifying set of abstraction.)
Thursday, October 11, 2007
I remember Hurricane Gloria. I remember staying home from school and the excitement of waiting for something incredible--something hard to believe: Would or could this imaginary adult storm knock down the stand of creaking old oaks just south of the house? If they fell, would they crash down on us--how could they not? I remember my mother filling huge five gallon glass jars full of water, and possibly the bathtub, and jittery trips up and down stairs to the basement; did we really have to stay down there? We couldn't. I don't remember losing power, though I do remember big quiet calm, so probably we did. I remember standing in the kitchen, looking out the window into the woods, watching a huge black chestnut tree go down. It fell as if in slow motion, gently, swishing across my field of vision from left to right, and never made a sound until it thumped to the ground and the house shook a little. Feeling it fall amazed me, how invisibly the wind tore it up, singled it out among all the trees in the forest, but more than that, I gaped at the roots that had ripped out of the ground, 15 or 20 feet into the air, pulled up by the weight of their own tree. Whenever I tried to explain what I had seen, I had to use two hands: My left arm up, fingers splayed as the tree's canopy, my right hand below the left elbow, fingers spread for roots, rising as the left arm folded. We had no swing set or jungle gym, and for the next few years, until my parents finally got someone to come and chainsaw those long branches, my brother and I played on that great, horizontal tree.
I remember Jeanne Dixon's autobiography A Gift for Prophecy. I remember the cover of her book was printed in purple! Everyone was reading it in fourth grade. Or not everyone, but the most unexpected people. It was neat to stand in lines and see other kids I never talked to, to see girls, lost in the same book I was absorbed in, all of us so interested that we were reading it as we lined up before school. It was as though a gigantic version one of my uptown grandmother's pearl-drop veils had been dropped over the school, with the drops being the kids scattered everywhere feverishly reading the book. (I remember one girl whom I had a sense of as being vaguely aloof reading the book too, and this humanized her for me a little. It was nice to see in her too what reading was for me: a kind of wanting.)
Thursday, September 27, 2007
I remember, from the marquee of The New Yorker theater, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and (later I believe) the Lennie Bruce movie.
I was surprised and intrigued by "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." I liked it that adults turned out to like fairy tales as well. But I didn't quite get why the Big Bad Wolf should be female. There was some level of sophistication about the adult version of the fairy tale that I was aware of but unable to imagine. I kind of had a picture of adults enjoying the movie and enjoying fairy-tale fright the way I'd enjoyed the dramatization of Browning's "Pied Piper" at Town Hall when my father took me to it. I also sort of imagined my teachers -- the ones who read to us in class (so I must have been in first or second grade) -- as the audience to a movie like this.
(I didn't know that Woolf was not how you spelled the name of the animal, and misspelled it a lot since then because of that marquee. Things were probably complicated by the fact that there was a kid in my class named Michael Wolfe. I am just realizing only now how witty it was that he was given the role of the king of the wolves in our class play, one of the five major roles -- I was one of the rank and file wolves. The teachers must have loved giving him that role.)
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
I remember learning the word endorse> from Ronnie Rogers, who used it a lot when he was paling around with the teachers so impressively in seventh grade. It was one of the common words in his joke routines. He'd seek endorsement or offer endorsement to some teacher.
And I remember thinking that the verb bump, which I remember my mother using, was funny. Later I remember being told not to sit around like "a bump on a log" and that wasn't as funny. I wasn't sure what a bump on a log was, but I did know that it wasn't a good thing to ignore her when you were the bump and she the rebuker of sloth.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
I remember -- I think when I changed schools -- seeing kids eating cut-up orange slices. We never ate our oranges except after peeling them, and we always peeled them in their spherical state.
Monday, September 17, 2007
I remember being stuck in elevators. The new elevator in our building, with its office-building feel, had no window. The old one had a round porthole that looked very old-fashioned (my uptown grandmother's also had a round porthole but my downtown grandmother's, in the new buildings in Chelsea, were windowless.) But in both elevators being stuck between floors felt like being in limbo. For some reason the new elevator also had a stop button that you pulled out. I vaguely imagined this would save you if the cable broke. The alarm on the new one was a regular button. On the old one it was a particular button different from the elevator buttons which stood out from the wall and which you depressed till they touched the panel.
Anyhow, I got stuck at least once in the old one (and pressed the alarm button first once or twice and then repeatedly -- it was then I learned that the doorman (Al) heard the alarm from the elevator and not through some system which lit up the switchboard or the like. In the new one I got stuck with some adults -- two older women as I recall and a young adult man. He forced the door open between floors and climbed up and out.
Although I knew from service elevators with their grills and also from European lifts what the floor looked like at shoulder height, it was very strange to see the opaque door forced open and to find that we were actually in a physical place, between floors -- strange since I thought of floors as self-contained and separate regions which you could take stairs to, of course, but which elevators linked only by going from one to the other without any spatial transition. Motion and time, but not space, were the mode of transition. Even in the grill elevators at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, the blankness of the wall between floors made it seem that we weren't actually moving through space. But now this guy was climbing up and out. Someone else in the elevator -- maybe one of the older women, maybe another kid -- said this was dangerous, and I intuited why. But the most surprising thing was that you could force open an elevator door between floors.
Monday, September 03, 2007
I remember how interesting I found the toothmarks I could make in my arm. I remember that the palm-down-side of my forearm (no doubt there's a technical name for this) took the best impressions -- no hair there -- but that it was somehow more interesting to press my teeth into the top of my forearm (so my tongue experienced the texture of my hair), even though I could really only get my upper teeth there. None of this was destructive or self-mutilating: it never hurt. It was just an exploration of what I was physically made of, and what was interesting was the fact that I could take impressions like wax, and then as with wax or sand they would disappear. The same was true with scratching a rough rock on my thigh, not too hard. I liked the rough white tracks it left, and how I couldn't tell if they were rock or epidermis, and the fact that you could write or draw with them (which of course you couldn't with your teeth, though I'd sometimes try to leave interesting tooth patterns, as though of a nonhuman creature with many sets of teeth).
Saturday, September 01, 2007
I remember the words I would fill in for "I Me Mine," wryly thinking of myself as wryly thinking of myself as wryly humorous:
Joy to the Earth!
I me mine I me mine I me mine.
We want...a playoff berth.
I me mine I me mine I me mine
(Of course my subvocalization of playoff had to rush and slur it.) The Mets and the Knicks were much on my mind at the time, and I guess my relation to the Beatles was sort of like my relation to sports teams: groups that worked together and that combined expertise with an appealing vulnerability, felt in the way I knew the players individually (unlike the players in rival groups), a vulnerability that made me love them.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
I remember how sad the beach at Bellagio looked after a rainy night or morning, even when the day was sunny. I would imagine, because the sun was now out, that people would come down with their kids to sit by the lake, or at least that the kids would come down! -- and we could all have fun. But the sand would still be wet and clumpy and somehow full of pebbles, often with sea-weed (lake-weed?) strewn around, and it just seemed a mistake for the beach to look rainy and unpleasant when the weather was good. I felt that the mistake was being made by the people who accepted the evidence of the beach over the evidence of the sky. But there it was: the lonely beach, and when the little bar beside the cabanas didn't open, and when the very old lady who you rented keys to them from didn't show, it felt as though even the hotel was giving in to the mistake. Often we'd go somewhere on some expedition, and when we returned in the afternoon the beach would be bright and full again. But the sense of days shortening -- the number of days we'd still be there, the night falling earlier and the mornings taking longer to warm up -- was accentuated in the aftermath of the rain, and now the sunny, summery afternoons we returned to seemed much more precarious and ephemeral than they had a week earlier, as August flitted away.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
I remember the pleasure of keys in hotels -- of the big keys that were kept downstairs behind the reception desk in the box corresponding to your room. Our boxes were on the top right. I liked asking for the key, and I liked depositing it. I liked how big the key was -- too big to carry around with you, but the right size to fill the box and to makes its presence there obvious. I liked being able to tell, if I went to get the key to go upstairs at midday, whether our room was empty or whether my sister might be there, and whether one of my parents might be in their adjoining room. I liked the fact that with the key in the box, you couldn't tell immediately whether there was mail there. Since I liked mail so much, and since it came so infrequently, the large key deferred disappointment for a moment, even as its own benevolent presence made up for it in advance.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
I remember that my father always did arithmetical calculations muttering in Yugoslav, the language of his childhood. They told me, though, that otherwise they thought in English.
Friday, June 22, 2007
I remember that one time coming home from school, one of the kids said we should go sneak into a garage on 89th street, I think between Broadway and Amsterdam. He'd done it before, and said it was fun. The garage was down a little curved ramp that reminded me of the ramp to Hugh's courtyard, which we took his go-kart down. We went in and there were some geezers working there and one of them started yelling at us as though he knew us, but obviously he only knew the instigator. He told him that he'd warned him not to come back, and he unleashed a dog on us. A dog! A little terrier, a miniature! At first this seemed hilarious, but the dog came racing up the ramp towards us, barking insanely and nipping at us. I remember pulling back and up in that sort of torero stance, my body arched away from the jumping dog when it caught up to me as I was running back up the ramp. It felt very graceful, even my shins arcing back from where my feet were on the ground, planted there so that I couldn't be running at the same time. And the little terrier bit my shin, drew blood, and I had tooth marks and cuts there for the next few days, and it itched a lot. The dog circled madly, no doubt to resume the attack, but we raced up the ramp and excaped. I think I was the only one who'd got bitten. I didn't know whether to tell my parents -- I assumed that the fact that the garage owned the dog meant that it was in the control of authorities and didn't have rabies. I knew from Hugh that rabies took a long time to manifest itself, so I had a while to think about telling them, and then I just forgot.
But in college, Tad, who was kind of the Hugh-figure of college life, said one day in conversation that rabies could actually take forever. I'd thought you were in the clear after six months -- I think I thought this because we'd read a book on Pasteur, and how he innoculated someone who'd been ravaged by rabid dogs and this person survived, which impressed everyone. But Tad said that he'd heard of someone who got rabies years after being bitten. So I started worrying again, a little bit. It felt like a long time in psychological time between middle school and college, but I realized it was well within in the window that Tad had, alas, opened. That too faded, though.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
I remember that the dock in Bellagio was painted dark green -- is this called olive green? -- and that the raft was also green with lots of peeling paint. I remember this, suddenly, vividly, and from great depths because I remember that I was surprised by the docks on Long Island, a few years later. They weren't painted, and I was surprised that the wood itself had the quality of peeling paint -- rough, splintery, unpredictable. This must have be due to the salt water there, but I didn't expect it: I thought of wood as being like the wood of our floors or the table or our school desks or even the picnic tables at Bear Mountain or in Stormville -- smooth and pliable, with a lot of give. The benches in Riverside Park could give you splinters, I guess, but that also felt like an effect of peeling paint, as though the paint were pulling bits of wood off with it when it came off. On Long Island though it was the wood itself, and this was a surprising discovery, the disconnect between what the docks looked like from afar and the actual experience you had of them when you walked on them. The people who knew them -- Michael C's father especially -- who owned boats and walked barefoot on them with their fishing tackle had a kind of expertise which made them unsurprised by the roughness of the wood, and which made the roughness of the wood the signal of that expertise, so that that wood took on a prestige for me different from the pointlessly well-painted but now peeling dock in Bellagio.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
I remember that I used to hate the way the white-on-green banner of letters and numerals above the blackboard in our class showed the numeral 3, sort of like this -- Ʒ -- with its top loop replaced by an acute angle. It seemed unlovely, the beautiful symmetry and smoothness of the two parts of the numeral broken, the top turned into a sort of flattened shard which made the number itself seem unfamiliar, unfriendly, out of affinitity with the capital E it mirrored and balanced (especially the way I wrote the E myself). It was as though the bottom left sharp angle of the 2 had been wrenched out of place, or as though the sharpness of the numeral 2 had invaded the familiar friendliness of the 3.
Monday, May 28, 2007
I remember the colorful gypsy cabs that used to cruise in New York. Like yellow cabs, they had prices stenciled on their doors, but they were different colors -- green and purple pre-eminently. I didn't know they were different from yellow cabs until I was old enough to take cabs. By then I'd read that they were dangerous and uninsured (and also that it was illegal for any car registered in New York but a licensed taxi to be painted yellow). They were livery, but not allowed to cruise for fares, which of course they did. I took them once in a while, though by then, as well, they were scarcer than they had been. The only time I really remember taking one, I was surprised by how dilapidated the swaying back seat was. The cab had a meter that didn't work. Yellow cabs had just started putting partitions up between passengers and driver; the gypsy cabs hadn't done that.
Friday, May 25, 2007
I remember the basketball courts south of 79th street in Riverside Park. The Promenade ends on 81st street (at the monument to the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis), then there's a downhill (where I fell once when my father was teaching me to ride a bike) and an uphill, and then you have to cross 79th to continue in the park, and that's where some basketball courts are. A fair number, actually, so the teenagers and people in their twenties played there, unlike at the one or two hoops I vaguely recall farther uptown. This was playground ball, shirts vs. skins, and they were all really good. Early on days that we had no school, we could play there too, and I remember going there with Peter Obstler, his friend who went to my school with equally long hair whose name I can't recall, and Billy Kaplan, though I'm not sure Billy was there. Maybe it was Eric Bendetson? Anyhow, what I remember is that some of these hoops had chain "nets" that were singularly unlovely. They didn't come down as far as the string nets at our school, which I could touch by leaping. (I remember that phase: how high you could jump measured against hoop, backboard, and net.) Most of the hoops didn't have any nets though. I remember also -- I wonder if the dimensions are subtly changed now -- the way basketballs would sometimes get jammed between the square bracket holding the hoop and the backboard. And I remember trying to shoot the ball with just the right touch to land it on the bracket, so that someone would have to throw something up or leap up and grab the net and shake to get the ball to come down again.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
I remember that the adults -- my parents and grandparents -- got to carry around umbrellas when it rained. I had to wear my yellow raincoat and hat, but umbrellas (like those nylon beach chaises-longues) were an adult accessory only. I remember it was slightly mysterious to me how they opened and shut, and also the kind of conclave they made outside our front door in the hallway when my grandparents visited on a rainy day, opened to dry and tilted at a 30 degree angle, inscrutable but friendly in the way they waited there with their perfect posture and deportment, clustered serenely around the entrance mat, part of adult knowledge and practice. The rain was part of what I thought of as city life (unlike the parks and playgrounds) -- the life of offices and taxis and business phone calls and mail and checks -- that was my parents' other life and expertise, and the umbrellas were, like the adults and their clients and partners, also calmly expert in conducting that life, the life of the rain.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
I remember a kid appearing on Bob Barker's "Truth or Consequences," I think he was a science prodigy, maybe eleven or nine (older than I at any rate), who described the enormous air pressure that pressed down upon us. It made me very impressed with my own (and all of humanity's) Superman-like strength.
Monday, May 14, 2007
I remember that someone brought in an oscilloscope to our fourth or fifth grade class. It might have been a teacher, or maybe a parent at the behest of a teacher. I think we saw it in the lobby where we lined up every morning and had recess in bad weather, and had our class pictures taken. I remember that the teacher explained that it displayed sounds on a screen -- a round, graphed screen like the radar screens from old movies. (In movies now radar screens seem more updated; I hated the way everything they detected vanished right after the sweep, and couldn't see how air-traffic controllers kept track of these disappearing blips.) We talked into it, and the sounds we made were turned into a thin, jagged, uninteresting line. It was chastening to think that all our talk turned into this tenuous and information-poor graph. I think though that I projected that feeling on to a kind of disappointment at the machine itself, which could only get that nugatory scribble out of the human voices of my friends, voices that were saying meaningful things; but more meaningful still, voices I could recognize as containing all the richness of their presence.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
I remember the thrill of my mother opening the rarely-opened cupboard in my room. Our baby-record diaries, carefully filled out for some pages (immunization, footprints, first words), but mostly empty. I wished I could complete them. Photo albums of my parents' vacations pre-me -- Kashmir most distinctly, perhaps also Ooty and Mysore -- and of my first two years, which were all alluring in their being from a time before my memory, and being mostly locked away. (All other photographs were at my grandmothers', on open shelves, so I naturally took them for granted.)
Although I looked at the Kashmir photos every chance I got, I don't remember now any details of scenery. Lots of mountains, of course, and I think I remember what my mother wore. But I remember sensing its extreme distance -- geographically as well as its lack of resemblance to anywhere I'd been to, the feeling that the insurgencies, starting as they did only a little after I was born, would not end for a very long time, and the fact that my parents were there only two years before I was born and that I had hence just missed it.
And it made me sadder to have the albums locked up, because the photographs were the only claim I had to any memory, past or future, of the place. I was afraid the cupboard would lose them.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
I remember posting about the Claremont stables almost five years to the day before they closed last Sunday. It was fun to be in that cavernous space in New York, in a building that otherwise looked ordinary. But inside was a paddock filled with dirt, and horses, and hay, and light coming in, caught by dust that seemed very old. Now it's gone.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
I remember wondering what was underneath my nails, or rather having a vague sense of hollowness there. At different times I had different ideas. I had a vague thought that the hollowness was just the standard hollowness of the inside of my body, with my nails being less obviously airtight then the rest of my integuement; and then again I also thought my nails belonged to a kind of Lego assemblage. They were the part of me that seemed manufactured, made of plastic. So I associated them with things that snapped into place, and I thought there was a kind of corresponding plastic-like structure beneath them, the structure of the inside of my fingertips.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
I remember that Jackie, my Catholic friend, came from Texas and had a mother from Cuba. Her dad worked for President George H.W., and her family was very pretty and rich. I had my first slumber party at her house; it was her birthday and she invited all the girls from our grade. Her Cuban grandparents sent her a pair of porcelain Romeo and Juliet dolls, which she opened while we were there, although they were quickly taken away by her mother so that we wouldn't remove them from their boxes. Jackie told us these dolls cost four hundred dollars, and I associated them, and her huge, plush-carpeted house, with Texas and Cuba, revering the two places for several years thereafter. Jackie looked like a deer and was adored by everyone, although after she moved away the boys in our grade would marvel over how she managed to be a slut at the age of seven.
We had a wonderful first-grade teacher who gave us all the confidence to write even though none of us could spell. We spent several hours each week writing stories independently on lined, green sheets of paper shaped like horizontal rectangles. My father visited the class one afternoon with his recording equipment and taped each of us reading our stories aloud, then made copies of the tape for the entire class. Most of the girls' stories were about dogs and cats and nearly all of the boys' were about sports. Jackie's story was about a dog, a cat, a mouse, and a sandwich, and she read it in a breathy, sibilant whisper with no pauses between words. I thought this voice was so cute that I appropriated it and used it for several years while reading things aloud. I also appropriated her adorable grammatical tic of using the incorrect form of "to be" for plural nouns ( those girls is; we is), a habit that still occasionally plagues me in speech today. By the time the elections rolled around and we were in the fourth grade, I was obsessed with Clinton winning and thought "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was an extremely catchy song. But I reassured myself that even if Bush won, I would still be happy, because then Jackie wouldn't have to move away.
I remember when I learned I wasn't Catholic. I was on the playground with my friends Maggie and Jackie, and they were talking about their preparations for their First Holy Communions. I asked what a First Holy Communion was, and they laughed, assuming that I had to know, and when they realized that I truly didn't, they became a little confused. They assured me that every girl had a First Communion and that I would be having one very soon because first grade was the year when you had one. That night, I asked my mother why I didn't yet know about this rite of passage awaiting me somewhere in the very near future, and she, who had been raised Catholic, laughed and explained what a First Holy Communion was. There is only one part of this explanation that I remember, or which was actually clear to me at the time: The past Christmas, she had given me a box of dress-up clothes that she collected at the Salvation Army, and she told me now that the white dress my friends and I always used as the wedding dress was really a First Communion dress. I thought about how Jackie had come over and pretended that dress was a wedding dress, and wondered if she had known then that it was really a First Communion dress and that she was going to get to wear a similar one for a real ceremony.
It seemed that Maggie and Jackie also consulted their mothers, for the next day at school, they were more accepting of the fact that I was not going to have a First Communion. The problem was that they both wanted to invite me to their First Communions because I was their best friend, but they told me that only Catholic people were allowed to go. (I believe now that their initial disbelief ensued from their assumption that I, as their best friend, had to be Catholic, rather than their belief that every girl in the world had a First Holy Communion, and that they just chose to express this in the universal manner at which young girls are so adept.) Eventually, the thing became so confused that Maggie's mother actually called my mother to invite me to Maggie's First Communion, and my mother made up some excuse about why I couldn't go even though I didn't have anything to do on that day and actually could have gone. It was okay with me that she lied about this because I regretted very much that I wasn't going to have a First Communion, and knew that going to Maggie's would make me want to have one even more which would make me even sadder. I pictured it as a warmly lit ceremony, sacred and delicate as the sugar shell of my diorama Easter egg, comprised of dozens of beautiful, beaming, first-grade brides.
I remember coming inside one summer afternoon to find a dead bee resting in a patch of sunlight on the carpet. I had just recently learned, from a warning from my babysitter Ramonita (Nita), that bees could sting. This warning, however, referred to living bees, the ones that drifted lazily in and out of the shadow of our porch, and this bee was a dead bee, which meant that it could not sting, because being dead meant that you could no longer do anything. I squatted over the dead bee for a little while, contemplating this, and to prove it to myself, bent one knee forward and knelt all my weight onto the bee. I realized instantly that the pain that followed was a sting, and began to cry, not because of any inordinate amount of pain, but because of the shock in finding the equation I had just worked out to be wrong. Nita rushed into the room, saw the dead bee on the carpet and took me upstairs to the bathroom where she grazed my skin with her long, pink fingernails searching for the stinger, which was not left inside, then cleaned the pink patch of skin with a wad of toilet paper soaked in rubbing alcohol. She spoke very soothingly to me and I knew that she thought the bee had stung me before it died. I was scared to ask her about what actually happened, because it seemed to me that I should have known dead bees could sting and she would be mad at me for getting stung on purpose.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
I remember a couple of lines from poetry in my high school literary magazine, from students a year or two ahead of me. If I'm not mistaken, Steve Fenichel had a rapidly accelerating protest-against-the-times poem which ended with the striking grim propulsive couplet:
And mannikins applying Nair.
The hollow men are everywhere.
(I knew the reference to Eliot from Mr. McCormick's English class.)
And Jim Gleick had a wistfully nostalgic line about "A past that's high as a house."
I might be reversing who wrote what, though.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
I remember how interesting the word apparently is. One of those adult adverbs, like incidentally, that brought a more subtle judgment to bear on the assertion it qualified than I was capable of at the time. It meant that something looked a certain way, but that the person using the word wasn't convinced. I think my father used it more than my mother, but as soon as I say that I think my mother used it more than my father. I associate it with their conversations about work at our dining room table -- where I also heard the word affidavit a lot (a word whose meaning was much less clear to me).
Thursday, April 12, 2007
I remember seeing Wanda June and then Kurt Vonnegut talking to the audience after. I liked his novels, but was never a play person. Seeing him in real life was interesting, but not as interesting as reading him. He claimed to be "frightfully funny" which is why the younger generation and counterculture liked him. I didn't realize he was funny, in high school. I can't remember if he made the claim that night or on TV.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
I remember my downtown grandparents' kitchen table, where they would eat when they weren't having company. I'd eat with them there too, often before spending the night on the couch. I always faced the window when I ate, and my grandfather faced me: behind him was the sink and fridge. It was sitting there that they taught me to play Tatch. And also, probably earlier, that they taught me to eat spaghetti without getting any on my chin. That is they taught me to roll it up on the fork and put it in my mouth, and then dab at my chin in case any sauce got there. I would ask them, "Dirty? dirty?", a memory reinforced because it was part of my grandmother's lore: she loved to remember that scene. I believe that I used to sit on the step-ladder from which I fell off once and "didn't even cry." Then we'd move it back to the little table against the facing wall, where they had a toaster and I think a radio.
I remember that I had favorite foods associated with my grandmothers. My downtown grandmother would ask what I wanted and I always answered, "Spaghetti á la Bologense." I always asked for filet mignon from my uptown grandmother, which she always claimed to give me, but which was really skirt steak or something similar. Once in a restaurant I ordered spaghetti á la Bologense, and it was much meatier than what I expected -- no good at all! And once in a restaurant I ordered filet mignon, and got a tourando of steak that was good, but not what I wanted. I don't know how I got the idea of eating filet mignon -- probably from something I read, maybe James Bond. I also liked my downtown grandmother's chevapchichi (as I thought the plural was spelled), which were really finger-shaped fried hamburgers with lots of chopped onion in them; in Yugoslavia they turned out to be raw. I did like eating my mother's raw hamburger meat when I was in high school. Now I'll never quite know what my adult taste would be, but I doubt it would ever compare to the pleasures of having my granmothers cook me just what I wanted.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
I remember being very puzzled that the little hand stood for hours, which were so much longer than minutes. Why should the big hand stand for the shorter time and the little for the longer? And then my father and his father had watches with second hands, which were longer still (I noticed later, maybe years later).
(Why? Maybe because when you're little time moves like the hour hand, and when you're big it moves like the minute hand, and when your life is very long it moves like the second hand. Helas.)
Friday, April 06, 2007
I remember Tom Jones singing, "It's not unusual that I'm feeling kind of blue." But it seems that I'm misremembering. I think I reconstructed the line when I couldn't get the annoying song out of my head. It wouldn't be a bad line. I remember seeing Tom Jones on my uptown grandmother's TV. She just had it on to some live variety show. He looked absurd, a low-rent Elvis who (like a cartoon parody) affected my sense of Elvis himself when I started watching Elvis movies. (And of course it affected, less fatally since Fielding is so overwhelmingly vital, my sense of the novel; just as the inevitably paired Engelbert Humperdinck affected my sense of the composer.) On the show, where Tom Jones performed live, some fan threw him her panties, and he swung them around as he sang. I realize now this must have been scripted. It was silly without seeming particularly interesting in any way at all, including its silliness.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
I remember the car horns of my childhood (mainly of my uptown grandfather's car) -- a metal ring (chrome I guess -- one of the chrome features on a car) around the inside (or most of it) of the steering wheel, a concentric circle maybe half an inch closer to the center. You could press it with your thumb while you were driving, or bang it with the heel of your hand, I think. I liked the nervous elegance of it. I now associate it with my grandfather -- the fact that it was ridged and focussed and slim and so somehow knowing, like his intelligence; but as round as round could be, since it was circular, and therefore also relaxed and pleasant and warm, by a kind of kindly choice.
Monday, April 02, 2007
I remember the Sterns scrubbing their house of hometz (?) one April. Geoffrey told me that his father had sold their house in Windham for Passover for a dollar to a neighbor, and then would buy it back after Passover. I liked the idea of the actual dollar that would buy and sell the house. For some reason the dollar he sold it for seemed more real to me than the dollar he would buy it back with -- there was a certain relaxed ease with which the dollar represented the legal fiction. I'd heard before (I think) of things being bought and sold for a dollar for legal purposes. But here the dollar was making possible a religious duty that preceded the U.S. by centuries, and yet it was doing it with nonchalant grace. I had a visual image of its pale green harmonizing with the slightly bluer greenish tint of their kitchen.
I remember Erev Pesach in the Old City. The amazing thing was that you didn’t have to do this crazy house-turn-over, where you put away all your regular dishes and cutlery and pots and pans and got out all the Pesach dishery, the way we did in America, dragging box after box down from the attic. In the Old City, we put our glass dinnerware & drinking glasses, and our metal pots and pans, and all the cutlery into the plastic baskets we used to carry fruit and veg home from the shuk (usually Mahane Yehuda) and carried them to a courtyard where bearded men and sidelocked boys had huge vats of hot water going over big fires at a furiously hot rolling boil. It was a beautiful day, sunny, and the streets were wet from the water of people's mopping and scrubbing. Everyone, the whole neighborhood, brought dishes and utensils, and we kashered them there, quicksmart, in those vats. It took mere seconds. Nothing like those hours and days of up and down, packing and unpacking. I remember the boys in their arba kanfot, running up and down, calling, helping people carry, curly payos flying behind them. I felt their energy and freedom. We waited a minute until our things were kosher, and then we took them back home and put them away in their own clean and newly lined cupboards and drawers.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
I remember the weirdness of the word "illustration," or maybe "illustrate." I'd describe that weirdness now (though this is not how I would have known to describe it then) as encountering a word that I knew I would never use myself.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
I remember someone asking me, senior year of high school, "Are you a head?" I didn't know what they meant. This was at the bottom of the hill near Broadway and 250th street or so. We drove there in driver's ed; I remember that Keith Outlaw once slammed on the gas rather than the brakes when Mr. Moran told him to slow down as we approached the intersection, and Mr. Moran quickly slammed on the pedal that he controlled from the passenger's seat. That was scary, but I was impressed with how quickly and successfully he reacted. But this time we were just walking down the same street, and possibly I was smoking a cigarette; certainly it was a non-smoker who asked me. After a brief panic, it became clear that I didn't know what they meant, and then they said that if I didn't know it was because I wasn't. I don't know how I found out the meaning of the term -- this was (just) before headshops became popular or well-known. But I found out within the next few days, and eventually became a head when we visited Boston for the Model U.N. Brent sang "Don't bogart that joint, my friend," which I think is from Easy Rider, or maybe Arlo Guthrie, or both. Well, I didn't really become a head that trip -- I tried pot then but didn't know how to inhale. I think that came a week or two later.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
I remember that when plastic "gems" in gum-machine rings came out of their bands, there was some odd adhesive that would stick to the bottom of the gem, and that sometimes paper would adhere to it from the setting. But the ring was plastic, so it was surprising that there was this kind of glossy double-ply paper in the setting. I always felt a need to scratch it off, both gem and setting.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
I remember what I think was a Fabregé commercial, based on the song "Caberet." "And for the men / There's the great smell of Brut!...Come to the Fabregé, my friends / Come to the Fabregé." I'm pretty sure this was a department store, because when I found out about Fabregé eggs later, I was puzzled by them -- why should the Romanovs have them? Why should they be so awe-inspiringly rare and valuable?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
I remember thinking that underneath one's skin was a layer that was essentially a sheet of blood, like liquid trapped between two panes of glass. I thought that when you cut yourself you breached that area, and that the only difference between cuts was their depth and the amount of skin they opened. I think we learned about veins in third grade or so (arteries later). I remember I was in fifth grade when I scraped my wrist very slightly and worried about bleeding to death (since by then I knew that you could commit suicide by cutting your wrists), because Miss Brenner (after reassuring me that I was fine) told me very kindly about her brother who'd been bitten by a squirrel and was worried about rabies and getting rabies shots. In the end he didn't get them.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
I remember noticing that my grandparents and great-grandparents pulled the bedcovers over their heads when sleeping. My parents didn't, so I took that as a characteristic of old age. I also worried for their breathing, and told my mother to tell my great-grandfather not to do it. She made me tell him myself, reasoning that he would be more likely to take a child's advice seriously (I suppose out of indulgence). I was sure it would be the opposite (and it was).
Thursday, March 01, 2007
I remember that I was with Tommy, Kenny, and I think even Butch (the youngest) in their parents' bedroom, and they began making prank calls. They'd done that before, but it was new to me. But pretty much no one answered, and when someone did it seemed to be a woman living alone, and there was nothing thrilling about calling. I think I thought it would be a way of taking some swell down a peg. But we didn't reach any swells. After a while, Sally (their mother) came in and made us stop. She didn't seem too concerned about any of it though.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
I remember that I forgot to notice that it's recently been over five years since I started posting these. Where does the time go? Where does the past? I feel as though I've gone dug through background memories to deeper more surprising ones, but then through those as well to a stratum less rich, or less affectively rich, than what I was thinking about two or three years ago. These strata aren't chronological but psychological, the layers of context for my own sense of Lockean "personal identity." Do they return me at length to the present then? Stay tuned.
Friday, February 23, 2007
I remember my parents had an Amana hot-plate/tray that they used mainly to keep the coffee in its Chemex carafe warm. They may have had several.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
I remember the amazing doll house my parents got my sister. I worked hard helping to put it together. The reason I remember it vividly is that one day my parents threatened her with dismantling it if she didn't behave. My father went off to bathe, and my sister started acting up again. I felt -- moralistic creep of an older brother that I was -- that I should make good on "our" adult threat. I started taking it apart. My father came into the room. He thought that I was fixing it for her, and smiled approval. But when I explained what I was doing (I think she was in tears and he thought I was helping her) he blew up. He threw my things on the ground, asking what I would think if he started breaking them. Unfortunately one of them broke the wall of my sister's doll house. I did manage to put it together again, though, so that it was pretty good. I think that the doll house we had on display later, with lots of cunning little furniture -- and curtains! -- was a different one. But I don't remember where it came from.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
I remember the Gulf War. I remember our heder atum. We made our sealed room in Yossi's bedroom, a smallish one with only a single window to seal up; I remember a lot of duct tape was involved. I remember decorating the outside of my gasmask box. I covered it with newspaper clippings, pictures, headlines and protected them with clear packing tape.
I only clearly recall three times in a heder atum. The first was with my family, and I suppose I remember it because I was writing about it at the time, probably a letter to my best friend, Elisheva, but possibly in my journal, so I noticed things, like how uncomfortably tight and heavy the gasmask felt, and how stiffly frightened my parents seemed, and how thirsty we all were, and how unwilling we were to take off the masks to take a drink. The other two times must have been Friday nights: the fuzzier memory is of a siren interrupting dinner at the Werthans, and all of us trundling from the Shabbat table into Moshe and Libby's heder atum, the room I thought of as the library but which was really Moshe's office. I vaguely remember this, but I distrust the memory: could I have made it up? It seems likely that something like this would have happened--that year, we shared a meal with Moshe and Libby just about every Shabbat, war or no war. The clearer memory must have taken place shortly after candlelighting. Lonny was out davening, I guess, and I was downstairs with Tammy and their children. I remember understanding that there was no way, short of cruelty, to keep the baby, Neriya, inside the protective cot for any length of time. And there was no way to carry it with you, so if you took him anyplace, you couldn't really protect him in case of a chemical attack.
At the beginning, there was something exciting about the drama--what I could write to my friends in the States!--but after a few weeks, it wore me down. The question, 'how much danger are we really in?' was impossible to answer. The missiles didn't seem to be doing much damage, but you never knew what could happen the NEXT time. Knowing that there was no way to protect Neri, my beloved Neri, didn't make me want to think very hard about the possibilities.
I remember Moshe, our sweet, generous, and gentlemanly neighbor describing a dream in which he killed Saddam Hussein.
I remember rooting for Norman Schwarzkopf and Bush senior.
I remember refusing to translate the news for my father, though I was fluent in Hebrew and he was not, and though he asked me repeatedly. I remember refusing to watch (or listen to) the news at all.
After the initial shutdown, I remember going back to school. It seemed like nobody else's father was at home. Almost everyone had been called up for reserve duty. I remember the real tension on the faces of the girls whose dads were up North, tension reflected on the teacher's grave faces. And I remember that the war ended around Purim time, and that even after we were given the all clear, it took me several days and a serious talk with my father to be able to leave the house without my gasmask.
For the rest of the year, every time the daily train whistled its return from Tel Aviv, I heard a siren.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
I remember (from the pictures in The Little Engine that Could?) that trains had cow-catchers. Did they really? I mean is that what they were called? I think I saw them on cartoons also -- the grilled wedges on the front of the engine to plow things out of the way. At the time I thought they were kind. The cow would just be carried along instead of being slammed into, until the engineer could slow the train down and it could amble off into neighboring fields. When I first saw a real train, with my downtown grandmother, I was surprised and disappointed that the strange, gigantic, sleek diesel engine didn't have one.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
I remember coveting those of my mother's paintings that were in my grandparents' (and other relatives'?) houses. I felt they were the nicer ones, and the places they were hung didn't deserve them as much as we did. I remember finding a couple of watercolours of horses hidden in a closet at my grandparents', and being puzzled that my mother was dissatisfied with them because they seemed beautiful to me. I took to secretly drawing crayon horses for some time. I remember, too, finding a large stack of my parents' wedding invitations and using the blank sides to draw on -- I liked the thickness and the compact, postcard-ish shape.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
I remember reading a passage in my Latin book about the geese who saved Rome. Anseri, as I recall. (The passage must have been from Livy.) My mother did the assignment with me, and she knew all about it. Because she did, I remember feeling that I had assimilated a discrete nugget of cultural knowledge.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
I remember other things around lie-detectors. Hugh C was interested in them (from Dragnet?) and said you could tell whether someone was lying by touching their hands to see if they got cold and clammy. But I think I knew about the technology before (I learned about voiceprints, I remember, on Mission Impossible or maybe I saw a show on them and then they showed up on Mission Impossible).
When I first found out about them, I thought you could find out whether God existed by using a lie detector. (Since Hugh was the first atheist I knew, he must have been connected to this plan too.) You could hook someone up and then ask them whether God existed. If they said no and they were lying, he did, just as if they said yes and the detector registered that they weren't lying, he did. I thought it was a truth detector, alas.
Friday, February 02, 2007
I remember how much I used to love collecting the plastic toothpicks in the shape of swords -- sabers they were, though I didn't know it then. They came in different colors, and I think I got them with drinks, not hors d'oeuvres, so I could only get a few at a time. What were they doing in drinks, though? Maybe they came with the Sangria at La Fonda Del Sol? It's pretty hazy.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
I remember that you were supposed to be able to tell if someone was lying by seeing whether their nose was straight. You traced from bridge to bottom, and if your finger deviated they were telling a lie. I know kids did this at my school; and I think my downtown grandmother did as well. I believe this is now a lost folk tradition.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
I remember that I got to sleep over at Haley Moss' house on Christmas Eve which meant waking up there on Christmas morning and being a part of opening presents and all. It was my first Christmas since we didn't celebrate. They lived in an old mansion and had a huge, beautifully decorated tree, roaring fireplace and all - it was exactly the way I had always envisioned Christmas just like on TV. I was prepared that none of the presents would be for me, since it had been a spontaneous decision that I would be allowed (invited) to sleep over, but the generousity of letting me inside this family event was enough.
I enjoyed watching Haley and Julie open their presents and looked forward to playing with all their new loot with them later. When everything was almost opened someone said "Look! Here is a present for Caroline!" I couldn't believe that I got something--it was a really nice set av French plastacine in 25 different colours. I remember being awed that they had bought me a present at all, and such an exclusive one at that. Even at that age (8 maybe?) I could appreciate that this was much more than a set of Play-doh. How did they have time to buy it? And then realizing (or did my parents surmise it later?) that it had been intended for Haley but they gave it to me. I remember all the mixed feelings concerning this but settled on being glad and finding it generous that they gave me something for her and wondering if she knew and agreed to it.
That beautiful house, three storied mansion burned down a few years later and all that was left was the swimming pool.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
I remember what must be a common and unexpected benefit of city life, the way various family members were associated with baked goods from different bakeries. Because one set of grandparents lived downtown, one set uptown, and ourselves halfway between, the boxes of cookies and other treats that they would bring (or that we would buy) always came from different bakeries. The kinds of bread were not as different, but then differences in taste came up; my uptown grandparents like a sliced crusty white bread with poppy-seeds; my downtown grandparents ate more rye. But more than the bread it's the cookies I remember: they were nothing special but they were different, and the differences were special because they were part of the specificity of each of my grandmothers. A subtle aspect of that differentiation was what their friends brought them when they came over to play bridge or for coffee or tea. I got to eat those cookies too, and the two sets of bakery-brought cookies I associate with each of my grandmothers includes these other subsets as well. My parents' friends didn't bring cookies over as often, but when they did I got a sense of them, of who they were, from the way their cookies reminded me of one or the other of my grandmothers. It was odd ot go to Eclair's on 72nd street, later, and find my uptown grandmother's cookies there. They were not the cookies we bought, though -- my parents' taste seemed younger and more sophisticated, that is it stood for youth and sophistication, and we bought from a different part of the display case.
Friday, January 19, 2007
I remember stripping the wallpaper off the dining room. The wallpaper in my parents house was old, and dingy, and had been painted over with paint that was, by that time, old and dingy. For some reason, possibly because we felt so poor, or possibly due to some aesthetic about doing things the old fashioned way, or possibly because nobody thought it through, we used water, spackle knives and kitchen sponges for the job--and not even hot water. It took days and days of hard work. My arms were sore, my neck was sore. When we got them clean, the walls themselves were strangely beautiful. Unevenly hued, warm toned, much golder than we'd expected. My mother said she would like to keep the dining room empty and the plaster bare, but, of course, as soon as the walls had dried, we spackled, primed, and painted.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
I remember watching the Jack LaLanne show, and doing calisthenics with my mother. He made robust health look grotesque. No doubt this prepared me to love Jack Palance when we were both much older.
Monday, January 15, 2007
I remember my (uptown) grandfather would always push the antenna down on his car after he parked it (I liked pushing it down and also pulling it up, that thumbnail experience under the button to begin prying it loose). Lots of antennae in their neighborhood were broken off. My grandmother explained that teenagers would break them off in order to fence with each other on the streets. This seemed pretty cool, since we only fenced with sticks, but a little scary, verging on the possibility of really getting hurt. But I liked the idea that all the stubs and occasional wire hangers stood for a kind of energetic fun still in my future.
I remember the raindrops on the car windows of my uptown grandfather's car. They were smaller than the drops on our windows, pearled and compressed and beaded by the texture and angle of the glass and by the wind as the car moved. They formed tracks, tailing into smaller drops towards the front of the car, as the draft pushed them backwards, where the smaller drops would merge into larger ones. I liked those patterns, especially in the late afternoon, when they would sometimes get the blue of the car's paint, sometimes the red of the red lights we'd pass perpendicularly as we drove up Riverside Drive. They looked nothing at all like rain on the windows of my room. That was the only car I rode in regularly, so I associate that pattern of rain with my grandfather -- as though the rain and the car knew each other and knew him, all part of the same world which knew who was who and what was going on.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
I remember that the word deaf came up a lot in our house because my uptown grandmother was pretty profoundly deaf from her twenties or thirties on (I remember the hearing aid she wore until she had an operation when I was seven or so). I remember that I felt something like the same surprise that I experienced on finding out that "dumb" meant "mute" and not "stupid" (a discovery that must be pretty typical in English-language childhoods, among hearing children anyhow) when I found out that there was this other thing, death, which was considerably more significant and also more widespread than being deaf. No operations for that. But I clung for a while to the idea that death was a kind of anomaly, like being deaf, only more so, and not really applicable to most of us, not even my grandmother, who didn't have to go farther, so I thought then, than being deaf.
Monday, January 08, 2007
I remember that at my junior high school there was a group that I wanted to get into (as though I was a late-comer to the school; but I wasn't -- maybe they'd all gone to elementary school together?) and they were all amused by the existence of the "yellow bellied sapsucker." That was the first I heard of it. Their knowledge of this risquee and amusing bird name was part of their cohesion as a group.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
I remember a scene from the original "Wild, Wild West," one of the Sunday night tv shows that reconciled me to the end of the weekend (it was an hour long, which was something else to look forward to), in which Jeremiah (?) West, the handsome star of the buddy pair of clever and daring thieves and gamblers, has to pretend for that show's caper to be a cultured Easterner to some Frenchman. They're in the dining car of the train, and Chateaubriand is on the menu. West refuses it: "I could never see why one would name a cut of beef after a great writer." His French companion appreciates the mordant superiority and trusts him completely. I liked the literacy of the show, having heard of Chateaubriand, both the dish and the writer, myself (although I was acquainted with neither).
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
I remember when I was cutting Hebrew School I was also cutting my practice sessions with Dr. Greenberg for my Bar Mitzvah. One day I bit the bullet and went to Miss Russler's class.
I liked her; people said she was scary, but she turned out to be less scary than I'd been anticipating; I remember her rebuking the Earl of Snowdon in some Simchas Torah sermon she gave, or talk, or exhortation, in the main synagogue at Bnai Jeshrun, for suggesting that Jews were genetically superior; it was surprising and interesting not to want to claim superiority, just because all of us wanted to believe we were really from Krypton.
She was imperturbable. But halfway through the class Dr. Greenberg came in. How could I be scared of him? He was so gentle and wonderful. But I was terrified. He opened the door, apologized, and told Miss Russler that he had to "borrow a third of her class." Of course there were three of us there. I desperately clung to the hope that the odds were on my side. But they weren't. Away he took me.
Nothing traumatic happened, as I remember, except that he changed his tune -- literally -- on my Torah portion. He'd sung it into a tape-recorder for me to memorize, and I had started doing so. But now when I sung it as he had a month or two earlier, he was irritated and corrected me. I think this may be the only time I ever saw him irritated. It was too bad that it was a case where he was wrong. But of course I realized I was more wrong, and maybe it was good for me not to cash in the points I might have thought his unjust irritation entitled me to. Appropriately enough, with my Bar Mitzvah coming up.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
I remember that what's now Filene's Basement on 79th and Broadway was once a pool hall -- at least the second floor was. I went up there once, thinking it would be like the bowling alley on 72nd, but it was much seedier and kids weren't allowed in. I didn't know that an official commercial place could be that seedy. It was empty and dusty and not at all appealing. (Probably it looked better after dark, when it was full and the dust didn't show.)
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