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 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.

posted by william 3:04 PM
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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.

posted by caroline 4:07 AM
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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.

posted by william 3:39 PM
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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.

posted by Rosasharn 10:36 AM
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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.

posted by william 2:03 PM
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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.

posted by william 8:30 AM
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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.

posted by william 12:20 AM
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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.

posted by william 12:07 AM
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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.

posted by william 7:44 PM
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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).

posted by william 8:55 AM
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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.

posted by william 6:42 PM
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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.)

posted by william 9:07 AM
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