But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"
Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
Thursday, December 25, 2008
I remember a little more about tying ties. I remember that the first time my father tied a tie around my neck, there was something magical about seeing that knot, which my father and his father had in their ties, suddenly materialize out of the simple over-and-under movements of the long and slightly triangular strip of material. Marc B also showed me a simple way of tying a tie and I could suddenly, magically, make that knot materialize by myself! And I still can.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
I remember my mother's double diamond ring (which I thought of a little bit as a more glamorous version of the purse hasps on my grandmothers' purses, but not on hers), and how it related to my uptown grandmother's single diamond. The single diamond seemed older fashioned, more stolid. It had my grandmother's physiognomy; it was an example I think of what Benjamin calls non-sensuous imitation. It fit her gnarled finger perfectly. My mother's double diamond was more glamorous, like her cats-eye glasses, and had her physiognomy: the resemblance was visible. Her mother, my downtown grandmother, didn't have a diamond ring at all, so there was a way, maybe, that I separated maternal and paternal vectors of dazzlement between my mother and my father's mother.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
I remember visiting the BSO in 5th or 6th grade as part of school. I don't remember who was conducting or giving us the talk. I do remember him asking us if we could figure out why they had potential new members give their auditions behind the curtain -- and to take off their shoes as they walk onto the stage. I couldn't. [It was so that the shoe-click wouldn't give away the gender of the performer.] I don't remember what the music was, but I do remember the pleasure it gave me. Utter absorption, utter recognition, utter delight.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
From Giovanni Tiso:
I remember the first thing I wrote, when I was five years old. It was a letter to my parents, and it read as follows (I won't reproduce the typos in translation): "I'm tired of these injustices. I'm leaving. I'm going to the doctor's. I don't know if I'll be back. Giovanni." I left the letter on the dining room table and opened the door of the apartment. It was dark on the landing, so I didn't venture any further. My mother was so proud of my writing talent, she showed the letter to everybody she knew and quite a few people she didn't know. She seemed to take the fact that I wanted to leave the family entirely in her stride.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
From Pauline Dawson:
I remember Mr Marshall, our primary school caretaker. He was grumpy but not creepy in any way. He made wooden toys in his workshop in the boiler room. He made me a wooden doll's cot for Christmas once. But the thing he made that I remember most was an artificial Christmas tree. Artificial trees were unheard of in New Zealand in those days (well where we lived anyway) and in true kiwi tradition it involved wood and Number 8 fencing wire (and a lot of silver tinsel). We had it for years growing up and it got very tatty but we all loved it. I have no idea what happened to it.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
I remember that one of the things that I loved about the house in Stormville when we decided to rent it was that it had an upstairs! It wasn't like our apartment -- it was like a real house, the kind they had on TV or the movies. I remember that my mother told me that you could slide down the banister. First I'd heard about this -- a recreation I'd never dreamt of, and total fun. She showed me how, straddling the banister, which was all I knew about sliding down them till much later when Tad W showed me the terrifying break-neck speeds you could achieve by sliding down side-saddle. But kids who grew up in New York knew very little about banisters.
fsollero remembers:
I remember when I was six or seven, how I hated the movies of the Three Stooges. I thought they were mean, bad, and I was very surprised when I discovered that I was the only one that thought that way about them. And I noticed that the other children - and the grown-up too - laughed at the disgrace of others. But they didn't like when THEY were laughed at.
It was a huge discovery - the continent of human contradiction.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
I remember my la leche league leader informing me that although I was seven full weeks (!) post-partum, my milk supply was not yet established.
Friday, December 05, 2008
I remember noticing, in the shower, that the difference between consecutive squares increases by 2. When I got out, I excitedly wrote it down, and was disappointed to see that it was a triviality.
(It was because of things like this that I preferred physics to math -- even a seemingly trivial observation would turn out to have an interesting explanation rather than the other way around.)
Monday, November 24, 2008
I remember the first time I got adult-style pants: zippered fly, and they opened at the waist and buttoned at the top. What I had no idea about was the little metal clasp that held the top together even when the button was undone. This piece of hardware was like a sleek secret from adult life, not the lives of adults so much as the lives of adult trousers. This is how they were. Adults knew this. My father's plastic collar inserts were another version of the way clothing approached adults and expected them to behave. But I knew about those from the start, saw them in his little change dish with tokens and occasional cufflinks. The metal clasp was something else again, and seemed youthful and athletic: it was the kind of think you'd expect in kids' clothes but wasn't. It had a self-confidence to it, as though an extra bit of fastening for incompetent kids turned out to be a glinting standard feature of the adult world. It worked, it wasn't desparate addition but the very way things worked. It knew what it was doing, that clasp. It was so much more modern than buttons, which kept coming off. I couldn't even figure out how it was attached to the fabric. But I didn't have to. I could repose confidence in its previously unsuspected functioning.
I remember this post from over five years ago, in which I remembered a New Yorker story that our English teacher (in eighth grade, I thought, correctly) read aloud about a mad punster and the puns he sets up, including one that leads to the headline "Pére Squegg in Hound Role." I thought about it a lot. Well, tonight, using the New Yorker's digital archives on line, I found the story! "Turtletaub and the Foul Distemper." By Roger Angell! Whom I wouldn't really pay any attention to until college. But he'd written that story. Which appeared in the May 30, 1970 New Yorker, pp. 26-29.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
I remember: "You could look five pounds thinner in a Playtex panty girdle. Five pounds thinner." The white-coated guy showed how if you pressed at just the right area of the abdomen -- kind of where Lee Harvey Oswald was shot (though I don't know that I made that connection then) -- you could look five pounds thinner. That's just where the Playtex panty girdle pushed!
Monday, November 17, 2008
I remember that my mother taught me to count by twos -- 2, 4, 6, 8 -- which could halve the time it took to total up a quantity, and that when I did this once at the Hoges, their mother, Sally, pointed out you could count by threes, which seemed pretty radical.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
I remember "make no mistake" in political speeches on TV, and extrapolating that the phrase was a common Americanism.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
I remember posting this entry:
I remember my father taking me to vote. At P.S. 166! Where we usually lined up for recess there were voting machines. And grownups in coats lined up. We waited and then went into the booth, pulling the lever which closed the curtain. He showed me how you could flick the wrong toggles and then change them -- he flicked Republican toggles! but then unflicked them -- and then we voted Democratic all the way down (except, maybe, for Javits) and he let me pull the lever which registered the vote and opened the curtain simultaneously, which I thought was pretty neat.
I remember Democrats winning.
Monday, November 03, 2008
I remember weddings I went to as a child--Phil and Stephanie's wedding, Ann and Moshe's wedding (in Miami), Maureen and Eldad's wedding. Phil and Stephanie's and Maureen and Eldad's I remember as loose colorful confetti memories--no shape, no strong images or narrative. Just color and the awareness that these are wedding memories. I do remember that Stephanie and Phil wore some very fancy traditional clothes from an Asian culture. Beautiful silk. I must have been older for Ann and Moshe's: I remember driving to Miami from my grandparent's house in Jacksonville; I remember a pool at the hotel and an old man asking my brother what kind of Jew he was (did he mean Orthodox or Conservative? Did he mean Ashkenazi or Sephardi--I don't know. I'm sure he was provoked into the question by my brother's payot (payis? long sidelocks)). Yossi didn't know what he meant, either, and said, "Just a Jew," which is always the right answer. He couldn't have been more than 5 at the time. I remember wearing a fancy dress (but which dress?) and my parents dressed up and a big hall with round tables and mood lighting and a wonderful band and dancing with my father. I remember being up late and eventually being put to bed (while my parents must have gone out or gone back to the wedding) in a room with an old couple who must have been sitters. I couldn't sleep, and they sat there watching one of those terrible (and boring) infomercials by CARE or a similar organization about starving children in a Third World country on TV. I also remember the very late drive back to Jacksonville, and how really cold it was, even in Florida.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
I remember Tommy H pointing out a very high stain on the wall of the 90th street building that housed the Garden Market (or Daitch Shopwell by then), dribbling down. It was probably (twelve year old) head height, and we couldn't imagine the dog that had peed there. It had to be a Great Dane, but how tall could it have been? It was hilarious -- Tommy's hilarity was infectious and every time I saw it I loved thinking about the dog that could have done it. There was a Great Dane in our neighborhood, though it tended to be a feature of the street one block west of the market, between West End and Riverside. And it wasn't tall enough, though we imagined it kind of leaning to the side so as to point upwards as it went.
I remember how the dogs that people walked were part of the geography of the neighborhood -- a dynamic geography, since you'd see them at certain times of day. We didn't recognize the people we didn't know -- didn't know anyone to nod to -- but we recognized the dogs on their daily rounds, their nondescript owners in tow. I remember that Dr. C, a psychologist who had a German Shepherd named Cleo, always held a pair of pressed, aligned suede gloves in his leash hand. It made him look dapper as he walked his dog.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
I remember the pleasure of snapping off model pieces from their plastic branches, where the little twigs that held them just gave when you bent sharply. I remember how much more interesting it was to break the branches themselves, once they were completely plucked, and how interesting the unpainted dull interior of the plastic was, serious and undynamic and prosaic. I remember how tragic it was when you snapped a piece of the actual model in the same way, and got the same bland and useless interior facing which had just been a lovely painted-costume arm or leg. The snaps were always clean, and always seemed to mean a kind of dull and implacable substrate within existence itself. I remember that sports trophies were gilded versions of the same material, made of the same ineluctable plastic, and that you could easily snap off the athletic arm or leg on the trophy and just be left with that kind of cool, somehow always concave facet of indifference (the part that snapped off would be convex, but we paid no attention to that useless relic).
Sunday, October 19, 2008
I remember the last "deep" recession, the one they talk about now on NPR as if it happened a long time ago--1987. I remember hearing my father saying to someone on the phone that we were down to our last nickel. It was hard to tell whether he was speaking idiomatically or if this was objective description. I remember a trip down to New York to sell artwork--to sell the metalwork they were doing then --the mezuzot and the jewelry, and possibly the kiddush cup, but since that was a big silver piece I doubt they had one with them. We stayed for Shabbat with the Davids, and I remember that Mrs. David took me up to the attic and got out her married daughters' old clothes and we went through them and she gave me what fit. I was in 6th grade, a bad time to be so outdated, but I remember liking these clothes for themselves, for their seventies' charms, even if I knew I wouldn't be able to pretend to myself that they were in style, or be accepted when I wore them to school.
I remember walking through the living room, passing behind the couch, hearing the TV talk about one more down day on Wall Street. There were graphs showing how far the Dow had fallen that day, but I wasn't really paying attention--there was nothing new about this. My sense of a constricted world stayed constant through high school, though I realize now that my perspective was decidedly micro; it never occurred to me that our family's straits were related to the larger economy--or, rather, that anything could change, that any change in the outside world could affect our circumstances. Without knowing it, I believed that the world was constant, as was our place in it, that my life and status were fated, fixed.
I remember my bewilderment when there were jobs, lots of jobs, plenty of "opportunities" for new grads when I myself was a new grad and newly married. I remember waking up in our second apartment, the one on Elm Street, where we slept in the back bedroom and where I had my own study in the front bedroom and where I was completely happy or as close to that as I have ever been, where I started grad school and where I conceived our first child, and hearing a surprised-sounding reporter on the radio describe how in-demand young people were, how we could call for unheard-of starting salaries. Or maybe I projected the surprise. Though we were two or three years into adulthood, into the workforce, I remember how impossible this seemed to me, how much I still expected things to be impossibly hard forever. Eventually, though, I accepted that things were different, now. I suppose that I got used to the expanding economy the way I get used to new shoe styles: The new thing always looks ugly to me for at least a year. Sometimes it takes me too long to acclimate, to adjust my sense of attractive (pointy toed to square toed to round toed to pointy toed again?), so that by the time I get around to liking whatever it was, it's moved on to something else.
Friday, October 10, 2008
I remember reading Robert Heilbronner, my friend David's father, on business cycles when I was writing a report in high school on the stock market crash. I thought it was fascinating.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
I remember Paul Newman. I remember there was a Life Magazine article about "Super-realist" painters, when I was about eleven. These were painters who overlaid fine graphs over photos, and then repainted the photos grid by grid, so their paintings looked photographic. Hugh C, who was the best artist I knew, was interested in this phenomenon too, and we decided to try some superrealism. But we had no graph paper, and certainly no transparencies (tracing paper, the balsa wood of foolscap, was the closest we came). So we had to do it by eye. I couldn't draw (still can't), but there was a beautiful glossy of Paul Newman in Life as well, and I copied it very carefully with my pastels, in full spectrum. It was one of the most impressive drawings I ever did, and I was very proud of it.
I remember seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But there Paul Newman was in motion. I'd read the book first (since everyone else had already seen the movie and I had to be au courrant), so I already had a good sense of the characters, and Paul Newman just sort of instantiated my sense of Butch Cassidy. He was in constant motion, riding the bike, jumping. So different from the gorgeous still photo. (Of course there's the sepia still at the end, but that's them frozen in action as they're being killed.) I remember him laughing at the Sundance Kid because he couldn't swim. "The fall will probably kill us!" That should be in the hundred best movie lines! And also, "SHIIIIIIIIIITTTT," as they jumped. My first real profanity in a movie. And also, "Who are those guys?" How winning he was in that movie -- that was a surprise.
Monday, September 22, 2008
I remember Yankee Stadium. I remember the first game I saw there. My father took me. Hugh's father had taken us to Shea to see the red-hot Mets (Gary Genry pitching), and the Yankees then were terrible. But still, you had to see them, and Yankee Stadium was somehow more authentic than Shea (though I wouldn't have put it that way at the time), more about the stands than Shea which just offered a utilitarian, function-following form structure for seeing the field. I remember that we sat under a deck in Yankee Stadium -- we had good seats that my father's firm got from one of their clients -- and that Joe Pepitone was playing first, and Bobby Murcer was in center. I remember that the Yankees lost. The game was in itself of very little interest. But my father showed me how the catcher backed up first on grounders. I remember a dropped third strike and the catcher tagging the batter, or maybe throwing him out at first. I remember Pepitone lost his hat on one play, and you could see his impressive sideburns, and that somehow made him more real than he was on TV, whereas everyone else was less real, reduced only to their names and numbers, not to the faces that you could sort of see on the screen. I remember that it was interesting that you could hear the umpire (you couldn't on TV in those days), though I may have already noticed this in Shea. I remember my father explaining that the umpire called strikes, but said nothing for balls, so the players had to count for themselves. It was a beautiful day and the park was very big, and the crowd was huge. It wasn't magical, the way baseball stadiums sometimes are, but it was real, the way baseball games never are on TV.
I remember going to a game with Steve Shaviro (what felt like) many years later, when Tommy John was pitching, and a guy behind us yelling incessantly, "Escrew the ball, Tommy! Escrew the ball!" The Yankees won that night -- this would have been July of 1980.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I remember that Sunday, September 9, 2001 was a beautiful day. We were at the beach. I threw D into the waves several times. The sky was cerulean. When we went to leave a bit of wind kicked up and sand from our towel blew towards another group. The big male in the group, a burly ex-marine (from his tattoos) said "Thanks." A bit of unpleasantness. The next day was D.'s first day of Kindergarten. (I remember about half way through first grade, when I could read, realizing with a kind of puzzled but grateful surprise, that I'd spent the last year in a "garten," not a "garden" -- grateful because I liked that it was European, like my German-speaking uptown grandparents.) He came home excited and happy. Tuesday was a beautiful day when we dropped him off, and talked briefly to his new best friend's parents. Then I drove to school and heard from the departmental secretary, on the cell phone, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. (I was in the parking lot outside the building, about to take J. to the pediatrician for a check-up.) I thought a small plane, no big deal, like the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the forties. I turned on the radio to hear the plane hit the Pentagon. It was all electric and frightening. At the pediatrician's office everything was silent. We watched the towers collapsed, while he made sure little J. was healthy. I reached my father in the hospital with pneumonia. The night before some self-important orderly had refused to let me speak to him because it was after 8:00 pm. Now they were releasing him because they thought there'd be a huge influx of the injured. So he got home, and then it was eerily quiet in New York too. Everyone in Boston drove with immense courtesy -- how could we ever think violently about each other? I felt bad about the tiff with the guy on the beach and the orderly on the phone. The sky was even more cerulean: no contrails for the next few days. I watched the golf channel for a long time that afternoon, and tried to figure out how much D. had heard and understood. I remember worrying about certain people I knew in the WTC, and also a really good poem by I think Deborah Gottleib Garrison in the New Yorker the next week. No one I worried about died, but people had no idea were there did. I remember going with mixed feelings to Montrachet, in Tribecca, for dinner on my birthday two months later -- we were supporting businesses, and it was good, but you could still smell smoke everywhere. I remember my wonderful,.sweet, committed student Bob M, whose picture I saw in the Times a few weeks later.
Monday, September 08, 2008
I remember how interesting and arcane it was that the vacuum cleaner cord retracted. I didn't know how it did this, only that the cord of the unplugged machine was almost flush with its cylindrical body. Then one day I was allowed to vacuum too. They must have judged rightly that I was old enough to use it, because when I pulled the cord -- like pulling a shade -- I had a confident anticipation that it would go scrolling back, and it did. I knew too that if it didn't go all the way back, I'd only need to pull it sharply out a little more and then let it go. Still I liked the way it snaked back into its hole.
And that reminds me of the even earlier days when I was strictly forbidden to pull on the shades. Even now it seems a slight violation of the rules for me to do so.
Venetian blinds, which we got later, were ok (I was allowed to use them before I was allowed to pull the shade cords) and I felt kind of expert -- like a foreshadowing of a child's VCR expertise -- at detaching the looped string from whatever ratchet or catch that pulling it to the side to form a hypotenuse detaches it from, so that I could pull the blind up or even let it go all the way down!
I still like that feel -- in plugs and shades and Venetian blinds -- of the satisfied sensing of what's going on in the works by feeling the live elastic pull or unsnagging of the cord. It makes you feel part of the world those objects form and preside over, like you belong there too with them, able to feel and work their hidden parts.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
I remember, but not with perfect confidence, "Can't get enough of Post Sugar Crisps, Sugar Crisps, Sugar Crisps, / Can't get enough of those Sugar Crisps...", and then what? It was a kind of nightclub jazz version of "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho." Was it "Post Sugar Crisps" or "those Sugar Crisps"? And what corresponded to "The walls came tumblin' down"? The cartoon character singing it was walking through some cartoon landscape, and murmuring it under his breath, carried along in his own superior world -- the world of his directedness towards his next helping of the transcendent privilege of Sugar Crisps -- past all the civilians who looked at him with curiosity and incomprehension, but whom he sublimely ignored.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
I remember how being able to swim seemed to me superhuman adult knowledge. They could swim! I would drown, and it was very dangerous. We had to wear life preservers and stay in the shallow end or in the kids' area of the lake. And then there were some kids who could swim too, which put them out of the reach of equality. The best I could do was play at it, in the moments of pleasure they let me have after I'd been scrubbed in the bathtub, where I would be allowed to "swim" for a few minutes by turning onto my belly in the warm shallow water and making swimming motions. Later, when they were willing to leave me alone in the bath I'd swim as the water drained out, before getting out of the tub.
My parents tried to teach me to scissors my hands and feet on the shores of Lake Carmel, so that I'd learn the breast stroke. It seemed strange and unhelpful to be doing it standing up though. Later, in some activity, maybe Bill-Dave, we learned the dead man's float and then dog-paddling. (I remember that this was in an indoor pool, anyhow, and that a counselor taught it.) Swimming was the first godlike thing I learned. It changed my relation to a part of space, the portion that extended over the reaches of the lake. To my little self, learning to swim was as thrilling as you would now think learning to fly would be.
Friday, July 25, 2008
I remember another thing that made the willow behind our house in Stormville different, but also helped define a group of grave older trees on the property: it would rain and we would have to stay inside; but then the sun would come out and when the grass dried, which it always did pretty quickly in the summer heat, we could go play. But the big trees with their brooding cavernous interiors would still be dripping, or would let a lot of water down in a gust of wind, as though they couldn't or wouldn't take part in the nimble change in weather. They were like my grandparents and their friends, old and dark people unaffected by the bright summer: tall and knowing and imperturbable
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
I remember that the barber shop counter in front of the mirror you were facing had drawers and that the barbers used these drawers incessantly. Drawers! They were small, much smaller than our kitchen drawers, more like the drawers on my toy furniture. But the barber would open the drawer, take out a comb or a napkin or scissors, close the drawer, clip the scissors overhead in a way that my mother absolutely forbade at home because she thought it would make them dull, do something rapid, put the scissors or the comb back in the drawer and close it, open another drawer and take something else out and close the drawer, open it again to return something, over and over again. I always thought of drawers as places you put things away, put the away for a while because you no longer needed them right now. If you're just putting something down inside it for a second you leave the drawer open. But the barbers had infinite patience with the repetitions: opening and closing and opening and closing. They treated the drawers like shelves or surfaces, except they kept closing them, as though they were done for now. But the haircuts went on forever and they were never done.
Monday, July 14, 2008
I remember a big mauve denim dress with large, round pockets, a high neck, and wide shoulder straps that my mother wore one Friday night when I was very small. I remember it because at the time I supposed she might be pregnant again--I associated that dress with her being pregnant--so I must have remembered her wearing it when she was pregnant with my brother, who is 20 months younger. But I was wrong. It wasn't the only time I wished there might be a third, but there never was.
Friday, July 11, 2008
I remember my delighted surprise when I learned (from Mr. Grotsky?) that Coke was made from Kola nuts. And I remember my further delight when the Kola nut commercial came on, with that serenely self-confident, fantastically fit older man taking a lilting pleasure that I shared completely in explaining them to the TV audience. I liked the fact that I already knew about them, so that I was partnered with him, unlike everyone else who didn't already know this interesting information.
Monday, July 07, 2008
I remember wistfully watching planes flying high overhead. I thought they were going to Europe, going to a new life. They were so high that they had to be going far away, and if they were going far away they were going for a long time. So height meant distance meant permanence. I was jealous. I never considered what a long time might be, but if I'd been asked I think I would have imagined six or eight weeks: summer vacation. Back then six or eight weeks elsewhere meant a new life, meant not having to think about coming back, meant going off to become a different person. There they were, glinting and free, the smallest part of the immensity of the sky, flying east into darkness, and an almost immediate new day, as the sun went down in our prosaic west.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
I remember that if you touch the ping-pong table you lose the point.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
I remember that if a little foil from your baked potato touches your fillings, you get an unpleasant shock. Your mouth turns into a battery. (I remember this though you may not. It doesn't happen with the fillings they use now.) The effect was interesting: not that suddenly you realized that you were a machine with hardware in your mouth that could produce a circuit. Quite the reverse: there was dear little me, the "dear self," and then this alien effect in my mouth (seat of selfhood says William James), and a kind of recoil inwards even away from my teeth, from this current flowing through me but which was not me, just the buzz of the world. I could experience it, but it was not me. It was the world betraying me a little, betraying me even within my mouth, even in the food I ate. But it wasn't me, and the betrayal wasn't that bad either, and seemed to limit the world's viciousness and incursion to the extent only of a practical joke. The world: that constant joker that produced cartoons and pranks and aluminum foil in the potatoes, and so went a bit too far, but only a bit really: and never for very long. I thought it would never do anything really mean.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I remember the Rosemary Woods stretch.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
I remember that when Jack D, Jonathan's father, picked us up to drive home from summer school at Cornell (before senior year of high school) there were two motorcycles in front of us on Route 17, both with couples on them, and he was very nervous driving behind them -- he thought that if they had any kind of accident he might kill them. I had been nervous too, watching them, but it was surprising to hear that he was nervous -- adult drivers in general seemed to me impressively serene as they drove.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
I remember (I thought I posted this but I can't find it, and I guess I didn't) -- I remember that my uptown grandparents called the wooden mallet which policemen carried around, what I'd now call a "billy club" and Trollope a "life preserver," a nightstick, a word I liked, I think because it suggested security, the idea that, like blankets and beds and lamps and interiors in general, it was one of the human objects benignly designed for benign night. I didn't even think about what it would mean to use it -- it wasn't even a threat, just a sign of authority, and the fact that it wasn't a gun (I was a little surprised later, in elementary school, I think during an election, to see a cop with a gun in his holster, a real gun, a real holster, right there, in my presence!) indicated how unlike the fantasy violent world of the movies the real world of my grandparents was. (How little I knew of their past then!)
I remember Officer Joe, host of The Three Stooges on Channel 11 (WPIX -- I never realized that was "pix" before!) in New York, commenting on how impressive it was that they didn't blink or flinch before being hit in the face with a pie. I hadn't thought of that at all, of course, and this made the show turn out to be educational, in a way that contradicted my father's hatred for the mindless violence of the show (besides, Officer Joe was a cop, with a nightstick and handcuffs and everything). A little later, when I watched Soupy Sales, I knew that his ability to take a pie in the face was impressive. Knowing it made me an aficionado (the word I later learned still later from Mr. Grotsky when he told us about Death in the Afternoon).
Friday, May 30, 2008
I remember pictures of the tanks entering Prague ("because the Czechs asked for the fraternal aid of their Soviet counterparts"), and later of the defeated Alexander Dubcek on a bus in Prague, strap-hanging and talking to the other passengers. Or was this a picture of him before defeat, but published after? I didn't know what to think, but my parents didn't seem too surprised by any of it.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
I remember, "Say Goodnight, Dick." --"Goodnight, Dick."
I remember that was the first I ever heard of Burbank, a name that made me laugh and still does.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
I remember being very impressed by the serrated teeth on the first real saw I ever looked at. Cartoon saws looked like large knives. But when the Herings bought their house in Stormville I first saw real-life versions of cartoon items, like wheelbarrows, fireplaces, and cinderblocks. I remember thinking that all those little blades were really clever.
This thought was part of the more generalized relation to the world I was learning about then: the kind of nodding assent I gave to the way things worked. (I mean things made by humans.) I assented with pleasure, and some pride in the transparency of my understanding, to the way others had thought these things through and put them together. Chickenwire on the school windows so we wouldn't fall out. Stamped texture on the aluminum alloy floors so we wouldn't slip. It was all so marvelous.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
I remember that you're supposed to get under a doorway in an earthquake. Hugh and I liked this knowledge. Suddenly (for a little while) doorways looked like impressive serene guardian spirits, somehow patricianly superior to the building that would crash down around them while we stood under their patient protection.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
I remember that you used to signal that you wanted to get off at the next stop by pulling on the cord that was draped along the two sides of the bus, under the ads, in lovely catenary curves from eyelet to eyelet. When you pulled the cord a bell rang, and the driver would let you out at the next stop. No "Stop Requested" sign went up, so if you weren't paying attention you wouldn't know that someone had already rung, and sometimes the driver would be vexed by six or seven signals. And of course the kids liked signaling and ringing over and over again -- irritating the driver if he (always he) thought we were doing it intentionally, which we weren't always. Bus drivers in New York (I think this is still true) were unusually committed to countering antisocial behavior of any sort on the bus. Train conductors too. My father taught me great respect for them, and he was right.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
I remember that I hurt my leg a little once -- I think I banged it into a piece of furniture. Hugh had injured his leg or his knee (he had fragile knees we'd find out later) and was limping, and then I hurt my leg and started limping too. At dinner I was limping my way to the kitchen to get something or clear something, and my father told me to stop. So I did stop -- in fact I wasn't in any pain at all, whatever had happened was over -- I stopped or thought I did, but he got angry and told me to stop immediately. I tried to walk normally but he got angrier and angrier, and I didn't know what to do. The next day everything was fine though, but it was odd to feel that I just didn't remember how to walk, or maybe just couldn't even walk gracefully under pressure (like the boy in Kleist's story who notices his unselfconscious resemblance to the Spinario sculpture in a mirror, and then can never repeat the gesture that brought out the resemblance.)
Sunday, April 13, 2008
I remember that you could read after you handed in your test. You weren't allowed to leave till the class was over, but the classroom was completely quiet (people were taking the test) and it was just a perfect time to read. In high school of course we could leave when we were done, and that was something of a loss.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
I remember the fascination with which I watched the horse in front of me, during group riding lessons, swat at horse flies with its tail. It did it in synch with its plodding. The flies landed on its rump in the same lazy rhythm. It was all standard and pleasantly phlegmatic. It was just a way of rattling through the environs, like sitting on a rocking chair on a back porch, but the porch was just unhurried life itself on a summer's day.
Friday, April 04, 2008
I remember my mother telling me -- we were looking at a rowboat or maybe getting into it on Lake Carmel, near Stormville -- that things would float if they had air in them. This was a fascinating piece of knowledge -- I loved the fact that she knew it; but, but then she knew everything; and I loved the fact that it was true. (Later she would tell me about Archimedes's "Eureka" and how objects displace their own weight -- floating objects, but I don't think she quite knew that; she also told me about Pi but thought Pi really was 22/7).
I also remember her telling me, at the dining room table, how "water always seeks its own level," a wonderful and lucid precept that had for me the force of revelation. What was revelatory about it was the combination of description and fact. It was something I knew intuitively, but not that strictly or perfectly. And now I did. But I was also awed by the clarity of the formulation. It was possible to say these things perfectly! My mother and water were two similar and perfect intelligences -- why, it turned out that water could seek, had intention and agency, just like my mother -- each of them in absolute tune with the other, which is to say, with how things are.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
I remember the surprising smell and feel of my Superman costume. First of all that the cape tied around the throat, and didn't spring, in a sort of authoritative unfurling, from its epaulets, as it did on TV, then that the logo had the stiff and foreign feel that it did, not simply a printed part of the fabric design. I didn't really like that, except that at school I liked being able to feel it under my shirt - liked its inflexible presence, which wouldn't have been true of an undershirt. It made the S more visible though, through the fabric of my button-down, against which it pressed, which was a problem, and I'd fasten my coat before I said good-bye to my parents. I remember also having to hitch up my buttoned collar so that the top piping of the costume couldn't be seen over my shirt, since my parents absolutely wouldn't have let me wear it to school.
Friday, March 07, 2008
I remember seeing "Loitering prohibited" signs and not quite knowing what they meant. I knew that loitering was more or less like littering. But there was something else that it meant too. It was odd to have a prohibition without a temptation: I couldn't have loitered, as far as I knew, if I'd wanted to. I couldn't picture any action whose name I didn't know that someone might want to forbid. I thought of loitering therefore as some teenage transgression -- some power of teenagers which had to be curbed; and the fact that they had this capacity and that the adults knew what this capacity was and could address them on the matter was another cause for me to celebrate a secret competence on which those two estates agreed, acknowledging each other's pertinent understanding. (I myself was pleased to know what the word "prohibited" meant -- a shared teenage and grown-up way to say "forbidden," but one I already understood.)
Thursday, March 06, 2008
I remember driving across country the summer we got back from Israel. It was a long summer, a long road trip: To Lee Riley's (not her real name, but still the name I grew up calling her--nickname plus former married name) on Riverside (between 100-103?) in NYC (at least that's what I remember from when I used to walk by that building, which went co-op eventually, in my Barnard days), to Aunt Ernie and Uncle Bob's (both dead now) in DC, where we also must have visited Maynard (again, not his real name) and Lynne and Jessie and Sara, to my maternal grandparents' ugly condo in Jacksonville (this was the first time I remember visiting the condo after they sold the big house on the river), to their time-share on Captiva Island with all my cousins, to Clarenz and Daphna Hall's house in Little Rock, Arkansas (where I learned to dive off a diving board and Yoss and I were introduced to cable cartoons and Monopoly), to Arizona (where I remember the petrified forest and the Grand Canyon and the geode we got my brother, but where did we stop in between? If we visited people, I don't remember it) to Las Vegas (where I think we stayed at CIRCUS CIRCUS) to my father's mother's house in Santa Barbara (where my other cousins met us and we watched the Olympics, which were in LA that year, and where we fasted for Tisha B'Av). While we were there, I told my mother I would never eat another tunafish sandwich in my life, and I didn't for about ten years. Kosher tuna must have been easy to find on the road, but I couldn't force any more tuna salad down, as good as my mom's was. Then we began the trip back.
I don't remember the stops we made on the way back, except for Iowa City, Iowa, where we hung out with friends of my folks from their grad school days: some woman we stayed with--but what was her name? She gave me a beautiful antique black wool-felt hat, and I gave her the book The Last Unicorn, which I had just tearfully finished, for a boy she tutored in reading. And Donald Genie (how do you spell his last name? Also, I think other people called him Martin, but as that was my father's name, we called him Donald. He, too, is dead now), who had been a my father's dear friend, collaborator, and teacher at the University of Iowa. What my brother has told me he remembers from that stop (a strong memory for me, too) is our stopping at a farm, a "collective" my parents had bought in to for small money in those days, 20 years before, where we got and drank raw milk. As I think about it, I recall that on the way home, we stopped also in Toronto, with the Peleds, friends from the year before in Israel. I lost a doll there, my Baby Feel-So-Real.
I spent most of the days in the car reading. At every stop, people would give me books, whatever they had handy, so I read crazy stuff like the second volume (but not the first) of a novel called The Tontine. It's sad: I read so much (remember my dad nagging me to look out the window), but I only remember three books by name. The third is Helen Keller's The Story of My Life. Which is what made me write this post. I read that book, and, for the rest of the trip, my mother and I would sign into each other's palms. She would reach her back through the narrow space between her seat and the door (this could not have been comfortable), and I would reach forward, and we would slowly sign letters back and forth into each other's hands. I think of it now, such a patient indulgence.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
I remember biking past 331 Sumner Street in Norwood. It was yellow then, the porch was screened in, and the front of the house was obscured by large evergreen shrubs. So much for the pathetic fallacy: It seemed dark. It seemed shrouded. It didn't want you to look, and if you did look you still couldn't see anything. The air around it was still, thick, heavy. We knew that a Nazi lived there. I remember sometimes feeling that malevolence watched me as I went by the house--and wondered if, just as I knew that a Nazi lived in the house, he knew that Jews were riding bikes outside. I remember that eventually he was arrested, after what seemed like years (how could we all know he was a Nazi and the government fail to notice?), and that the house was sold.
The house is different now--no longer shrouded in shrubs, the front porch is open to the road, the screens removed; it's been painted blue with white trim and seems to breathe differently, or perhaps I breathe differently when I drive past.
Monday, March 03, 2008
I remember a series of Nestle's milk chocolate that had pictures of individual animals on wrapper, and a matching sticker inside.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I remember Geiger counters, from Superman, and I think also The Time Tunnel. They seemed very cool -- the way they clicked and the needle jumped. Then as a junior in an NSF high school summer program we actually used them. It was like the entry into the fantasy world of TV. But I could measure my approach towards adulthood by the fact that I could also see them as reasonably routine. Like (years earlier) routinely plugging things in, an activity once strictly and glamorously forbidden (I idiotically also held some radioactive material up to my throat the day we were introduced to Geiger counters, clowning around. I was immortal then. I'm pretty sure the radiation was insignificant.)
Sunday, February 24, 2008
I remember that my uptown grandparents used to put sugar into their cups before adding the coffee. When she served coffee at my grandfather's bridge games I remember her as asking people if they wanted sugar before pouring the coffee. She'd put the sugar in first, then give them their cups and pour the coffee in over it while they held them. My father always added sugar to the coffee, and I've never seen anyone do it my grandmother's way since, but I was reminded of this by a moment in Peter Rushforth's novel Pinkerton's Sister (set in 1903) where someone puts in the sugar first.
Friday, February 15, 2008
I remember oil rags. Whenever we filled up they'd check the oil, pulling out the dip-stick and wiping it down. The ritual was so interesting to me: remove, wipe, reinsert, remove, examine. We never got oil that I remember. I didn't know why they did it this way, or in fact what they were doing. But I do remember that they'd whip the rag out to wipe the dipstick down, and I thought there was something special about those rags. They had for me the enigmatic and wonderful status of Tools for the performance of activities we would never do or know how to do. Soldering irons weren't a patch on them. They were implements of a mystery.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I remember how cool the 35 mm film canisters were. They used to be metal with screw on tops, the same battleship gray as the plastic ones now (maybe slightly lighter), but their tops were also gray, not today's (or yesterday's) black. They would get dented too -- a neat fact about them that I only treasured once the plastic ones replaced them. Of course kids kept their stashes in them too; but I think I started thinking they were really cool when I stopped associating them with stashes. They were beautifully utilitarian and so a badge of expertise. Camera expertise was the only genuine expertise we could have at the time -- the only thing we could do that adults did too, and did seriously, as serious utilitarian jobs, and that the best of us could do much better than most adults could. We didn't drop our film into Instamatics! The cannisters stood for all that. They stood for the way we could know what they meant.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
I remember that I started this blog six years ago yesterday! But yesterday I forgot.
I remember Chess Life and Review. When I joined FIDE, or was it the U.S. Chess Federation?, they sent it to me as part of my membership. My name was listed in it, in small type, at the end of the year, with my rating! I remember keeping the various issues on the shelf in my bookcase, above the castle that was the central display piece there. Slim and flimsy paper, crammed with chess games and ads for tournaments everywhere. I went to one or two, based on the ads. I also went down to the Manhattan chess club a couple of times, which was on the same block as Eclair's and the dojo where I used to go for karate, on seventy-second street. I never found the famous Marshall, though -- the Manhattan was my substitute for it.
Yesterday in a bookstore I found a bound volume of Chess Life and Review from one of those years. I looked myself up and there I was -- my name and rating staring up at me with more of an adult serenity than I possess even now. But I didn't plunk down the $16.00 they wanted for it.
I remember too that the schemester John Gross had a plan for raising our ratings in high school. If you beat someone more than thirty points higher than you were, you got bonus points -- it wasn't a zero-sum game. So we could report a series of wins for him, until he was a hundred points higher than I was, then a series of wins for me which would bring me up faster than he went down. Then I could leapfrog ahead of him until I was a hundred points higher than he, and so on. We never did this, but it seemed inelegant of FIDE that it was a possibility, though I vaguely thought he should get some points just for being clever enough to figure this out.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
I remember my father taking me to see the statue of Alma Mater at Columbia. I'd been on the campus before, with my mother, since she worked for one of her law professors there after she graduated, Willis Reese. I don't know where she was the evening he took me there -- maybe in the hospital having my sister, but I don't think so -- I don't think that was on my mind and it would have been. My mother's name is Alma, so he told me that "mater" meant mother, and that it was a statue in her honor -- my mother Alma. (This is why I don't think that she was in the hospital having my sister -- that didn't enter into my conception of her being a mother as he evoked it. I think in fact it was before she was born, before I was six. Maybe when she was away in Washington, before we drove down?)
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
I remember one time my Florida grandparents were visiting us in Sharon. I think it was the summer after we moved. They must have been taking a walk down the loop. Pleasant Street isn't a dead end, but it may as well be one, since there is no thru-traffic, just a loop at the bottom as it turns into DeHart and then back into Pleasant. Anyway, I was so used to it being a quiet road and so excited about how I could ride my bike without holding on to the handlebars that even though I didn't normally go in the street, I rode along with them. I was so busy showing off how well I rode hands-free, I didn't listen for traffic. When a car came along behind me, I was riding right in the middle of the road, and my grandfather let me have it--screamed that that was the dumbest thing he'd ever seen, and didn't I know how to ride a bike! I was frightened and shamed, and I went back to the house, crestfallen, crying. I remember sitting on my father's lap as he explained that granddaddy got mad because he was scared something might happen to me, and he had shouted at me (as unlikely as this seems) because he loves me.
I remembered this when going through my desk today (a mess ever since our move to Maple Ave), and, nearly five years after his death, I found an envelope with his deliberate scrawl on it. I left it where it was. I can't put it away.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
I remember Caravel candy bars. Do they still have them? They were the first candy bars I had because of seeing them on commercials. I think Hugh recommended them too. I didn't like the fact that I couldn't pronounce the name (or reliably spell it -- and the cursive caramel-colored writing didn't make it any easier, as with the Montreal Expos logo), but I eventually tried one and it was delicious -- much better than I would ever have expected from the commercials. In this way they contrasted with Mounds (which do still exist). Mounds looked great in the commercials, but were just tasteless chocolate over repulsive coconut.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
I remember getting gum stuck to my shoes. It was really yucchy and hard to get off in a non-disgusting way. Why doesn't this happen to me anymore? Is it that I wear different kinds of shoes now? That I'm more careful where I step? That I don't walk around junior high all day?
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