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 (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!)

posted by william 2:29 PM
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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).

posted by william 2:23 PM
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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.

posted by william 12:35 AM
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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.

posted by william 10:39 PM
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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.

posted by william 9:44 AM
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