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I remember / je me souviens
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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.
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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
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
I remember that one day when we were just hanging around, maybe at my uptown grandmother's house, maybe at ours -- at a side- or cocktail-table, at any rate, where he used to sometimes do hand-puppet shows for me -- my father idly spun a coin, a nickel I think, flicking it with his thumb nail, and it whirled around like a top slowly drifting around the surface of the table. This was beautiful, and an amazing skill, one which I'd never dreamed existed.
Friday, December 25, 2009
I remember the few times I celebrated Christmas as a child -- I mean enjoyed the luxuries and indulgences of Christmas. Once with the Herings (when we put up our socks and found huge stockings the next morning; I had no idea about any of this, and didn't know why my parents wanted me to tape my sock to the mantelpiece); and another time at Michael C.'s, when there was just the slightest dusting of snow and I realized that late December usually wasn't snowy yet, and also somehow what the song and the term meant, which I'd never thought about before. I believe I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull that weekend, since Michael's father had a brand new copy of it and he was very up-to-date on the books with buzz.
I think there may have been one other Christmas weekend: the weekend I'm thinking of is one where I poked a fire in a fireplace for the first time, which made me feel both little and an adult (I knew I wasn't an adult because I was doing this for the first time, and that made me feel smaller).
Sunday, December 20, 2009
I remember that my downtown grandparents had a couple of things in their house that we didn't, in addition to the wonderful balcony overlooking Chelsea. They had a small and elegant manual typewriter, with its double red and black ribbon. I was interested in how the keys got stuck, and also in my grandfather's expertise at shifting from small to capital and also from black to red.
The red strip was below the black, so that when you shifted to red the whole ribbon went up a quarter of an inch or so in its metal guide. Sometimes the black part of the ribbon would go up a little too high and flop or crease over the pointers of the guide, and then when you tried to shift back to black it would get stuck. But my grandfather was very good at getting it running smoothly again, and also at changing the ribbons when they were no longer usable.
That was a judgment call, since when you got to the end of a ribbon it just switched directions and went backwards, each long pass (the ribbons were many yard long so each pass produced yards of type) slightly less dark than the pass before. As with my parents' inked stamp pad (and the ink they kept to refresh it but which I wasn't allowed to touch) the difference from the nth to the n + 1th use was imperceptible enough that I always wondered how or why you'd know it was time to change it. (Later I felt that way about changing razor blades and toothbrushes. Sometimes, when I was older, the thing that determined me to change a ribbon was the fact that the ribbon I'd earlier discarded was now obviously darker than the ribbon I was still using, so I'd reuse the old one.)
One thing that would help make you realize that a ribbon was getting defunct was when the type was light enough to induce you to switch to the red half, which of course was used an order of magnitude or two less often than the black. I liked typing in red, and my grandparents seemed to as well, but even so it always lasted much longer. When the red faded, it really was time to switch. My grandfather was really good at that too, whereas I would never even try to do it. My grandfather would always show me how his fingers were free of ink -- he was always campaigning to make me learn his fastidious habits and techniques.
They had a drawer full of ribbons. One day I noticed that they were all black -- the bicolored ribbons were gone! This seemed very modern to me, as though they'd joined me in the jet age.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
I remember that business failures weren't like other failures -- driving accidents, alcohol, divorce -- that made you realize that adults could sometimes be weak and imperfect. Everyone seemed to suffer financial losses at some point, without visibly having done anything foolish. I remember my father telling someone how much he had lost in the stock market one year -- to my mind, a terrific amount. But my father was wise and cautious -- if he suffered a loss, it wasn't indicative of his own failure, but of the harshness of the world in which this loss was so easy and unavoidable. And the fact that adults constantly participated in this world, but seemed unfazed at the end of the day, made their wisdom and courage all the more impressive.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
I remember that if you picked up the extension to listen in (or eavesdrop) on an adult's conversation on a rotary phone while they were still dialing, the call would not go through. You had to try to time picking it up while the phone was ringing on the other end, ideally before the person being called answered, since it was always obvious if you picked up after the connection was made. I'd worm my finger under the handset, holding one of the still slightly scary pop-up plastic cylindrical buttons flush with the base of the cradle, wait a second or so after I heard the last number dialed in the other room (you could hear the clockwise dialing motion much better than the dial's return), and then slowly let the two buttons come up, as noiselessly as possible. (I'd sometimes do this on incoming calls as well, gently releasing the buttons while the person in the other room was picking up the handset which I trusted would make enough noise to cover what I was doing.)
I can't, of course, remember anything interesting that I heard during these conversations, but I always liked to listen to my mother talking to my father on the phone: the adult world was just like business in the movies, urgent but opaque and for me unreferential conversations about lots and lots of people and the various things they were attempting and thwarting which put the hum into city life, the buzz in the business of living.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
I remember more about the pink satin bedspread my father gave my mother one year, for her birthday I think. It had her monogram on it, but one day I realized that the large middle letter was her last initial, and the last letter was her middle initial. I was surprised but they explained that this was how monograms worked. It seemed inelegant to me: I mean the fact of design vs. the ordering of names seemed inelegant. The middle letter was appropriately the largest, but then it couldn't be the middle letter any more. This seemed a discord in the logic of the world.
I remember that after she got that bedspread I was no longer allowed to lie on their made bed. This was a great loss to me.
Friday, November 06, 2009
I remember that my father had a drawer full of 8 mm film; some reels were of us, some were unused (and expired).
When Hugh C. and I wanted to make a movie we saw that they were expired and went to the specialty camera store to buy more film for my father's camera. But is was so expensive! So we used the expired film and then the owner of the shop got p.o.'d at us when we went to get it developed: he thought we'd just bought some film from elsewhere. I think we got some film back from him eventually, but never figured out how to watch it. All those frames! I somehow thought we could just scan our eyes down the film -- after all we didn't need technology for Hugh's great flip movies.
My father also had some old commercial films -- ten minute shorts (of entertainers) and some cartoons. Cartoons you could watch at home at will! Amazing! But we never figured out how to watch those either, and I don't think my father showed them to us more than once or twice, if that. I just remember those large square flat enticingly colorful boxes in the drawer.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
I remember that Mr. Hanlon, our BC calculus teacher, described Newton's invention of the calculus with reference to lots of real world examples. He said that Newton was first a physicist, then a mathematician. He gave an example one day, and then said, "So don't let anyone kid you into thinking mathematics is the exclusive province of thought." I loved that last phrase. A few days later I was at school early (Mr. Hanlon always was), and we talked a bit about math. He said that something was characteristic of mathemetics. I replied, with a slightly arch tone that would allow me to break either way and that would indicate that I was quoting him if he recognized that I was, without embarrassing him if he didn't, "Yes, the exclusive province of thought." He said, "I've always thought so," which surprised me because he was contradicting what he'd said. And yet I knew he meant it. I could have taken this as a chink in his armor, a vision of his clay feet (he was wonderful and deeply loved), but I think for the first time I realized that what looked like an inconsistency wasn't a weakness. It was range and depth, rather; and my suppression of a slight and deeply regretful impulse to feel a touch superior or more knowing in perceiving this inconsistency that he didn't was an important advance for me: it meant that I could see what was good about Mr. Hanlon beyond idealization or projection. And he was a wonder.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
I remember that a friend of my sister's lived in the same building as Joel Grey (on the East Side), so she went over there to trick or treat. I don't think she saw him, though they rang on the doorbell of his apartment.
Friday, October 30, 2009
I remember having to get "working papers" to work at the tennis court when I was fourteen. A doctor had to see me. I had to cough with my head turned while he checked me for hernias. We'd all sung "It's a rupture" when I was in third grade, though I didn't quite know what that meant. But I did know it had to do with one's crotch, supposedly, and here was this doctor confirming it. I was very suave and adult about the check up, and then he signed the form.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
I remember that my brother and I had digital watches that beeped twice on the hour and once on the half hour.
I remember that the barbers not only kept snipping their scissors in the empty air as they circled around me: they also kept opening and closing the drawers under the ledge beneath the mirror. They took out cloths, talcs, paper cuffs, various hair setting liquids. Sometimes they'd open a drawer and close it without taking anything out, a kind of counterpoint to the clicking of the scissors on empty air. The scissors made a little more sense to me though: they were like practice swings in baseball or bounding the tennis ball on the line a couple of times before serving it. But what was this odd frenzied ritual they did with the drawers? At home I kept my drawers open till I got everything I needed out of them: shirts, underpants, socks, tie, etc. They were going into their drawers all day long. But it was as though they kept thinking they had what they wanted and could now close the drawer for the rest of the day. Except they were opening it again within another ten seconds. Would they never learn?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
I remember the Hardy Boys novel (The Sinister Sign Post?) where they find a ton of money during a terrible storm. They put in a classified ad saying that they've found something of great value in a satchel, or something. They get a letter saying that they'd better give the money back, signed "Rainy Night." I liked the signature, but then in the next paragraphs they are very puzzled by its content. I couldn't believe it! How could they not understand that the letter-writer was alluding to the night the money was lost? Someone was not getting something: either me or them.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
I remember Beckwith's bike repair...what? Not a shop, at all, more a junkyard really, with a dilapidated barn and some shacks. Beckwith himself was an old and shambling man in overalls and covered with grease, the perfect and perfectly Dickensian spirit of the place. It was impossible to imagine him on a bike; just as it was impossible to imagine Beckwith's bike repair at the end of this gracious lane in Quogue, New York. But he could just sort of grab a bike in his large and awkward hands and hand it back to you fixed. I was surprised that he wanted money for his repairs, though: it didn't look like he ever had any need or occasion to participate in its circulation.
I remember as well -- for a minute I conflated the two memories -- buying a used bike with my father in Ithaca, New York, the summer I spent there between junior and senior years in high school. It was completely destroyed by the end of the summer, and I wanted to abandon it where it was chained to some sign-post downtown. (I'd gotten a flat and fallen and twisted the frame; I remember actually going to a doctor about the contusions I had, also downtown, and he warned me about my posture.) But on the phone the day before we left my father told me to sell it back, and I did get $10 for it, which surprised me: it was $10 more than I thought I'd get. Jonathan D's father Jack picked us up (my parents had driven us, and we'd listened to John Dean's testimony on the radio), and we drove behind a motorcycle for a while, which made Jack D. very unhappy.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
I remember when Searchers (the Outward Bound type program that three high schools did together) set up an underwater test for us. We were supposed to swim four widths of the pool underwater, about a minute and a half. We were supposed to practice getting over CO2 panic by hyperventilating and then holding our breaths for two minutes. I never could. Then when the test came I did maybe one-and-a-half widths. It was pure and irresistible temptation; once you saw you weren't going to make it it was impossible to get yourself to suppress the desire to breath for even one more completely pointless second.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
I remember later on being shocked when a bulb I was trying to change broke. I tried to unscrew the base from the inside and of course shocked myself when I did that. I think this was the second time I was shocked. Ken H used to like to stick screw drivers into electric outlets, just for the brief thrill. Did the current go through because we were grounded? Anyhow, I did that once by accident, when I was following Hugh's example and unscrewing the plate so I could attach a grounding wire to the screw that held it in. The bulb was worse, but they were both so weird. I suddenly knew what a live current meant (on dry cells the picture wire we improvised with just got very hot), but it wasn't what I would want to think of as life. The electric chair seemed very strange after that: the living perception of a live current meaning death.
I remember that my father was master of lightbulbs and extension cords and door knobs. There were three bulbs in the fixture in my room, and I barely noticed it if one went out; and when two went out I got used to the dim dinginess pretty quickly. But my father would come with the step-ladder and change the bulbs, and then the room would flood with light. Extension cords were earlier: when he showed home movies he'd have to set up the screen at the end of the living room, and get out the projector to put on a little end table, and run an extension cord from the projector to the wall behind the lamps. I was always told to be careful around that extension cord. We didn't put it under a throw rug because they thought (especially my mother) that that would be a fire hazard. And I remember that my father would sometimes come holding an incongruously small screw driver in his large hands to tighten the screws that held the door knobs in place.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
I remember going to see Alicia de Larrocha play in Philharmonic Hall (I think) with my father. We were amazed by how small she was but how tremendous her reach was. When she played fortissimo, you could see her whole body reverberating with the force she applied to the keys. She looked sweet and benevolent when not playing, and ferocious when she played.
Friday, September 18, 2009
I remember passing a guy walking down 89th street with a monkey on a long leash. The monkey scampered up a No Parking sign, and also onto the guy's shoulder. It was surprising and interesting, but not after all that surprising and interesting. My parents noticed it the same way: one of those little events sure to add some diversion to your walk.
Friday, September 11, 2009
I remember sitting in a no-parking zone and hearing about the attacks on the phone from Lisa P. who said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought: no big deal because I remembered that a plane had hit the Empire State Building in the forties, with I think only two casualties. But I turned on the radio just in time to hear the radio correspondent from Washington yell that a plane had just slammed into the Pentagon, and suddenly I was really appalled and worried. That night I watched the Golf Channel for hours.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
I remember that during the Second World War my parents and I escaped from Sarajevo which was under Nazi and Quisling rule, to the zone of Yugoslavia occupied by the Italians. They were more lenient toward the Jews. We landed in Split but after a few months the Italian authorities decided that we must be dispersed to and confined on neighboring islands. We ended up on the island of Korcula, in the village of Vela Luka, renamed Valle Grande by the Italians who had annexed that part of Yugoslavia. Vela Luka was a small primitive fishing village of about five thousand inhabitants. We rented an “apartment” from some local peasants. ( I was then about nine years old.) There was a large street level room which served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. The floor was of some material which sloughed off every time you swept it so that there was never a time when you felt that you had finished the sweeping job. There was no plumbing though there was a sink with a hole in it through which dirty water was collected in a pail below. The pail was then emptied into a pit where a pig owned by the peasant family was confined. A set of stairs without a banister led upstairs to the bedroom which was closed off by a trap door. (You had to be sure that the trap door was closed at night so that you wouldn’t fall through.) My parents and I shared the bedroom; they in a large bed and I in some sort of palette with a mattress. The mattresses were filled with straw and the ticking had a hole in the middle into which one inserted one’s hand to redistrubute the straw when it got lumpy. A door from the bedroom led to a sort of balcony off which was a toilet consisting of a wooden bench with a hole and a cover. Below was the cesspool. It got brutally cold using the bathroom in the winter. Above the bedroom was a set of stairs leading to a storage room which was infested by rats. The rats never visited downstairs but ran very loudly at night and we dubbed the whole sound “horse races.” We stored potatoes and big demijohns of olive oil up there. One time my mother was trying to do some frying in the kitchen and had opened a new oil demijohn. She noticed suspicious hairs in the pan and found on examination that a number of mice had gotten into the container and drowned. Obviously we threw away the whole thing but when she later talked to a doctor friend of ours, he said that if she had not noticed that, the food would have been lethal. (A very young man with a young wife. A very negligent kind of doctor. Later we heard that he had been shot by the partisans, I forget why.)
Monday, August 10, 2009
I remember Embassy Florists (where we got flowers for my grandmothers) and Morris Brothers, which always reminded me of my downtown grandfather, both because of his Americanized first name (Morris) and because of the kind of jackets and slacks they got me there.
Friday, August 07, 2009
I remember hearing on the radio, as my grandfather drove me uptown, pretty much as we were passing Columbia, about the hundreds of thousands descending on Woodstock, and that they were letting everyone in. That was the first I heard of it. Then later, in the Hampton Arts Theater, there were all sorts of things posted about it, I think when the movie came out. Hugh C., connoisseur of large effects, was firm about there being over 500,000 people there. My father was very impressed at the movie by Richie Havens singing "Freedom" and playing guitar so fast and furiously. I liked the glimpses of nakedness. I did think it was Crosby, Stills and Nash's first gig, and that they were beside themseves with anxiety. ("This is our first gig, man, and we are scared shitless.") I'd known their version of the song already; and afterwards I got their albums and loved them beyond words. Partly, I think, because I had no idea they were a supergroup; I thought of them as the frail and nervous but beautifully committed hippies I'd mistaken them for (not entirely) in the movie. I loved the Country Joe song on the album too, though I'm not quite sure why now.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
I remember the vogue for copper bracelets that were supposed to counteract arthritis. This was early male-jewelry. All the middle aged male tennis players wore them. They looked fit and tanned, and then there was this accessory that brought out the tan, the bracelet which showed they were athletic and couldn't afford tennis elbow or sore wrists, because they played so much. The copper would also turn a little green, or stain their wrists a little green, which was cooler still. I almost wanted to be old and fighting off creakiness so that I could where one.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
I remember watching the moon landing in a hallway in a hotel somewhere in Italy. It was on a cheap black and white TV. We never saw TVs in Italy (once we watched Daniella, or maybe her baby brother, watching cartoons in Italian, but that was it). But all the adults were clustered around the moon-landing, so the hallway was full of stopped foot-traffic. I wasn't thrilled: I guess my space-age kid attitude was more: "It's about time."
Two footnotes:
I was (and am) sure that Aldren said "one small step for a man." Otherwise it made no sense.
I was thrilled, oddly, by the slingshot flights around the moon that preceded the moon landing that spring. There seemed something really exotic about flying to the dark side of the moon, flying farther into space than the moon itself, and then hurtling back to earth, all using unexpected and unscience-fictional effects of gravity. And the dark side of the moon still retained some mystery then. No one had ever seen it. It had only bee photographed very recently and sparsely. That seemed like a new world.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
I remember being bitten by our dog, Michael. She was a little white mutt bitch, my mother's, named for the man who found her as a puppy and gave her to my mom. She and Shandy, my father's whippet, were already old when I was born. I remember this sunny morning when Michael bit me; it was because I provoked her, though I can't remember what I did. I knew it was just, though: she was lying down in her place, and I was on hands and knees, intruding and teasing, and I got what was coming to me. Certainly she had growled plenty of warning, so it wasn't a surprise. What did surprise me was that she broke the skin, and so I had to report the injury to my father (who sided with the dog) and have my hand washed and a bandaid applied. Bill Cavish (sp?), a slim, bearded, balding single guy with a generous smile and a talent for great story-telling (a member of our Havurah community) was at the house when it happened, and I think he was a little appalled, and I enjoyed his sympathy very much, and I milked it for a story.
Friday, July 10, 2009
I remember that people used to say they were having a nervous breakdown. It meant they were a little keyed-up. Later I learned that they were somehow very intense. My grandfather's version was probably as intense as I could understand at the time, and the destruction of his ability to read did bother me. But I think it was only reading Marjorie Morningstar that I got a sense of them as disabling you pretty thoroughly, that and also reading that Franny in Franny and Zooey was having one. I think I understood (misunderstood) what Franny was experiencing through Marjorie.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
I remember visiting my great grandmother Babette, my mother's father's mother, in Jacksonville. I remember she lived in a complex of apartments (I remember the flowering trees on the grounds), and that as she got older her apartment shrunk, till she was in a two-room suite. Most important, she had a candy dish and she meant for us to take candies when we went to see her. I always chose the strawberry ones, in the strawberry wrapper, hard candies that had gel inside. I remember when I was about six she gave me a pin: a small gold chick emerging from a silver egg. My mother pinned it to the lapel of my furry purple winter coat. That was the last year we went down to Florida for my father's winter break, before he left academia.
I remember, after we'd seen a Chaplin movie, maybe a double-feature, my father telling me that Chaplin was as old as my grandfather but that he had a son who was my age.
I liked the idea, I think because of the complex ricochet of youth that it produced: Chaplin was young (on screen), like my father, and he had a young son, like me, and so my grandfather got to be young, like him and my father, at the same time as his son got to be the age of my father (since their fathers were born in the same year), which is to say the age that Chaplin was on screen, but being that age was really being 11, like me, so that somehow Chaplin was eleven too (as my grandfather and Chaplin both were in 1900, a fact that I always thought about which allowed his remote youth to come vividly alive for me, since I knew what it was like to be eleven, and also that 1900 was a significant milestone), and if he could be eleven, now, in his old age, then maybe my grandfather would live forever.
Friday, July 03, 2009
I remember the Mitch Miller Show. My uptown grandparents watched it Sunday nights, I think. It was either before or after the Danny Kaye Show, so I tended to confuse them when I was little. But somehow I didn't like the Mitch Miller Show as much -- it might have been the name Mitch which I didn't like; or it might be that I don't really like the name Mitch because of its archaic association for me with the show. I remember horns that whined a little too much, and the name Mitch still has that whiney feel for me now. (Apologies to any Mitches!)
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
I remember how pretty frequently there'd be workers on the track at the 96th street subway station where I waited for the train to school. They would wear yellow slickers, like rain jackets. I loved watching the calm way they'd step between the pillars that separated the tracks when a train -- or sometimes two -- came into the station, and wait in that narrow space of safety, to reappear when the train pulled away. I'd sometimes get to the station, or get home from school, just in time to see them going up or down the tiny ladder at the end of the platform, almost inconspicuous but always a kind of option in space that I liked knowing and thinking about since no one else paid any attention to it. Except the workers who belonged to the subway and to its history and procedures in a way that was part of the solidity of the city -- the city I lived in and whose subways I now rode, just like my parents.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
I remember the white plastic T-shaped tags that attached the stoppers of waterguns to their bodies when you filled them. They were always in the way -- they made the guns much harder to fill, especially with hoses, so I never felt that my watergun was satisfactorily full. By pulling hard you could force the T to collapse and fold over and pull the whole thing out, but somehow after that the gun never seemed to seal up quite right.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
I remember playing on the Moshav with the Moshav kids. Because these memories are visceral rather than visual, I can't easily describe this; outside. Dry sun on dry blond dirt. Running up and down scrabbly hills. The smell of heat, but also the variegation of sun and shadow as it falls on your back and of speed and breath as we ran, found a hiding place, squeezed and stilled into it, ran again. There were teams, so alliances, secrets, the pleasure of coordination, instant kinship. The memory/ies are conflated: I am four. I am nine. I am a stranger, accepted. I am there with Miri, my friend to be from the Old City. The place is full of siblings and purity, yearning, sweet & genuine spirit, and song. I wonder if we got our Shabbos clothes dirty.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
I remember how much I loved Dr. Greenberg, the kindly principal of the Hebrew and Sunday Schools at B'nai Jeshrun. So much nicer than the rabbi whose first name I shared and who lived in our building. I thought that as authorities at the same place they'd be equally nice, but they weren't. Dr. Greenberg led the junior congregation. I remember being one of the Torah attendants a couple of times, while some of the older people read the Torah. I loved Dr. Greenberg's blessing at the end of the service: "May he cause his countenance to shine upon you and to give you peace." I remember his saying that the lamp above the podium was perpetually lit, which was very impressive to me: I thought about the building in ruins in some future century but people desperately keeping the lamp lit over the rubble anyhow.
Sundays we would sing songs -- I loved
By the Sea of Kinnereth,
Ancient legend declareth,
Stands a palace enchanted,
With woods divinely planted.
Who dwells there? It is only
A lad like a nightingale lonely,
Who with prophets and sages
Studies the Torah's pages.
I was somewhat puzzled about how lonely he could be when attended to in his studies by a retinue of prophets and sages, but on the other hand it seemed right: a young boy, lonely and alone, as he is intensively educated by servant-masters. The song was perfectly calculated for a chid's misunderstanding.
We also did film-strips of Torah stories. He would narrate a picture, and then rap twice with his ring on the metal hand rail to the stage when it was time for the next photo (later I played one of "The Sons" in the Tradition song of Fiddler on the Roof on that stage), In high school, when we did the first two books of Paradise Lost I was regarded as expert on the Bible because I knew those stories so well.
I saw him a few years later -- maybe three or four -- and he had a terrible limp and was wizened and old. This was very puzzling to me, because he already seemed to me to be old -- permanently old and wise and in command of his place in the world -- when I first met him. How could he get older? I think he might have been my first intimation that old people aren't immortal, haven't achieved the eternal stability of their vast accumulation of time. Old people get older and then they die.
I didn't quite know that before. Unlike any of the other old people in my life -- people who were old when I first came to know them, and not much older when I was a teenager -- he was getting older faster than I was. This left me sad and -- as though I were accelerating my own aging into heart-hardened experience to match the speed of his own senescence -- cruelly indifferent.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
I remember the claim that inserting 'only' between each pair of words in "I hit him in the eye" would produce a different meaning. I spent a good amount of idle time trying to convince myself that "I hit him only in the eye", "I hit him in only the eye", and "I hit him in the eye only" were more than subtly different.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
I remember going out to Doug B's house, maybe upstate? And there were several motor-cycles there, including his brother's chopper, which he'd ridden to New Orleans and back -- a fact whose physical magnitude didn't impress me as much then as it should have. But it was still an epic journey, cross country and unbelievably cool, all of course in imitation of Easy Rider (which I hadn't seen). One reason I didn't realize the physical demands of such a ride was that I'd ridden Vespas in Italy. So I thought I knew how to ride a motorcycle, was feeling cocky, till I got on one. It was amazingly powerful when you gave it some throttle. And I didn't know you had to change gears. Doug showed me all about the clutch and the gearshift. But I kept stalling trying to get out of first. Accelerate really fast and stall. It's probably a good thing that I never managed to get into second.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
I remember Ken H. knowing that if we rolled a bottle down the big hill on 91st street, it would shatter after just a few revolutions. I thought it would just roll, and maybe shatter purely by chance. But for him it was a technique -- roll and shatter. He took a Coke bottle and rolled it fairly gently, and sure enough it shattered into shards in less then two seconds.
Friday, April 24, 2009
I remember going to my friend Geoffrey's house, and seeing a pure white marble chess set on their coffee table. Each of the sixty-four squares was white; each of the thirty-two pieces was white. I was puzzled, but then Geoff said that it was the chess set that John and Yoko and just given Bobby Fischer (who'd recently beat Spassky).
This seemed very cool to me. Thinking back now I see the coolness in several different ways. I was a better chess player than Geoff, but suddenly he had this great set, which I thought of as his, not his parents'. He had a great ability to seem to be his family's representative, to have all their weight and authority and insight behind him. I never felt that way about my family, but the S's were magical. Not their mother so much: she seemed the one who was not quite part of the rest of them. And because I liked worshiping Geoff, and didn't want to feel superior in any way, it was nice that now he suddenly had a more privileged relationship to chess than I did.
And at the same time that it helped boost one aspect of Geoff, the set boosted my view of Yoko. Since it was obvious to me that this was Yoko's kind of idea, not an idea that the Beatles would have. (Because it's only now that I see the chess set was an allusion to the White Album. Which I remember was white because the naked photos on the British version were banned in the United States.) We all hated Yoko for breaking up the Beatles, for fooling John into thinking her art was more interesting than the Beatles were. But here was this great chess set, and this new grouping: John, Yoko, Bobby Fischer! That was pretty grand.
And of course the grouping also included the S's, since they had the chess set. The chess set? Of course not. But somehow the world of commodities they lived in included things like this chess set. They could buy from the same cosmic store that John and Yoko could. They belonged to a kind of social Platonic realm, where the objects that people owned were works of art -- where you could just buy a work of art. So it turned out that what gave the art its aura wasn't that it was unique, but that it was an appurtenance of a transcendent social realm to which we sublunary types did not belong. But the S's did belong, and so did John and Yoko and Bobby Fischer, and the group they made up was almost as wonderful as the Beatles, and the S's at any rate lived just next door.
Friday, April 17, 2009
I remember the pleasure and luxury of things that were lit up at night. Walking past a garden with spotlights (unlit), I remember visiting restaurants or houses for dinner where the lawns were impeccable and the lights nestled in the grass made it possible to see that. I remember that when guests were over for dinner, my parents turned on every light downstairs, and replaced the inevitably dead one or two bulbs in the chandelier. (And how the chandelier gradually lost arms over the years from six to two.)I remember returning in the evening to the Lalita Mahal hotel in Mysore, and seeing it perfectly white and illuminated from a distance. And I was always excited about flying at night for the view (although I now fairly dislike it for its association with long international flights and leaving home).
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
I remember that I wasn't really puzzled by the fact that burglars didn't use fire escapes.
There were a lot of them in my grandmother's neighborhood in Washington Heights, but none in our neighborhood. It was like a different ecological region, with different flora: lower buildings, many with awnings, and most with fire escapes.
I assumed that using them really was cheating. I didn't even articulate this assumption to myself until I read a Batman comic where (as I recall) someone disguised as Batman was breaking into buildings. Batman figured out that he used his cape -- his counterfeit cape -- to lasso the bottom of the fire escape ladder and pull it down. That was when I first somehow realized that adults couldn't reach up to the ladder, and that it was held nearly horizontal by a counterweight (which I saw clearly depicted in the frame of the comic). I had just sort of assumed that they were fixed structures, like anything else.
The fact that they weren't made me obscurely sad: some trust went out of the background of the world. It wasn't perfectly still and stable, its use and status unanimously agreed to. It was designed to frustrate some people and to protect others. We weren't all at one about the world we lived in.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
I remember thinking "musician" and "magician" were the same word. I didn't have the concept musician, and so I heard all mentions of musicians as being about magicians. One day they told me that my second cousin, a musician, would be coming to dinner at my downtown grandmother's house with us. I was very disappointed when I found out the truth.
Friday, March 20, 2009
I remember dialing with my left index finger sometimes, maybe if I was making a lot of phone calls and had a pencil in my right hand, or was using my right hand for something else. It was much harder to dial with your left index finger, since now you were pressing against the spring resistance to the dial with the back of your finger, with your nail. And if you had a hangnail or any other sort of soreness in your cuticle, as I did all the time when I was a kid, it just hurt to dial that way. And the motion was much less natural, pushing the dial clockwise from the left.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I remember "Purim Day, Purim Day, gladsome joyous holiday." "Let's make [something] pah! pah! pah!...with our dreidels play." "Hamentaschen good to eat! Cakes and candies sweet!"
But it was in a minor key, which puzzled me a bit, but also made some sense, since all the anarchic joy praised by the song was a sort of false joy, not the fun I would propose for myself if I could do anything that I wanted -- I'd be down in the park playing football with my friends instead.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
I remember that there were two ways to make mistakes on dial phones: to put your finger in the wrong slot, or not to dial the phone all the way toward the curved metal stop.
The second source of error is the interesting one: I remember that sometimes you might not make it all the way to the metal -- you might have stopped a quarter of an inch or so too early. Then there were three choices: did you hope that you had just stopped and not let the dial move counterclockwise at all, so that you could continue the clockwise dialing motion? Or did you redial the whole number? Or hope that you'd gone close enough for the right number to register? Your answer to this question might depend on how far into the number you were (first digit? sixth?) and how quickly you had to make your call.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
I remember that in the old, lighter green and yellow buses, the steering wheels were much more vertically oriented, the way they are in cars. In the newer, darker green buses, the pitch was much more horizontal, which made the bus drivers seem more godlike to me. They weren't confronting the wheel, face to face, as it were, but controlling it from above. I took pleasure in this constant reminder of progress.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
I remember one time there was a party at the dojo after class on Saturday. I didn't know it was coming, but after I got out of the locker room it was all set up. My adult white-belt friend was hanging out with the Sensei and with lots of other students, both kids and adults. There was lots of party food in the entry area (not on the exercise floor, of course). The sensei was sitting at his desk, relaxed, having a good time, very different from usual. Then as I was getting ready to go, they delivered pizza, so I hung out some more.
They were listening to a tape of classical music with the pizza. I heard my white-belt friend say, "Hear that? Every performance has mistakes in it." The sensei rewound the tape and we all listened to the violinist scrape his bow in some spasm of unintentional motion. I had never been able to hear the differences between performances before -- in vain did my grandmothers take me to hear Serkin and Rubenstein (though I liked their kindly looks). But this was a mistake I could hear, and I was proud of that -- not proud that I could hear it, because it was obvious, but proud to be part of the group of people listening to this tape and all hearing the same obvious lapse.
The party was still in full swing when I went home -- I didn't want my family to wonder where I was. But it turned out to be early evening when I got there (I didn't have a watch, so I had no idea what time it was). My grandmother was beside herself. I'd thought I was about half an hour late. But I'd spend four extra hours at the dojo. That afternoon was one of the best times I'd ever had: it just slipped away in fun.
Monday, February 16, 2009
I remember telling my chemistry teacher, Mr. Reeves, also the soccer coach, about the story my grandmother had just told me (in eleventh or twelfth grade) about her cousin. This cousin, whom I called and think of as "my grandmother's cousin," had a friend who was seduced by a charismatic madman, who suggested a suicide pact. The friend declined, so the intense young man turned his attentions to my grandmother's cousin, who succumbed to his charms and his authoritative vocation for transcendence. He shot her and then shot himself.
This was all new to me, this cliché of excessively tormented adolescent eroticism, and I remember Mr. Reeves listening politely but not quite with enough interest. But it was a true story, and I don't know even now why he wasn't more interested (though maybe I'd respond the same way now in his position): at the time it seemed somewhat natural, though disappointing, that he wasn't engaged by what was after all just personal family history. But this cousin was so distant from me that I didn't think of her as part of my family, and yet I was interested. But maybe this was mainly because it came from my grandmother, who knew her, and deplored what she'd done.
Later the story of Kleist's death seemed familiar in just the same way that so many of the fairy tales and scary stories my grandmother told me were familiar when I reread them in Freud. There was something surprising about returning to that archaic culture -- archaic for me as well as for the world -- when discussing the reading with Paul de Man. And he was no more interested in my family, it turned out, than Mr. Reeves had been.
Friday, February 13, 2009
I remember Lindsay Nelson, I think it was, calling a Mets game on the radio. Probably in 1969 or 1970. I was walking Powell down the big hill on 91st street and listening to the game on my transistor radio. Bud Harrelson took three grounders that inning, and threw out the runner three times, once at second and twice at first maybe. Lindsay Nelson said, "...and Bud Harrleson with three assists in the inning. That ties a record." I liked that quick, wry, lazy, afternoon notation: the routine ways records get tied in baseball.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
I remember the prefects when I was in middle school -- all-knowing, composed, and in some ways more adult than parents and teachers. I remember the authority associated with their names (always in full) when called out during school ceremonies. (I also remember thinking, much earlier, that "investiture" was spelt "investeacher", having something to do with leadership.) I remember how, in 6th grade, every second person had a crush on a prefect (and how you had to, to be considered cool), and using 'fan' as a transitive verb to denote that relationship.
Monday, January 26, 2009
I remember that my parents had a Selectric in their office. Just like Doug B's. And it was such a thrill, to see that ball spin so quickly to type just the right letter through the one-time film ribbon. It was like science fiction -- a kind of precursor to that blob on The Prisonner that went after the prisonners who tried to escape. It was just this sort of elegant, paperweight-like model globe, sort of floating in the space of an empty typewriter, like a tiny monument to the Pica letters it would once have typed, but then you turned it on and the ball came to life, and somehow knew just what it was doing. (I liked also that you could read the film backwards and see what people had typed, though of course there were no spaces there.)
Sunday, January 11, 2009
I remember Freddie Cooper challenging our touch football team, when we claimed that it was fourth down for his team, to name the plays. I was very impressed by his knowledge that this was a workable procedure. In particular he knew not only that I could do this, but also that I would see that I should be able to do this, that anyone would be able to list the last three plays, and that we'd all me able to evaluate the list, that memory wasn't just private, that the details of what has just happened was something we could all reconstruct, that the past was shared, part of everyone's present experience as past and not just ad result (down number).
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