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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
Friday, December 31, 2010
I remember the sudden cruelty of friends and just as sudden reconciliations.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
I remember giving Nina a box of fat crayons for our second birthday. I remember wanting to keep them for myself. I remember a conversation on my father's lap in which we reviewed our agreement that when I turned two, I would give up the bottle. I remember the feeling: something inevitable, final, unavoidable.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
I remember whole conversations with my friend Avri made of lines quoted from Beatles songs. We could say anything with their words.
I remember that Mayor Lindsay's failure to dig Queens out of a snow storm for a week was a mortal blow to his political career. I remember the V was for Vilet.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
I remember that my father would stick his tongue a little bit out of the side of his mouth as he concentrated on putting various "assembly-required" toys together. That expression of concentration-demanding hard work is one you can find in Peanuts characters passim. It seemed to me natural and obvious, but I notice that I never do it, and I don't think anyone else does anymore.
Monday, December 20, 2010
I remember books I read in fourth grade because books were so precious in Israel: Little Women and Little Men and The Swiss Family Robinson and Dr. Doolittle (and from my Lipincott reader which I had brought from school and which struck me as utterly insufficient, The Walrus and the Carpenter and Riki Tiki Tavi) and The Little Princess and National Velvet and Black Beauty and The Secret Garden and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or maybe I don't remember them: I'm sure I had access to Miri's library, and I don't remember what I borrowed from her, only what my extended family sent me. I remember writing in the little red Record book my parents gave me as a diary that year. I remember drawing a map, in color, of our first apartment, the little place on Rechov Haportzim, in Katamon. I don't remember learning how, but I did learn to crochet in school that year, and I remember that it was hard for me. With great difficulty, I made an ugly piece of uneven pink crochet-work, but it was sufficient to get a passing grade on the assignment. And later I improved. I also made a beautiful hand puppet boy, with yellow yarn hair and embroidered features, whom I named Dan. I remember stitching his yarn curls into his fabric head, one by one. I loved making him.
Monday, December 06, 2010
I remember how little pleasure nursery rhymes afforded me once I could read.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
I remember seeing Yellow Submarine in the theater. I remember Steve's Ice Cream. I remember going to Harvard Square on summer nights and the street magicians singing If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake. I remember playing in a park outside a Catholic high school and my mom's distress that the girls all smoked while the boys played ball. I remember a sunny field at MIT. I remember a park a car-ride away that had a herd of letter-animals in orange plastic. I remember ball games late on Saturday afternoons. I remember the bitter cold, sitting in the yellow VW, and the realization that it just wasn't going to start.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
I remember the morning that Shandy could not stand up. My father tenderly picked him up and took him to the vet to be put to sleep.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
I remember brushing my teeth with Nina at Chris's house. We could not have been more than 4 or 5. I don't know when he moved to Lexington, but it was before we were in first grade, and this was at the apartment before that--in Watertown maybe? I remember debating the merits of a variety of toothbrush strokes: side-to-side and up-and-down seemed to make sense, but we had heard that they just moved the bits around. Circles were supposed to be better, but why?
Monday, November 29, 2010
I remember the chocolate-covered cookies at Nilgiri's. They were sold individually, wrapped in red or green foil. It seemed decadent to have both chocolate and biscuit in the same item... decadent more in a gluttonous way than an indulgent one. I remember that some girls who had family members in the Middle East would sometimes bring Kit-Kats and Mars Bars to school, which would have partly melted and become a gooey mess with the heat by mid-day.
Friday, November 26, 2010
I remember an anti-littering short we were shown in school. A guy on the street couldn't believe all the cavalier littering going on around him. He kept picking up other people's trash and putting it in the trash basket just a few feet away. There were no cops around, so he was the representative of the good citizen. Then he picked up one more piece of trash and tossed it, and suddenly noticed money in the trash basket. He tossed some litter away from the basket on to the street to get the money out, and with a smile of virtue rewarded, which made us smile too, he fanned the bill out into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 dollars! And suddenly two cops appeared behind him and wrote him out a $25.00 ticket for littering. Unfair!
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
I remember playing with Eden in the woods behind our house in Sharon. We were allowed to go to the first stone wall, not beyond without a grownup. The stone wall was really only the foundation: a line of boulders, one after another, but nothing between them or on top. The reminder of a wall. If playing boat, we would jump from stone to stone, wary of the sharks between. The stones also served anyone determined to play house: several had flat surfaces (beds), and three tall ones in a row served for table & chairs. At the edge of the path, at the end of the wall, there was a huge old tree with huge old vines hanging from it, and we used to swing on these. I always worried we would pull them down on top of ourselves, but that did not stop us (either of us) swinging.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I remember when my parents first showed me a rowboat, on Lake Carmel, near Stormville. I was surprised that a boat without a motor could float. They explained that what kept it up was the fact that it was scooped out, that it had air in it. (My mother told me that wood floated anyhow, but I think that was on a different occasion.) This seemed very mysterious to me. How did the lake know that above the floor of the boat there was air, that it wasn't a solid?
This was another of the mysteries of Stormville and of the lake somehow kept from seeping away by springs. The lake itself had that eerie authority of entities that are alive and that know how to be in the world and to interact with it, and how to use interesting items like the springs to be found in my toys.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
I remember visiting my Florida grandparents during winter break of my freshman year. I had written to them with my dates and announced that I wanted to come down to see them, and that they should send me airfare. So they did. I flew by myself to the happy little airport on Key West, and they drove me home to the house on Little Torch Key. After New York, especially in winter, the Keys are blindingly colorful, so bright it took me a few days to get used to the intensity. Everything reflects: azure sea and creamy coral rock make a backdrop of glowing contrast for neon hibiscus flowers. Against that palette, my grandfather's turquoise slacks made sense.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
I remember Angela. I learned the phrase, "Tuck in," at her huge round laden dining room table in Dursley. Her kitchen had a wall of copper pots—or I've produced them, for she was the sort of cook who would have a wall of copper pots. Her nails were always perfectly manicured, red. She had auburn hair, a wide mouth, good teeth, and smile wrinkles around her eyes. She was tall and slim and impressive and self-assured. She loved her dogs, big Airedales with names like Poppy. She was the kind of woman who could make smoking seem elegant, a long-fingered activity. In part thanks to her smoking, she had a sexy, deepish voice, and in no way related to the smoking, she had a refined accent and a languorous way of speaking: she would never rush, but when she reached a pronouncement, it sounded remarkably decisive. She volunteered in the open prison system. I first met her at a marathon card-playing session during my first visit to Steve's home in January of 1997; somehow the feeling I got was that that was Steve's family—Audrey & Arnold, Tracey & her husband, and Ian & his first wife Maggie, and Tony & Angela.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
I remember that Michael C. pronounced "new" without the enya or y after the initial consonant in my pronunciation. And Mr. Stern pronounced "Beautiful" "bee-ootifel" (so the first syllable was different from the first syllable of "beauty"). None of the other Sterns said it like that, so his way sounded to me like a wonderful affectation, a kind of demonstration that the beautiful thing he was praising was so good that it could survive his corny pronunciation, even flourish. As though its beauty had made him a goofy kid again, and made it okay for us kids to see that beauty was part of the array of the pure, transcendent, childish fun he was so good at encouraging and joining.
Monday, October 18, 2010
I remember one lovely pleasure of running cross-country: the way school opened out to space and solitude. We'd start running and as a mid-level runner I'd be more or less alone after a couple of miles, a few hundred yards behind the leaders, a few hundred yards ahead of the stragglers, running up and down hills and through the woods. So it was as though the more or less broad social splotch of school was suddenly pulled into a very long corridor of space, sunny and crisply cold and free. I knew I'd end up back where we'd started, at school or the buses, but in the meantime there was just a lot of ground I didn't know but that was where I should be, space that I was the only person passing through, landscapes that had nothing to do with school or anything interior or any concerted effort or task or assignment. Yes, we were supposed to run, but what cross-country is about is running through spaces not designed for cross-country, unlike soccer fields or basketball courts. I was on a school team, but not at school, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, but not at home, I was with my friends but not with them since they were elsewhere, ahead or behind. Where I was, nothing was making any demand of me; nothing was interested in me. I think this may have been the first experience, and maybe the last, where I could just look around.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
I remember power-cuts. (Should I say blackouts? The word doesn't convey the same thing to me. A power-cut is a temporary, normal interruption of electricity; there is something sinister and unexpected about a blackout.) They were usually on weeknights around dinner time and it was usually dark and raining. Depending on how hungry we were, we'd postpone dinner, or eat it by candlelight. Food is strange in that light -- familiar dishes suddenly look foreign and something about their taste is subdued. We weren't allowed to read under candles, so we had to set aside homework and sit together and do nothing and talk. I remember that if I had a test the next day, I would try to quiz myself in my head -- not very effective. At some point, we got a battery-powered lamp, but it wasn't really much better than candles, just a harsher light. I think I was allowed to study under it on occasion, if it was particularly important. I remember the annoyance of mosquitoes and sometimes, heat, and I'd often think how strange it was that comfort relied so heavily and almost solely on fans and electric mosquito mats.
I remember that the power would come back on with a sudden burst of light and the less sudden whirring of the ceiling fans. The sound of them turning on would start with the light, increasing within a few seconds, but only a few more seconds later would the coolness hit. I remember that my brother and I would race each other to blowing out the candles.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
I remember that one evening, my father brought a pack of cigarettes home and lit one. It scared me, not because I knew or cared about what was wrong with smoking, but because it was in my mind a forbidden action. A parent doing something that they had (abstractly) instilled in me was wrong was contradictory and confusing, and I guess also signified their fallibility, and the idea that I'd sometimes have to tell them what to do rather than the other way around. I was also disturbed that my father was amused at my yelling at him to stop -- wasn't it serious enough, then?
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
I remember George Blanda, one of those players who played from the paleohistory of the world as it was well before my life began all the way into my adulthood. He played in color, and on TV. But there were dozens of famous, grainy pictures of him in black and white, some just blown up frames form super-eight movies.
Monday, September 27, 2010
I remember writing an essay about gender and abandonment in The Grapes of Wrath. It was eleventh grade, while I was living in Israel. The paper was not assigned. The novel was not assigned. I missed my friends, my life in America, myself, so much that year that I read their literature curriculum (except Hamlet--which I was supposed to be reading in Hebrew in school) and wrote the paper because I wanted to. Our friend Alan Rosen, who taught (teaches) English at Bar Ilan, read the essay, and spent a long time discussing it with me. After that, he invited me to attend one of his American Lit classes; I remember loving his discussion of Billy Budd.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
I remember a few sukkahs from my youth: the one on the top of a low part of the building where Bnai Jeshrun is housed, on 89th st. It was a sort of roof-top area which was usually closed, though I guess it was intended either for a garden or for kids to play handball. (I still think of that as a kind of intent, because I think of the city as an intended but natural place, that is intended for whatever uses it lent itself to.) I was impressed by the size and beauty of the Bnai Jeshrun one, though I don't think I ever ate in it or saw anyone do so. But sukkahs were few and far between in New York.
And I remember one that the Sterns family put up at their house. It had an esrog hanging, with lots of clove, and it smelled really wonderful. We did eat there, at least once. Geoffrey told me the esrog was the fruit that Eve and Adam ate, and it made me happy to have that grandly esoteric knowledge.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
I remember posting an early entry here about jill johnston, nine years ago. RIP.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
I remember for the first time in years that my black (or was it yellow?) goalie jersey had elbow pads sewn in -- part of what made it cool. I remember more generally that things sewn into linings were very neat, as though two dimensions had come apart and left a place between them for secreting things not quite belonging to this world where everything was either inside or outside.
I remember purple loosestrife everywhere, filling the marshland and waterways on either side of the commuter rail tracks from Sharon to Boston. I remember commuting with my mother in the summer to a job at Coolidge House. I remember going to Pier 1 to check out the beautiful fabrics on the dresses there (the cuts were always appealing looking but plain old ugly on) during my lunch break, and sometimes getting frozen yogurt with my mom on the way home.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
I remember that it would sometimes feel strange -- especially when code-switching -- to not be able to use honorifics in English.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
I remember in seventh grade English the high-spirited Peter Rogers talking to our teacher about the Neapolitan flick of the fingers outwards from under the chin. Our teacher was mock-scandalized at Peter; we were puzzled and interested, so Mr. Donahue (or was it Mr. Baruch?) explained that the gesture ("never do it in Naples if you value your life!") meant "Nuts to you!" I'd never heard that phrase before either. But it really didn't seem so bad. And it was interesting to learn two new insults simultaneously, each somehow explaining the other.
Monday, September 06, 2010
I remember the fact that the Mets performed a triple play, and also I remember putting together how the unassisted triple play Hugh told me of (a different ohadn't an unspecified team) had to have occurred.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Your Prell post reminded me, so I remember "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful"--the Pantene commercial from when I was in 6th grade. I had very long hair then, and the girl who sat behind me would tease me, in a faux British accent, that my hair belonged in that commercial, or that I thought it did. She wanted me to make sure it didn't drape down behind me and get on her desk. I didn't think I was beautiful at all, and I didn't want to offend, but I found it hard to be sure my hair stayed under control.
Friday, August 20, 2010
I remember "All that lather from just this much", the Prell shampoo ad. "It's concentrated!"
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
I remember that once I picked up the phone the instant it rang and there was no connection. I told my father, and he said you should never pick up the phone on the first ring. This didn't quite make sense (though for him it was a completely internalized and therefore obvious rule) but after that I never did -- not until the cell phone came in. At the time the ruled seemed to be about making sure the connection was established -- that the phone company had confirmed that the call was going through. This seemed confirmed by the fact that sometimes people would say that they hadn't heard any ringing when I picked up even after one full ring. (Now I think that probably if you picked up too early the other person wouldn't hear any ringing at all and would hang up.)
Sunday, August 08, 2010
I remember thinking what a great word "room" is, meaning both an object, an architectural element of the apartment, and what it contained, a little bit of freedom and space and unconfinement rather than confinement. Somehow this had to do with the characteristic ways my grandparents used it as opposed to the way my parents did. For my grandparents it tended to mean space, for my parents circumscription: "Go to your room; make room." Later, my friend Andy K. had a room at our school, and he loved inviting us to what he called "my room." Then it really felt like freedom too.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
I remember the first time I rode pillion on a motorbike. I was reading with two other kids from Oliver Twist for All India Radio, and a girl in her twenties (I think) was helping us rehearse. She picked me up to take me to where we were meeting. I was surprised that my parents didn't mind. I remember how unstable it felt at turns, and clutching desperately to the back of the seat while trying to appear as nonchalant as possible.
Monday, July 19, 2010
I remember my family, especially my downtown grandmother, telling me to throw things into the wastepaper basket. At first that was one word to me, and then a little later two, but I remember vividly when I realized that "wastepaper" was a compound of "waste" and "paper": how elegant that was, and how good her English suddenly seemed to me.
Monday, July 12, 2010
I remember U2's Joshua Tree album. I remember listening to With or Without You on the school bus, which was the only place I heard pop music; at home it was classical, my parents' collection of 60s records, or nothing. Even asking for a radio (not a walkman, mind you, a radio) was a huge deal for me—risky, questionable. My father didn't like modern music, found it simpleminded, repetitive, boring. It was hard to like something he knew so much about and found so thoroughly dismissable. But I loved Where the Streets have No Name, and I remember listening to it with my oldest friend Nina, in her grandmother's guest room, when we took that solo trip to California, the summer before we turned 13. No pop music in family space, but go ahead and fly across country alone with your friend. What strange mix will my children take for granted?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
I remember going into the amazing courtyard of the Belnord once, in a car I think. As I recall, the mother of a friend who lived there had a bunch of stuff to bring home, so we drove in together, and it was beautiful, like another world, an English house drive in the middle of a building in New York. The Belnord was and is a pre-war building with a beautiful facade, and for me that made it pretty typical. But inside it was something else again -- like going into a movie. I didn't live there, and never would, but it was part of New York, and so I did live there, in the city with buildings like this wherever you turned, breathtaking but permanent and no big deal.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
I remember that (except on leap years) today's date will occur one day in the week later next year (because 365 is 1 (mod 7)). I remember how useful this was for figuring out when old birthdays were. I was born on a Wednesday, so I was 1 on a Thursday, 2 on a Friday, 3 on a Saturday and (leap year!) 4 on a Monday. I also remember listening to the Pirates of Penzance a lot, or maybe it was a compendium of Gilbert and Sullivan songs, and the "most ingenious paradox" that made the February 29th baby into someone who had only had five birthdays when he was twenty-one years old.
Friday, June 25, 2010
I remember my father explaining that the odd looking extension on the gun of a villain in a James Bond movie -- I think the blond SMERSH agent in From Russia With Love -- was a silencer, confirmed by the fact that it made almost no bang when fired. I thought that was a really great, and debonair, accessory.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
I only vaguely remember the time when my father's father could talk and move without difficulty.
I remember that in his shaky, silent way, he liked it when we took his blessings and touched his feet.
It saddens me that there is so little in the way of details that I remember about him.
Monday, June 14, 2010
I remember seeing a photo of the black-clad Soviet goalkeeper making a perfectly horizontal diving save, his elegantly gloved hands beautifully poised. That photo made me a goalie, which was some of the most fun and glory and satisfaction I've ever had.
Friday, June 11, 2010
I remember that you couldn't record over pre-recorded cassettes because there was a tab that when punched out disabled the player from recording. You could punch out that tab on your own cassettes too, though if you wanted to leave one side recordable it was a little tricky figuring out which tab was which. To rerecord you put tape over the tabs.
I remember thinking that it seemed interesting and wrong that the pre-recorded music cassettes I bought had the tabs already punched out, so that in an odd way they were defective. It seemed better to add something to disable recording, not to remove something. Just my aesthetic opinions about design at thirteen.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
I remember my mother rewarding or offering rewards to us if we were "especially good." I loved that word and still do: it's a word that she owned, for me. When we used the phrase, bargaining with her, we felt close to her (which was the point, the approach we were making, the earnest we were offering in the negotiation). "Can we go out for pizza if we're especially good?" I didn't recognize, of course, the kind implication that we were pretty good anyhow. It meant to me (and maybe was supposed to) that just being good, which would already be an effort, wasn't good enough. I think now it was both. At any rate, the word almost always makes her vivid to me.
The fact that English was basically a third language for both my parents, that they talked in another language with their parents who often talked still other languages with their friends, was a dim background to my sense of her highly literate adult vocabulary. It was as though adulthood were her native language, or her destined language rather. The babble of little-kid English and my grandparents' heavily accented English, German, Yugoslav: it was all where I lived (English primarily but not exclusively). I remember I invented a gibberish I called "Aboshab," probably like the Saturday Hebrew I knew fewer than a dozen words of. But then there was the adult language of "especially." (I'm pretty sure it was a word I also heard her using on the phone when talking with her clients about legal matters, so it was flattering to have it introduced into my own ambit.)
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
I remember being very surprised and impressed that my father could navigate his way through unfamiliar (to me) cities like Chennai without needing directions.
I remember that when people called from the US, we would get in a flurry to finish the conversation quickly so they didn't run up a huge bill -- although, at least by the time I was growing up, they didn't seem a bit concerned about the ticking minutes.
I remember foreign mail being sent and received on onionskin paper. It was hard to find onionskin (and it was perhaps also expensive -- but wouldn't that defy the point?). My mother kept a pad of it in her closet, safe and separate from other stationery.
I remember the inland letter card -- flat-rate paper that folded into an envelope. I liked its efficient design -- how it avoided wasting paper on an envelope, how neatly the tabs closed to seal it, and the preprinted stamp and fields for the address. The only people I knew who used them were my great-grandmother and servants. I remember my mother writing a dictated letter for our servant, and sealing the tabs with rice to avoid the messiness of glue.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
I remember that my father used to go to Oak Park, IL to do business with a guy named John Burg, which I somehow always heard as John Birk, which is how I heard the name of the John Birch Society, whose evil my mother had told me about. I sort of knew that he wasn't seeing evil John Birk, but I wasn't absolutely certain (why hadn't the guy changed his name if he wasn't evil?) and it never occurred to me to ask my father. Maybe I got a little thrill out of thinking he was negotiating with and even tamping down evil.
Saturday, May 08, 2010
I remember thinking that Annelida was too pretty a name for worms, and being a bit surprised when others in the class agreed.
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
I remember the time we drove through a swarm of locusts. It was summer in Maine. We were all in the car. My father, driving, my mother, my brother. We were driving back from somewhere fun. I think it was probably 1987 or 1988. It was getting dark or already was dark but not dark dark. The hits on the windshield started one at a time, sort of like big fat rain drops, those first fat drops before the downpour. We were hitting either the stragglers or the vanguard. Then we hit a dense cluster of them and the windshield went blind within a minute. My father had to pull over. It was gross. It was not easy to clean that windshield.
I remember confusing Wordsworth and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, partly because my uptown grandmother's telephone exchange was WAdsworth-7. I remember, remembering that, how huge the printing of the two letters at the beginning of the exchange was on the center of the telephone dial, and how small the rest of the letters before you got to the five numbers.
I remember my father telling me it was 1,100 miles to fly from New York to Chicago. I had a map of the United States on my wall, scaled at 1 inch to a hundred miles. I could measure out about eleven thumb-lengths, which was a nice and consistently repeatable reassurance that I could use the rule of my thumb to measure things, e.g. in my geometry and science and geography classes. I think I last took Geography in fifth grade, so maybe I thought both joints of my thumb came to an inch then? Or that I was big now, in my last year at elementary school, and the top joint was already the inch it was supposed to be? But it turns out that it's substantially less than 1,100 miles from New York to Chicago, so I thought my thumb was longer than it was.
Still my father's statistics were generally right, though in need of tweaking. I remember him telling me that the earth was rotating at about a thousand miles an hour. But this is true at the equator, not in New York. I remember the facts that my paternal grandparents told me that were true: that it takes nine minutes for light to reach us from the sun (some of my school mates said it was seven minutes); that the circumference of the earth was 25,000 miles; that its diameter was 8,000 miles; that I-80 went from New York all the way to San Francisco, and that that the highway was 3,000 miles long. I realize now that the interstates must have been an amazing thing for them.
I remember also being amazed when I first learned that the sum of angles in any triangle came to 180 degrees. I think I read this in a novel, way before we did geometry. I told my uptown (paternal) grandfather this with great excitement. He was surprised that I was excited, since he knew this fact so deeply that it was as self-evident to him as that water was transparent. It seemed amazing to me that someone could just know this about triangles, as though it wasn't something that he'd once learned as I was learning it.
Monday, May 03, 2010
I remember how glamorous I thought it was when my mother went to Chicago for the day to go to a meeting.
I remember Hoyt Wilhelm, the knuckleballer pitching into old age. Thinking of his cracked, smiling face now is like imagining Will Rogers as an old soldier leading young'uns through a campaign. I wonder if Hoyt Wilhelm is still alive.
I remember when I learned that the Yankees were called the Bronx Bombers. It was in a Daily News back-page headline that a kid at school had: "Bombers pound Tigers" or something. Since I was a complete Mets fan (the Yankees were terrible then, and the Mets were making history), I had no comprehension of this headline till I read the article. They weren't called the Bronx Bombers in the article, but there was something so WWII-ish about it, which hearkened back to the era of Ruth, that it felt as though the Yankees were some prehistoric creature, some King Kong returning to the headlines from the past. And so when a few days later I saw a reference to the Bronx Bombers, I knew what it meant, and began to think about how wonderful the Yankees were, a sentiment confirmed by The Old Man and the Sea. They were a little inaccessible, being a Bronx and not a Manhattan team. But they were generous in the umbrella they offered their fans, in Manhattan too. Even when they were wounded and down. They never gave up, the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of New York.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
I remember lying in bed frozen and terrified about a soon-due science research project. Five typed pages about seashore ecosystems. At least five different sources. Due within days, and I hadn't even gone to the library yet. I remember the tight cold feeling all in my chest and promising myself I would do the work tomorrow, so I could sleep now. And I did.
Friday, April 16, 2010
I remember I thought the frozen dessert we'd get at the Lake Carmel Carvell (words I merged) was called custer, so that I was both amused and perturbed when I heard about Little Big Horn. I think my associative energies went to making it reasonable that the person was named after the dessert, just as Carmel (which I then knew was Biblical) was somehow named after Carvell, at least in upstate New York, because there was a Carvell there.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
I remember the odd pleasure of typing onto the roller without any paper in the typewriter -- you could barely see the letters inked onto the plastic or nylon cylinder. My parents and grandparents were shocked when they saw me doing it and told me it was bad for the typewriter; I believed them, though I didn't see why, and after that I only did it by accident. (But why did I obey them? Maybe because being careful about the rules was a way for me to think of myself as a typewriter sophisticate.) But even though I no one ever typed on it intentionally, I remember the roller itself covered with these phantom letters, like a record of the typewriter's own writing or reading, its musings to itself.
Monday, March 22, 2010
I remember a mystery story where a fleur-de-lis (which was a new word for me) was the main clue. It was set in Wyoming (which was a place I had not heard of). I think it was about two identical fleur-de-lis pendants, one of which was missing and later established a link between two families.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
I remember that one of the pleasures of metal rackets - my Wilson T-1600 - was that you could hurl them at the ground in disgust if you blew a shot. Sometimes, on composition courts, if you threw them just right, they'd bounce right back to you like a spring. Sometimes, though, they'd bend and you'd have to sight down the grip and handle to try to straighten them out, or live with the warp. I remember the pleasure of the look of veteran rackets, both wood and metal: the scrapes on the rim showing that you'd scooped up and returned your share of hard, low balls. Throwing the racket helped get you that look too, which also recorded the self-disgust of the good player who routinely expected to make the spectacular shots and saves that the thrown racket showed he sometimes missed, when he wasn't quite playing as well as he should have been.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
I remember posting on Peter Graves early on in this blog, here and here. I remember that George Peppard on the A-Team was capitalizing on Graves's platinum gray charisma
Thursday, February 25, 2010
I remember the little booklets of lyrics that sometimes came with tapes, and the slightly bigger ones sold separately in music stores. I remember how strange it was to read the lyrics disjoint from the music -- terribly bad poems, but with some kind of authority to them.
I remember the first store in Koramangala that carried English music. It also doubled up as an internet cafe, and charged for e-mail by the page.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
I remember that life changed when you could still be in trouble the next morning. I remember mornings when I was still in trouble and how school was a relief, a sort of shelter in time where if I did what I was supposed to be doing the authorities would not be aggrieved with me. This gave me both sustenance and hope at the end of the day - sustenance because of the feeling that I'd done what I was supposed to do even when my parents were so deeply skeptical of my character, and hope that the strongly perceived sense of time spent dutifully's being a lot of time indeed meant that my parents would also have felt that last night's trouble was a world away.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
I remember that Jack Ruby was a nightclub owner. I read this in Life Magazine, I believe, the week after he shot Oswald. I was surprised: it seemed someone as tony as a nightclub owner, with his glamorous life and his obvious wealth, wouldn't be doing anything as tawdry as shooting people in police custody. I figured he was really mad. But even so.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
I remember that my father came home from a business trip with a gift memento: a Superbowl III ticket encased in lucite to make a paperweight. He gave it to me. I really liked it. I was interested in the fact that this was a ticket that once had had immense value and now was just a paperweight. I'd look through the thick glass at this mysterious, depleted artifact a lot.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
I remember misremembering a downhill stretch of road that I used to bike down. The block that I had to pass before getting there was narrow and badly paved, the sand and gravel accentuating the upcoming pleasure of the long pedal-free ride down. A couple of years later, when I wasn't allowed to bike anymore, I remembered the stretch as ending at a wide, quiet road bordering a pond or a small lake. But of course, this wasn't true -- it ended at a crowded street with no water in sight, and part of the fun was accelerating enough that braking and turning to avoid traffic was a mildly non-trivial challenge.
Still later, I realized there was a lake (a large one) beyond the street, but after a kilometer or so of undeveloped land. There was certainly no way to see it, or get to it easily, from that intersection.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
I remember my mother telling me about Animal Crackers. I think we'd read about them in a story, and then she told me they were real! Somewhere in the world the thing this fiction mentioned really existed. More than the Museum in Danny and the Dinosaur since that museum wasn't the real Museum of Natural History. And then: she said I could have some. And that turned out not to mean... some day. It meant the very next day: she brought a box home. Of course they weren't as amazing as the Animal Crackers in the story, which were really beautifully illustrated, and numerous, and seemed three-dimensional, because they were in a picture, and maybe even they came to life (though I don't think so: I think it was only that I assumed they were 3D). But they were still pretty amazing, and I was happy.
Monday, January 25, 2010
I remember that an odd furry clump showed up one morning with my parents change and keys. They told me it was a rabbit's foot, which seemed gross but unlikely, and that it brought good luck. I was given one myself a couple of years later. They seemed too colorful and clean to actually be rabbits' feet, but like so much else they did signify some special adult skill in understanding and negotiating reality: just the way both my parents knew all about it the night someone gave them one was part of their ease in the adult world.
Monday, January 18, 2010
I remember that when Boeing introduced the 747 there were TV commercials showing glamorous people with drinks standing around a grand piano while behind them a spiral staircase led to an upper deck where they could look out of the window, like in a nineteen thirties movie nightclub. A year or two later we got to fly in one! It was just a lot of seats with nothing interesting about the plane except its size. (Once I got to sit in the upper deck, which was like sitting in the upper deck of an observation car but with normal porthole windows and nothing else interesting about it.)
Thursday, January 07, 2010
I remember my cousin Cico, my mother's blood brother, who was a survivor and a lusty smoker and bon vivant, and a great athlete, could outrun me very easily (the only adult in my family who could). I think I only met him on one trip: I remember him diving into the Adriatic and also running the mile I always ran with me. He told me that there were 1582 meters to the mile, a slightly inaccurate stastic that I nevertheless keep using as my instinctive reference. I was about nine or ten when I met him (was I really running then? Maybe I met him again at twelve--no older thatn that. He died at about forty a year or two later of a heart attack. He had That adult European soccer-ball handling skill and exuberance too, I remember.
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