Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember that Perry White, editor of The Daily Planet on Superman, would express consternation by crying, "Great Caesar's ghost!"  I loved that somehow: as though Caesar and Perry White were similar bosses, similar authorities, making his invocation authoritative as well.

posted by William 9:07 PM
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I remember Phil Pepe (who just died).  He'd be on the back page of The Daily News, or right after the jump, two or three days a week.  I read him religiously during the season of the Amazins.  And he was all over the World Series victory issue, which I had posted all over the walls of my room.  I guess he was for me what it meant to be a fan.  He wrote for the fans in both ways: we read him, and he also said what we thought, what we hoped, what we wanted.

posted by William 4:27 PM
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I remember my father taking me to a Knicks-Bucks playoff game.  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took two foul shots near the nail-biting end of the game.  He was a terrible foul-shooter, and even though he'd scored a lot of points he missed them both (I am pretty sure), and the Knicks won!

posted by William 5:26 PM
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I remember when there were readers of this blog.  Now it's private in public.  Like one's past life.

posted by William 5:24 PM
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I remember the appearance of Jews for Jesus.  They put up signs and posters everywhere one summer.  Posted bills.  I was intrigued by one of their lamppost signs one day.  It looked like a protest.  In large letters it read:

NO MORE

JEWS

FOR

JESUS

But printed underneath that in smaller letters was:

But we're here anyway.

Jews for Jesus.

I liked the rhythm and the epistrophe (the repetition of "Jews for Jesus" at the end of both slogans).  I kept thinking of it and repeating it as I walked to work, and my preconscious continues to do so from time to time.

posted by William 10:36 AM
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I remember Rocky Marciano. I remember when he died. I remember that Rocky Graziano was someone different, and I always felt sorry for him for not being the truly great Rocky Marciano. Rocky Graziano had a gravelly voice; very recognizable in the auto commercials that he did.

I remember that one weekend my parents had sunglasses. They were unexpected, and impressive. I think we rented a Pontiac convertible that weekend. I remember them being young and somehow having more extended authority -- over all outdoors, all urban outdoors anyhow -- with their sunglasses.

I remember a friend of my father's picking us up in his convertible. The top could be retracted mechanically. I was amazed at how what looked like an ordinary car could be turned into a convertible as we sat in it.

posted by William 1:05 AM
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I remember discovering touch-me-nots -- it was one of those things you read about that probably belonged to another world that you'd never see, and yet, here they were right outside my house. I remember the tinge of disappointment whenever I prodded a plant that looked the same and the leaves stayed open.

posted by sravana 7:46 PM
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I remember my uptown grandmother bouncing me on her lap to the song  "Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter". Her delight was greater than mine, and this was one of the few times when her delight didn't delight me too. Later she did it to my sister, and I didn't particular enjoy that either, though I liked learning what the words meant.  The version she sang wasn't about how the crows would eat him ("fressen ihn die Raben"), but about how the boys would help him ("helfen ihn die knaben"), so that there was hope!  On the other hand, I think that if he fell into the mud he was going to drown.

posted by William 8:50 AM
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I remember one of the first large jigsaw puzzles I had was of Big Ben.  I remember my parents got it to for me in England, where they went the summer I was five or so.  Big Ben and London Busses: I became aware of them the first time from the presents my parents brought back from that trip.  My downtown grandmother started working on it with me, but as with all the jigsaws she thought would be a good idea, we never got very far.  (I am not sure I completed a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle till college or so.)  What mattered was the photo on the box.  Later I had jigsaws of Swiss mountain scenes, brought to me by my uptown grandmother, I think -- she loved Switzerland and loved going there.  In fact I associate both my grandmothers with jigsaw puzzles, and can't be sure which puzzles went with which grandmother.  It might be that they both thought of them as a way to keep me quiet for a while.

I remember I liked the cardboard, unlaminated back of the puzzle pieces but hated how sometimes they wouldn't be properly separated, so that I would have to pull them apart to make the puzzle fair.  But when you did that, you'd sometimes pull part of the surface picture with it, so you'd get a piece with some of the glossy figure gone, hanging as a flimsy wisp off the top of some other piece.  I realized that completing the puzzle (but I never did!) would fix that, but it was still frustrating and wrong.

I think one thing I liked about puzzles is that it was something everyone did, like Christmas, like having grandparents whose first language was English, so they were very American in a way that I never felt we quite were with my parents and grandparents being immigrants and refugees.  We had as much title to the puzzles as anyone else because their subjects were individual.  There wasn't one American subject.  Americans did jigsaws, and we did too, and the ones we did had European scenes so we had title to them, and because they were jigsaws we had title to being American as well.  And even when we did American scenes, like the Grand Canyon (again I think I first became aware of it in a jigsaw), they seemed European, the kinds of places one's grandparents would visit and be enthusiastically experienced about.  (I remember my downtown grandparents visiting Hawaii one year, and how Hawaii struck me the same way.  Later, when they started spending time in Miami, it felt that way too, until I visited.)

posted by William 5:32 AM
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I remember my first significant professional engagement in litigation.  I was defending three people in a civil action stemming from a business dispute between partners. I was a young lawyer without litigation experience facing a former assistant district attorney representing the plaintiff, and I was terrified. We were at a court conference which my husband, Stephen, attended  as the accountant for one of the defendants. When we all left the courthouse my opponent  handed Stephen a document written in longhand in the course of the conference bearing the title "Suppena." That did a good deal to relieve my anxiety.

posted by alma 1:05 PM
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I remember wondering about the addition in "Billy Boy."  I remember the back of my record, and that it had the lyrics of "O Susanna," and maybe of "Billy Boy."  Why did I love those songs so much? I associate them with my grandmother; I remember reading them with her at her kitchen table, the same one at which I liked singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again," a song my uncle loved, and which one day prompted her to tell me about his death and how he wouldn't come marching home -- killed, not missing, in action in 1944.  (Now that my father died three weeks ago, I don't know anyone in the world who remembers him, though there probably are a few people who do.  Possibly even John Simon, the exact same age and also from Serbia, who beat the shit out of him on the playground when they were twelve or thirteen, prompting my grandmother to find him and threaten him with her umbrella.  He ought to remember that.)

Anyhow the addition: "Three times six and four times seven, twenty-eight and eleven."  I thought in terms both of apposition and of a series of terms.  Which was she 18, 28, 50, 78, 39, or 89? 89 was the only one that could make logical sense, but I knew that anything over 28 was probably implausible, given that "she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother."  The last possibility was that I was doing the arithmetic wrong and that three times six and four times seven equaled twenty-eight and eleven, which had the shared 28's in its favor.  I guess it didn't occur to me that Billy Boy might have been a) obfuscating; or b) uncertain himself of the calculation.  After all, the song was canonical, and therefore had canonical authority.

Later, I remember, that Beckett got the calculation of Molloy's frequency in farting wrong.  I remember learning that you couldn't trust everything in print.  I guess Billy Boy was the start of that.

posted by William 9:24 AM
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