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 our English teacher brought in Pinter's Dumb Waiter to class one day, in seventh grade, I think.  That would have been Mr. Richards, whose strangeness was partially encapsulated in our slightly uncanny knowledge that he had an identical twin.  (There were fraternal twins in our class, but I never put their present and different twinship together  with Mr. Richards' twinship with another, more mysterious, Mr. Richards, somewhere out there whom we never met.)  I didn't know what a dumbwaiter was, though I believe he explained it.  As a title, it didn't quite feel that you had to know what it meant, since it was a title, and meant the play it named. Mr. Richards had a couple of the students read a scene out loud, which they did with surprised and delighted gusto since it was all about puking.  That's when I learned the word puke.

posted by William 10:59 AM
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I remember posting this over thirteen years ago:

I remember that my father had an autographed picture of Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. I knew he who was: he had thrown the pitch that Bobby Thompson hit into the three-run homer that gave the Giants the 1951 pennant: "the shot heard round the world." My father got the autograph in 1952. I was amazed that somehow Ralph Branca was able to continue to function in the world, giving autographs and such. It was a lesson to me in the fact that people do recover from disaster. But I had contempt for him for recovering. Somehow, I thought this historical moment had to be the end -- at least for the loser. Baseball and fiction didn't seem much different for me at the time: winners could go on living in the world of our knowledge, but losers got superseded. And yet Ralph Branca endured. (I think he endured until the nineties, in fact, though I'm not sure.)

In fact he outlived my father (I guess he was only a few years older), and died this week, at 90.

posted by William 10:01 AM
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I remember the wonderful Russian physics and math books that I found one summer (after 7th grade?) in the Hyderabad house. There was one I particularly treasured, written in a "how things work" style in two volumes -- all the physics I would learn at school shortly after, but so much deeper and motivated. Then there was a book on Euclidean geometry (I think that was the first time I learned the word "Euclidean"), with delightful observations at a level of detail and comprehensiveness I didn't think was possible in the adult world. And another one with household experiments on mechanics and optics -- I remember entertaining myself many days that summer trying them out. It was always slightly surprising that they worked. I also found some British science books, but they were much drier than the Russian ones: tedious lists of proofs and exercises.

In contrast, I was puzzled by all of the Russian fiction and poetry I came across, which I think was restricted to some Dostoevsky and a collection of Pushkin. They were incomprehensible, and not in the same way that English literature that I didn't understand was. In the latter case, at least I glimpsed that something might be considered good even if I didn't know why.

I remember that I had some Russian picture books earlier when I first started reading (they were abundant in book sales at the time). Lots of Tsars and characters named Ivan. There was one story where the mother tells her child that if she was good, she'd buy her a kerchief. I assumed it referred to handkerchiefs, and thought it was a sad reward -- handkerchiefs were the most utilitarian objects, and I guessed they were cheap because you could buy them from vendors on the street in packs of 3. It made me wonder if Russia was terribly poor.

posted by sravana 10:14 PM
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I remember my father hated slow motion replays in baseball broadcasts. The call was the call. On the other hand, he thought Bob Feller was robbed on the pickoff play, based on the photos. He was right.

posted by William 3:57 PM
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I remember thinking that the word shin referred to the calf.  I think I remember reading about them in The Games, which was the book that got me into running.  I was disappointed a year or two later when I found out that the beautiful, elegant shape of the back of the lower leg was called by such an ugly word.  Calf!  And the shin was just some uninteresting cylindrical flatness connecting inelegant knee with inelegant ankle.

I remember, too, my surprise (much younger!) at learning that the little hand pointed out the hour and the big hand the minute.  That just seemed wrong, since an hour was so much longer than a minute.

posted by William 11:54 AM
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I remember the drawer in the pantry for extension cords.  They lay there like coiled, sleeping snakes, able to do wonders but somnolent now.  Unlike other tools in the nearby drawers -- the light bulbs or nails or screws, my father called upon them for temporary tasks -- plugging in a radio or a movie projector or a light.  Afterwards he'd return them to the drawer.  So the extension cords seemed alive in a way that the other things didn't.  They were allies my father could call on when he wanted to do something specific.  They contributed to his intentions, which meant in some way that they had to understand and share them.  There was no malevolence in them, because they were indifferent to me. But their indifference wasn't inert: it wasn't that they were just wire and insulation and metal.  It was that they were incurious about me, since I wasn't the one about to use them for anything.

posted by William 2:19 PM
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I remember that Babe Ruth's home run total went up when they reinterpreted the rules.  It used to be that a bases-loaded home run in a tie game in the bottom of the 9th counted as a single, since you only needed a single to advance a runner home.  As soon as the runners touched the next bases the game was over.  But then (I think after he retired) they decided that a home run was a home run, and the Babe had hit enough walk-offs that he went from below to above 700.  At least that's what my father told me when I was a kid.

posted by William 9:33 AM
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I remember that I first learned that grapes were trod into grape juice to make wine from an I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy gets herself into a situation where she's wearing a kerchief and treading grapes.

posted by William 5:38 PM
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I remember how in huge snow storms the snow would fall through the grates into the subway.  I could look over the edge of the platform and see it between the ties of the tracks.  Sometimes, more rarely, it even got onto the platform itself.  There was something comforting about that.  It was as though I was still outside, traveling through the city.  But also immensely protected by having gone underground.  The slush and snow petered out as one went down the steps, sometimes collecting into scuzzy puddles at the bottom, which people tracked a little farther to the token booth and turnstiles, but which were gone once I was on the platform proper.  The other snow, the snow I could see from the platform, was like a vision of snow, like looking at the snow through a window, but the window was just space -- city space which when I looked through the real glass windows of my room was there all around me and was where I was despite the window.  Here in the subway there was no window but I was still in the space the same way, outside but just watching the snow, waiting for the thunder of the train, which would go through the endless black tunnels that could bring one anywhere in that space, any station out of which I'd exit into snow.

posted by William 1:17 PM
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I remember that Viva was a client of my father's, briefly.  She gave him a copy of Superstar, which I paged through, vainly looking for salacious scenes.  There was a lot less sex in her memoir than I hoped.  (Same thing with Henry Miller's so-called pornography.)  I remember that I answered the phone one day when she called for my father.  That was the one time I talked to one of Warhol's superstars!

posted by William 12:31 AM
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