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 my father ordering something from the Government Printing Office.  (I believe it was a poster of some sort, and I believe it was for me, but I have only the dimmest memory of what it would have been.)  That made me notice that he got lots of mail from the Government Printing Office, and I was very impressed by him, very impressed that the Government Printing Office looked on him as a worthy correspondent and peer.

posted by William 12:06 AM
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I remember posting this fourteen years ago.   I remember finding out more since, from my father about the death of his brother, two days before his birthday, which was D-Day, when he would have turned 19.  My father got home from school.  He was twelve.  The elevator operator in his building was horsing around with the kids there.  His hand had been mangled somehow, and he and the kids would play games: maybe he'd pretend to scare them, or they'd pretend to be scared.  My grandparents and their children (but Willy was off in the Pacific) lived on the ground floor, near the lobby (in an apartment I knew as a young child) so they didn't have occasion to use the elevator: they'd walk by it and up three stairs into a hallway where the mailboxes were.  The elevator operator flagged my father down to say that they'd received a telegram.  Everyone knew what that meant, but both my father and the elevator man pretended they didn't, and he went back to scaring the screaming children.  My father went to get my grandfather who was doing something a few blocks away -- I am not sure why he wasn't at work, down at the Empire State Building.  My grandfather came home, opened the telegram, and then took my father downtown and to the East Side, to the doctor's office where my grandmother had an appointment on East 81st street I think.  He said to her, "Willy je pao," Willy has fallen.  That's where the story ends, or maybe it isn't, since my grandmother mourned ferociously the rest of her life.  In his old age, my father thought more and more of his brother, who was I think the last person he thought still loved him completely, the last person who represented his memory of a hope for the future.  Not the future he lived and died in, where he was close to his grandsons and loved the rest of us still, even if not as much as when he could boss us around, a bossiness that was his way of presenting the world to us as a gift, a universe to enjoy while the enjoying was good.  But a future that was what the US must have meant to all of the when they escaped Europe and started a new life free from the murders then devouring the rest of their friends and family.  His brother was that older, new-world teenager, the good and protective big brother, and then he died and the latest born and first dead of the family that had escaped to America.  But his photo and his memory helped my father through his own last years and months, helped him sustain a tenderness which had disappeared everywhere else.

posted by William 4:13 PM
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I remember that we heard the news about RFK's shooting on TV, but went to bed not knowing whether he would live or die.  The Times was delivered the next morning -- I looked at it immediately -- and it said that he had been critically wounded.  (I remember that he said, "No, no, please don't move me."  I liked that he said "please.")  The Daily News, which I would often look at on the way to school (since the prejudiced lady always had me buy it for her when I walked her dog), also said that he was in critical condition.  We heard in school that day that he had died -- I remember a look of concern on the face of a kid named Barry whom I have a sense of as a presence in sixth grade but have no other episodic memory of -- but there was a way in which I wasn't going to believe it till the Times confirmed it.  The next morning the Times had a banner headline about the aftermath of his death (and they must have had a story about Sirhan Sirhan).  But we never got the actual headline saying that he'd been killed.  This was a newspaper my father wouldn't be able to save.  RFK went from being critically wounded to having been dead since the previous day.  This made me think that newspapers were less authoritative then I had been thinking of them as being.  The sequence of headlines didn't tell the story.  Of course a later edition of the Times did say he'd been assassinated, but I didn't realize then that there was more than one edition.  I didn't like that either.  The world was not an orderly place, conforming to a sequence of facts that could be made into a coherent story with what would eventually be a happy ending.  Humphrey was a nobody, and our only hope.  And Nixon was elected.

posted by William 5:28 PM
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I remember my mother teaching me to play chess.  This was in Stormville, so I was no older than seven, and probably five or six.  Like everyone, I was intrigued and surprised by the way the knight moved.  I was also surprised that the Queen had so much more power than the King.  Although in our house mother and father were pretty much equal, it was a novelty not to see the King acknowledged as the lord and master on the chess board.  The Kings were so different from Kings in checkers, a game my father taught me to play.

In fact he taught us all the games we played: he knew how to turn the rules, printed on the back of the top half of a game box, into an actual game.  He'd read the rules and understand them and turn them into something fun!  This was one of the traits that I most valued in him: how a new game could be something we were playing after just a few minutes.

I recognized immediately that chess was the superior game -- I think I may have already known this in fact, which was why I wanted to learn to play chess.  And my father didn't know how to play, but my mother did.  So that the Queen's superiority in chess seemed appropriate: my mother knew how to play chess and my father didn't, and the Queen could range the board, while the King was stuck (maybe a bit like my father on the toilet in his long morning monopolization of the bathroom).

And I remember in the very first game I played with my mother, one of probably less than a dozen games total, I took her Queen with my Knight!

posted by William 2:39 PM
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