I remember one day in the park suddenly knowing that if I threw a rock down hard enough it would break. This seemed an amazing thing to me -- amazing to know in advance and then to actually do it.  It was as though from one second to the next I was released from a paradigm and saw something that was clear and open but that I couldn't see before. Here was a rock that had existed from the beginning of the world (as I thought) and now simply by the use of my own muscles I could throw it hard enough to break.

This thought must have been related to my discovery, maybe around the same time, that you could throw things downwards faster than they could fall.  That was really interesting.  And now I could see that though rocks didn't break when I dropped them, I could throw them with enough force that they would. 

I remember the hair dryer that someone brought us from the States, with the "Do not remove under penalty of law" tag. Detectives and cops in American movies seemed to be competent and powerful, so I imagined they might figure out if I removed the tag and show up at my door. 

I was itching to try to tear out the tag just to see what would happen. It was a bit like the temptation to put my foot on a book intentionally with no one watching -- would there be retribution for that? One could never know, so I played it safe.

I remember that I first learned the word identity as part of the phrase secret identity, which was the romantic and thrilling connection between Clark Kent (uncharismatic like me) and Superman! It was interesting to find out, considerably later, that it was a word on its own. 

I remember that the phrase this instant!, used by mother to demand that I cooperate immediately, was similarly thrilling (though without the positive connotations), denoting a kind of absolutely efficient worldly authority. I don’t remember the context though I do remember the sudden down-pointing gesture that made the this so immediate. Again, it was only later that I had a sense of the word instant as having a meaning of its own. 

I remember a full-page ad -- probably in The New Yorker -- for a watch which had its face rotated clockwise by 90 degrees.  The photo showed a debonair young professional leaning his head on his hand, in a pose of arrogant relaxation, his elbow on a conference room table.  The watch face was on the inside of his wrist -- people don't do that anymore with their smart watches, I am just realizing -- and because the face was lined up parallel with his arm, so to speak, that is because the diameter from the 12 to the 6 was parallel to his arm -- he could read the time surreptitiously (without obviously looking at his watch), so he had superior power and knowledge in the meeting.

I realized I could do the same thing with my own watch just by setting it three hours fast.  It wasn't perfect -- 12 noon came out as 3:15, more or less, except that the hour hand was slightly forward, a quarter of the way to the next hash mark (my watch had mainly hash marks with four Roman numerals).  But it worked fine and it was fun to glance at the time in school that way.

My father saw my watch one day on the counter and asked whether it had stopped.  I explained what I'd done and he expostulated with me against it.  What if other people were trying to figure out the time from my watch?  This seemed to me to be going far to seek disquietude, but he insisted.  Anyhow, it obviously didn't matter.  I could tell the time even if the watch was set in a normal fashion, and of course in class you also just looked at other people's exposed watches when you needed to know but didn't want the teacher to know you needed to know.  (Which meant, I guess, that my father was right.)

I remember the low-grade but odd and ambivalent excitement evinced by my parents when Fifth and Madison were made one-way avenues.  We were driving towards the East Side, probably to see the Herings (whose wonderful phone number I loveds: FI8-8888 -- FIvr 8's), probably in a cab, and I think they were anticipating the new navigation we'd be undertaking (the Herings lived a couple of blocks north of the 84th street exit of the transverse road).  Since we were going east on a one-way street anyhow, I didn't quite get what they were talking about -- most streets were one way, and I didn't have much of a sense of the difference between streets and avenues. Without thinking about it, I took their width or narrowness as local and variable, like that of a stream.  But it must have felt to them like a major change in their idea of the city they'd grown up in.  When my father and his father went to tell my grandmother, at her doctor's office on Fifth, that her elder son had been killed in action, Fifth was a two way avenue.

I remember seeing, in bright sunlight, my mother cup her hand one day under a kitchen counter and sweep the crumbs she'd brought together into her cupped hand.  I thought this was astonishingly elegant -- the flat counter, the poise of her hand, all her fingers curving together, extending the arc of her curved palm.

I remember that Sonny Fox (who just died of Covid) used to have the kids in the studio audience line up to tell him jokes.  (As I mentioned before, my friend Marc Bilgray got to see him live!) The one joke I remember went like this:

KID: Why did the chicken cross the road?

SONNY FOX: I don't know.  Why?

KID: To get The Daily News. (Beat.) Get it?

SONNY FOX: No...

KID: Neither do I!  I get The New York Times!