We were going on a trip (1963) to Canada. This being the days before child seats my parents
thought nothing of putting down a mattress in the back seat for me to crawl around on. The
memory is still very clear to me: I looked up towards the setting sun and saw what looked to
me like a big orange tiger in the clouds. I recall being fascinated for a number of seconds by
the sight. Talking to my mom years later she confirmed that it happened when I was 10
months old, and yes they read to me a lot so I knew what a “tiger” was. It was almost
like my consciousness clicked on at that moment but that’s probably the wrong way to put it.
Hmmm… this might be slightly off-topic, but I would hope the OP might have anticipated that the earliest memories of one Doper might spark more recent recollections in others. So many of my youthful memories seem to revolve around my dad. He had taken us to France with him in 1960. For three years, we lived in a small community of mostly American military and diplomat families just outside Paris where he worked. I guess because of the time difference it was late in the evening that we learned that President Kennedy had been shot. I remember that my brother and I were already in bed when loud knocking on our front door woke us up. I heard voices coming from the living room, some sounded distressed. Moments later, my mom came into our room to check on us and to tell us that everything was alright and to go back to sleep, some friends had just come over to visit. I was 14 years old and my brother was 12, so there was no “going back to sleep”. We were Air Force kids, having lived on or around military bases our entire lives, and we knew how families reacted to sudden, important events like general alerts and, when in foreign countries, other more urgent things. We knew that something was wrong.
Our house had polished concrete floors - as a matter of fact, the entire home was built of concrete, as were many things in that country, things which we were accustomed to seeing fashioned of wood, even the telephone poles – and I remember feeling the cold up through my feet as I walked down the hall from our bedroom. I recognized one of our neighbors in the living room, the wife of one of the servicemen my dad worked with, standing next to my mom, her hands clenched beneath her chin and looking worried. As I came fully into the room I saw her husband, looking a bit out of place dressed in civilian clothes. He, too, was standing and looking intently at my dad who had his back turned to us as he spoke to someone on the phone. Then my dad hung up. He turned and said something to everyone in the room, but I do not remember the words that he spoke… just their impact. Everyone in the room sat at once, as if on cue, like puppets with their strings cut… except my dad and me. I just stood there feeling the cold of the concrete floor. It was the first time I ever saw my dad cry.
Although there were daily television broadcasts from atop the Eiffel Tower just a few miles away, they were limited to just certain hours during the day and, of course, they were in French, so for three years we hadn’t had a TV set at home. The English-language radio was almost as bad – a very limited broadcast schedule, hardly any of what we today have come to recognize as “news” - mostly big band and bee-bop music and re-plays of dramatizations from Radio City Music Hall and Rockefeller Center back in the States. So it was that I first learned that Dad could cry and presidents could die… against the background of popping static and a distant but familiar voice speaking assuredly of “a fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi Ho Silver’…”
Earliest memory (I think): lying in a cot or on a bed, big bright TV screen above me, night-time, and I wiped Vick Vaporub from my chest (must have had a cold or something) into my eyes.
Not a good scene …
I remember being in the womb and the pain of my circumcision.
No worries about being off-topic. I’ve been considering the idea of starting a thread in the Pit about the militant SWAT dopers that so indignantly police thread “hijackings”. To me, conversations meander naturally and I’m always interested to see where they go.
My father says his earliest memory is playing under the table in the front room that had the radio on it. He can remember looking out from under the table at a roomful of tense adults all sitting or standing very still, listening to the stern staticky voice of the announcer tell them about a bombing in Pearl Harbor. He was two years old.
My first memory is of really bright sunshine, and my mum teaching me to read for the first time. My mum told me later that she started teaching me to read on a plane to Florida, but that was when I was only one and a half, so I might have made up that memory.
This happened to me as well, one of my 2 earliest memories (I don’t know which is earlier) is me sitting on my mothers lap, and a women dressed all in white was pointing a stick at me, telling me it wouldn’t hurt. The stick was attached to a wire that lead to a blue box. When I was 15 I busted up my elbow and went to the ER, the stick turned out to be a thermometer, and I finally knew that I hadn’t invented the whole thing. My mother says my only ER visits were at 9 months and 2 years, so it must have happened when I was 2.
My earliest memory is playing with a bright green ball in the hallway outside of our apartment. I was 2 years old at the time.
I have a LOT of memories from age 3-4. This was during the time we lived in Isfahan, Iran so I’m not surprised that I’ve retained so much of that unique experience. My favourite of those memories was during one of the many plane trips it took to get there. The flight attendant took me up to the flight deck, I stayed in there for most of the next 2 hours, completely captivated by the view and all of the oh so cool lights, switches and buttons!
I have the worst “earliest memory” in the world. Luckily, this isn’t a topic that comes up often, but whenever it does, I always feel incredibly silly answering. It’s sort of funny in an odd way, though, so here it goes.
What I believe to be my earliest memory is of laying on a blanket on the floor in my parents’ apartment, having my diaper changed by my mother while my older sister talks to me. As I was potty trained by eighteen months and we moved into that apartment when I was six months old, there’s a window of about a year that this could have taken place during. A potentially earlier memory is of me toddling out of my bedroom in that same apartment and walking in on my parents discussing whether or not it was appropriate to allow children to use the word “butt.”
Oddly, I seem to have become a farly well-adjusted member of society, in spite of these earliest memories.
I must have not have even been two years old when, one night I was crying in my crib. My mother went in to pick me up and carry me out to the living room where she sat down with me in the easy chair to comfort me. While I was on her shoulder I remember seeing the glow of a street light just outside of the large picture window in the front room, shining through the closed drapes.
Getting a new car – a blue Plymouth. We drove up in our green Plymouth and drove away in the blue. I was 4 or 5.
Ha-- I remember my conception. It was my Dad’s birthday, and my mother wanted to give him something extra special that night.
I remember being pushed in the pram (a lot) by Mum. We had just got a cat and it was in a large shopping bag on my knee.
I was three.
From when I was three; standing next to a back-yard merry-go-round. (Don’t know if they still make that kind: a cruciform device with four seats; you push and pull with your hands and feet on a big lever and it goes 'round and 'round.) A kid’s Oxford shoe hit me in the forehead, leading to one of many ER trips for stitches. Still got the scar.
I think I remember the earliest thing as being in the ocean in Florida and feeling like I was going to drown. I remember I was wearing a mustard-colored shirt over my suit, which makes sense because it would have been the early 70s. I remember boats in the distance.
The story that’s told is I looked like I was in trouble but Mom didn’t want to get wet so she sent someone else to retrieve me. 
Ooh, sounds rather like one of my young memories. I was about four, as it was shortly after my mother split from my dad. I was visiting her wherever it was she lived; she had shacked up with some guy in a townhouse. She (or he, I don’t recall) had bought me a toy U-Haul truck to play with. It was rather large, as toys go; I was able to push it around on the ground by bending over and leaning on it with my hands. It was also made of metal, not chintzy plastic, so it was good and sturdy enough to stand up to a kid’s punishment. So there I was pushing it at great speed down the sidewalk. My head was was down and in such a position that I was able to see the truck and two or three feet of sidewalk in front of me. Sadly, this was my undoing as before I knew it some kid’s tricycle pedal smacked me right above my left eye. These were the days in the mid-70s when some pedals were plain serrated metal affairs for grip instead of covered with rubber, so me, running at speed directly into a serrated metal pedal coming at me from the opposite direction, also at speed – well, the outcome was not good. I felt the impact, stood up and swiveled around. Blood streamed down over my eye, partially obscuring my vision as I let out a wail and started to run back to my mother’s front door. In mid-wail, however, I noticed something astonishing: It didn’t actually hurt! The wail was more a pre-emptive strike against the pain I thought was to come, and when it curiously did not, the wail sort of trailed off as I arrived at the front door, where I looked up at those who were gathered there watching me. I even knew I must have had a puzzled expression on my face, which must have looked quite at odds with the blood streaming down my face.
My aunt, who was there too, explained that I was in shock, but kept telling me how brave I was being. I wasn’t going to contradict her, I just kept thinking “But it doesn’t hurt, how is that brave?”
It did start hurting eventually – especially when the doc stuck that damned needle right in it to administer a local anesthetic. After that I felt nothing again, just these squicky-feeling tugs against my skin as he threaded the stitches. I still remember that feeling – and it still skeeves me out.
I still have that scar, too, though it’s faint. It’s mostly noticeable because it bisects my left eyebrow faintly, and no hair grows on that thin line.
I think it’s going to the hospital to visit my mother after my youngest brother was born. (I know it was the youngest one because I was walking pretty steadily on my own, and I’m only 21 months older than my younger brother. My hair was also in pigtails, and I didn’t have enough hair to do that until I was older.) I got a blue bubblegum cigar. I actually don’t have any memories of seeing my baby brother – I was more into the gum cigar and seeing my mom. I would have been three and a half.
After that, the memories come fast and thick, because I was diagnosed as a diabetic when I was four going on five, and I have a ton of fairly traumatic and stressful memories of that time.
Ditto.
I can remember being in my crib, taking the red music box out of the back of a white bear. And I remember my mom putting a chair in the doorway of her closet. I asked her about that years later and she said that’s where she nursed us kids, she’d open the closet door since that blocked the entry into the bedroom, the bedroom didn’t have a door of it’s own and she could get some privacy this way. I was the youngest, so she wasn’t nursing my sister.