I remember sitting and playing on a green carpet with a big, ugly flower pattern. Mom says that was the carpet in the apartment we rented in Cleveland before we bought the house I grew up in; we moved to the house just before I turned 2, so if that is the apartment carpet, then I was a little less than two.
I remember my grandparents visiting us at the house just before my little sister was born. This would have been right around my second birthday, since her birthday is 3 weeks after mine.
I also some early memories that are harder to pin down to an exact time–I might have been 2 or 3 or 4. For example, I remember a large, square hole cut in the kitchen floor of my grandparents’ house, and us little kids gathered around, looking down into it. There was rushing water beneath, I think from a hose or a burst pipe. A man in a white t-shirt came in the front door, and my older brother ran up to him. I have an idea that this man was my grandfather, but if it was, I must have been less than 2, since he died that summer; my second birthday, above, was the last time we saw him. If the man in the white t-shirt was my father or one of my uncles, it must be some time later.
I have some which might be < 2 years old but they aren’t specific enough to know for sure.
Earliest one I’ve got nailed (and know for sure that I remember rather than remembering being told about over the following years):
I was a few months past by 2nd birthday and
{I didn’t know this background until decades later:} the graduate student housing my folks had just moved into had a water heater that leaked for awhile until my Dad got someone to come in and get it fixed… the water heater was right there in the kitchen so “leaking” meant “onto the linoleum floor”.
/backdrop
So my Dad is describing it and I only tune in to the conversation when it sounds interesting to my 2-year-old ears, which is when my Dad says “… drip, drip, drip…” and then probably goes on to say things I could not follow.
I wait for a chance to butt into the conversation and then say/ask “Daddy you went drip drip drip!”
He says: “I did?” Paused a beat and then goes back to his conversation, without explaining to me why he had said “drip, drip, drip” which as any fool could plainly see was what I wanted him to do when I said to him “Daddy you went drip drip drip”.
Annoying and frustrating and therefore stuck in my head to be remembered forever.
Oh wow - reading this just brought back one for me - I remember a navy blue pushchair (would be called a stroller nowadays) - it has a footrest that could be locked in a horizontal position, or dropped down like a step. I remember my mum pushing me past a pub called The Tabby Cat - again, this would have been before the age of 3.
This is fairly topical, and with the miracle of the internet, I can confirm that I was 3 or 4. Why is this? It snowed in Los Angeles in 1962. For those of you from out of town, this does not happen all that often. Yeah, it snowed in the San Fernando Valley in 1962 and I could probably find out the exact date with a little more research. This I remember.
I find this highly unlikely. The brain will, of course, form memories from birth (or properly, even before, once there are enough neural connections to form impressions); however, in order to render those memories you have to have context. How the heck would you know what circumcision was when you can’t even raise your head to see what’s being done to you? How would you remember “being in the womb” when you can’t see or differentiate anything? Memory is prone to suggestion, and I suggest that you’ve formed these memories post hoc. I’m inclined to give a little more credence to impressions of being in the womb, especially when sparked by similar environmental cues, but I doubt that these could be categorized as distinct memories of a particular event.
My earliest distinct memory, like Qadgop the Mercotan’s, is being in a crib. I was looking up at a Winnie-The-Pooh mobile that I found in storage years later. I figure on being somewhere between four months and a year. I recall intermittent memories when I was clearly younger than two, including being fed baby food (red stuff good, yellow-green stuff bad), fishing with a bamboo pole on the edge of the dock (I kept dipping the tip in the water), swim class at the YWCA, and being in a walker stuck on the front lawn. More or less continuous, coherent memory trails start at about the age of three. I find it curious when people say they can’t remember anything before five or six years of age.
Mine, unfortunately, is nearly suffocating to death as a young child. My mother used to be a farmworker back in our small eastern Washington town. She didn’t have enough money to pay for childcare, so she would leave me and my sister in the car while she worked. One hot summer day (90+) I saw my sister run toward me screaming because she was being chased by a cropduster spraying the fields. We rolled the windows all the way up and must have been there two hours before our mom was able to get back to us. I talked to her last week and she said it probably happened when I was two. The oldest event I can specifically date is the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. I remember being wrapped in coats and scarves just like it was a heavy snowfall, but what fell from the sky was gray instead of white.
I remember being outside in the snow and feeling very cold, but my arm was hot. I wondered how my arm could be hot when I was so cold.
My older sister confirmed that my mother was mad at me, grabbed my arm and threw me out the door in February, breaking my arm, when I was 26 months old. To this day, when I get really down I have an image of sitting outside in the snow.
On that note, I have an early memory that I’m not clear on. That is, I know it happened, but I may be remembering it wrongly.
Context: I would have been about three years old. Middle daughter, “Jan”, was still at home, and oldest daughter “Marcia” was in and out of the house following the breakup of her shotgun marriage. Our house was built on the side of a hill, and as such, the front porch was a stoop, while the back porch was a full story off the ground. There was a large tree, as tall as the house, within an adult’s arm’s reach of the back porch. Yes, that is relevant.
What I remember: Marcia was distraught about something, and sobbed, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do!” Jan suggested, “Jump off the back porch and grab the tree as you go down.”
What everyone else remembers: Nothing.
I don’t know. It could have happened. Jan had little patience with Marcia’s drama-queening, and could very well have made the exact statement I remember. Or she could have made some other suggestion that I couldn’t parse, and I translated it as seen above. But the gist of it – Marcia coming apart at the seams and Jan telling her basically to pound sand – is absolutely typical.
My earliest memory… I think it must have actually been a dream because the details don’t add up.
I remember being ~20 months old, sitting in my crib and crying my eyes out becuase I was afraid of the lightning… and nobody coming to comfort me.
But I remember it from the outside- what my hair looked like, the tears on my face, etc… I remember the curtains, which I think we got when I was around three, I don’t think that crib ever actually belonged to me, and I didn’t live in that bedroom til I was three.
The earliest one I’m sure actually happened would have been when I was 2-3. I remember the kitchen and my mom putting my little sister’s baby seat on the kitchen table to give her baby food. I remember being allowed to feed her and being taught how to put the food in hermouth and then put the spoon under her mouth to catch anything she spat out. And then my dad coming home from grad school and walking in the back door.
And I remember the Oklahoma City bombings. I would have been nearly four years old and i remember having a vague understanding of what had happened and a very strong idea that some very bad man had done this and they had to catch him and punish him. I thought the entire city of Oklahoma had been blown up and had some understanding that that meant lots and lots of people had been killed and it was very sad, but for some reason I had a much clearer idea that “ooooh someone’s in trouble now!” and hoped the police would catch him. I would watch the news with my dad to see if he had been caught…
so I also remember when the unabomber was caught. I thought he was very creepy and very bad and should not have blown up Oklahoma (at the time, I didn’t quite diferentiate between Oklahoma City and Oklahoma State and Oklahoma where the winds come sweeping down the plains and a single building within Oklahoma state)… and I remember arguing with my dad because he told me that the unabomber hadn’t blown up Oklahoma City. Which… obviously it’s impossible to have TWO bad men out there setting off bombs and blowing things up at the same time. I mean… he’s a BOMBER and there was a BOMB in Oklahoma and they’re arresting him and it’s big news, so OBVIOUSLY it’s the same thing! … I don’t actually remember Timothy McVeigh being caught, though.
It was a gray rainy day–I could see a cloudy sky–and I was lying on my back in a pink stroller, looking up at my father’s face, and we were passing by the leafy green park nearby my house. I don’t remember how old I was.
I think my next memory is yanking one of my blond Barbie’s heads off and colouring it purple.
One of mine is like that too. I was probably about three, and we were visiting my grandparents for xmas. My grandma was making pinwheel cookies for my dad. Part of the process is like making cinnamon rolls, so she and my mom had this long tube of pecan-stuffed cookie dough that they were trying to get into the freezer. It was sagging in the middle and they were both laughing. I remember running over to try to hold up the middle, but I was too short.
Like Dorothy, I kind of remember it from the outside. I can see my hair in pigtails and my green striped shirt and green cords. But it’s a real memory–my mom confirmed it and was surprised I remembered it.
Another one that’s early is playing on my swingset in the front yard when my mom rushed out the front door, jumped off the porch and got across the yard in about two steps. She snatched me off the swingset and turned to run back inside. As she turned, I could see over her shoulder that there was a tornado. (It was high in the sky and never did touch down.) I remember pointing at it and saying, “Mama, look!” as if that wasn’t why she had come to get me.
My two year old is quite fluent - speaks in complete sentences, and uses words like “delicious” and “actually” with correct pronunciation. I’m sure she understands quite a bit more than she can say, as well.
