What is the first specific event or experience that you can remember? (Note: If there are any devotees of past-life regression here, I’m referring to your current life.)
I have two earliest memories, both from around age 3:
One is of falling down the stairs and biting my tongue badly enough to require stitches.
The other is a memory of sitting out in the yard on a sunny day, in the sandbox or something, and feeling a sudden, almost unbearably intense thrill of ecstatic joy about the fact of being alive.
Oh, not again. We’ve had several of these threads in the past.
Usually people get in a competition of one-upmanship. Get ready for posts about how they remember struggling to get out of their momma’s belly and the doctor cutting the umbilical cord
EDIT: and right after that how they started to read
Breaking my leg at 3. Sitting on my butt to get down the stairs with the cast on. I remember my downstairs neighbors in their Girl Scout uniforms waiting for me at the bottom.
I also remember getting the cast off. The lollipop I was given was grape. I also got Chiclets.
I have several from when I was close to 3 but a few months shorts.
I remember being bored and wandering into my Mom’s room where she was playing cards on her bed. I think this is my ealiest. I may have been only 2½.
I remember watching Mickey Mantle Day on TV with my father and brother and my father telling us to pay attention as we would never see a better ball player.
I remember watching the men walking on the moon for the first time.
I recall my sister taking me across the Bronx to visit my grandmother by bus. She was only 13. I was playing with a Matchbox[sup]TM[/sup] bus on the bus.
These are my earliest. There might be a few more but I am not sure what age I was. These I was able to figure out the year and in many cases the date.
I remember getting a haircut for my first birthday. I hated it, I couldn’t figure out why my mom wouldn’t stop pulling my hair. It was some home haircut jobby that held a razor blade in a plastic sheath. She probably used an old blade out of my father’s razor.
The earliest, I think, is waking up while riding in the car. I was sleeping in Mother’s lap, under my Daddy’s letter blanket from university. We were driving through the mountains, it was late at night, and traffic had stopped due to an accident ahead. As we passed I looked down at a crushed tractor-trailer rig lying down in a deep ravine. It seemed very surreal. I think Mom said I was 2.
I think the next memory I had was from standing on the grate of the floor furnace. We melted little scotch-marks in the bottoms of our footie pajamas.
Not sure how old I was but it was well before I started school. My Mom had taken me with her when she went to visit a lady she knew from church. I was old enough to be outside by myself, at least briefly.
I recall being in the driveway, alone, when I had a bout of explosive (as I remember it) diarrhoea. Down my leg and on my shoe. I hobbled into the house where I apparently blamed a passing dog for the mess. The next thing I remember was being dressed in some oversized trousers and being escorted home by my Mom who, by my recolection was not very sympathetic.
I remember my second or third birthday… I wanted a Carvel (ice cream shop) Hug-Me Bear cake. My mom went to the nearest Carvel’s, but they only had one defective, unsellable one left. She asked what was wrong with it, and the kid behind the counter said that it had been made with a much thicker layer of chocolate cookie crumbs than it was supposed to. She said she’d take it anyway.
So, my first memory is of the most amazingly delicious birthday accident ever.
I remember getting a new car, but I don’t know how young I was at the time.
I also recall naming my grandfather’s boat. I had to be four or so.
I can remember the layout of the first house we lived in; we moved away when I was five and I haven’t been back inside since. I also remember the time I put a screwdriver in the electrical outlet there and playing with the boy from across the street, who had a boxer (dog).
I also remember things from kindergarten when I was five. Most important, I remembered organizing naptimes. There were morning and afternoon groups and we all had blankets. I noticed that the piles of the afternoon kids (I was in the morning) made a great pillow. Another kid and I started to race over there so we’d have them. Finally, I proposed we alternate: I take them one day, he takes them the next. He agreed. As time went on, more kids joined. It got to the point where you’d get to use the “pillow” maybe twice a month.
Then I noticed that there always were a few blankets left over for the morning class – kids who were out sick. I started napping there.
The first I can actually date is when Alaska became a state in 1958. I was nearly six. I asked, “What was it before?”
Nope, not me. I avoid one-upmanship. I was slow to start reading in fact and stay behind grade level until 6th grade when I found books I really loved.
I have two memories of Toronto, that took place some undefined time (but probably not long) before we moved to Vancouver, at which time I was three:
I remember playing with a Slinky™ on a carpeted staircase, and being frustrated to the point of crying that it wouldn’t walk down the stairs like it did on the commercials.
I also remember my father making an ice rink in our front yard, and believing that it was so cold that the water from the garden hose froze as soon as it hit the air. (I believed this for years, but with hindsight it’s obvious that there was just some ice in the hose that was pushed out.)
I remember being about 2 1/2 or 3 and making my parent sit on the couch while I stood on a chair and sang a song I made up about coloring. I also remember being woken up and wrapped in a blanket and rushed to my uncle’s apartment in the middle of the night when my younger brother died and that would have been around the same age but I’m not sure which memory was first.
I remembered another thing - at kindergarten, one child was chosen to wake the others after nap time. They did this by touching the sleeping child in the middle of the forehead. I was squicked out by that, and felt as though they left fingerprints on my head.
