Sitting in the front seat of an old Ford pick-up truck in the late 1940’s on a rural country road in Texas when my grandfather stopped and got out of the truck to look at something he just ran over.
He was thinking it was one of those new road counters that count traffic to see if they should build a better road.
He gets back in the truck and said it was the biggest (cuss word, cuss word) snake that he had ever seen.
I remember being downtown with my Pop and gazing through the storefront windows at the latest Lionel trains. God, I wanted that for Christmas. Must have been about 3. People, shoppers would stand on the sidewalks and just watch television en masse. Men and women wore hats.
A goat getting loose and fucking up my grandmother’s flower bed, including a banana tree. And then my grandfather grabbed the goat’s horns and tried to rein it in.
I was three. I remember being frustrated that I couldn’t say “three” and said “free” instead.
Being put into my crib for a nap and not wanting to go to sleep during the day. We were living in a house, not an apartment, and I couldn’t talk yet. It wasn’t winter, so I couldn’t have been older than around six months. I can still see the room (the walls were painted beige), with the light streaming in through the window and the parchment window shade. The curtains were white. I remember how terrible it felt to be left all alone in a closed room when I couldn’t even stand up yet.
This is my earliest memory.
When I was three, I got ahold of a pair of scissors and cut the cord on our vacuum cleaner (it was not plugged in, obviously, as I am here to tell the tale). I have a very clear memory of my mother running toward me, yelling for me to stop.
My younger sister was also born around that time. I remember being in the waiting room with my dad, and him turning to my older sister and I, saying, “well, I guess we’d better go home.” Younger sister took 24 hours to be born, so presumably we were later dropped with grandma.
I have one memory, and one memory only, of my parents together (they divorced when I was three-ish). It’s hazy, but I remember looking out a second-floor window of the place where we lived at the time. I had a Slinky in my hands and I was showing it to my dad, who was in the bathtub.
So that would definitely have to be the earliest.
No one will believe this, but…
I remember being bathed in a baby bath tub. It looked like this. It had a head rest but it was just a ledge, and no other rests to hold me up. And I remember my head sliding off the rest and being afraid I was going under (because I had before), but my mother would catch my head every time afterward. I love her very much now and trust her to kill or die for me, but back then? I did not trust that she would catch me in time. I do not know how old I was, but I could not control my muscles to do it for myself and I definitely could not talk.
I remember my baptism. I’d like to think I was only a few days or weeks old, but it’s possible that my parents had it done just prior to my entering the church preschool, which would have made me about three years old at the youngest. I do remember that I held up more or less horizontally, the way one would do with a baby, and I remember the sprinkle of water on my forehead.
Of course I had no idea whatsoever about what it was for.
I remember getting circumcised when I was 3 years old. I remember the pain when I urinated after the proceedure, and I remember that my father figured out that putting me into a warm bath and having me pee submerged was like angels singing the urine out of my weiner. I also vaguely remember a toy from the hospital waiting room during my stay for the circumcision.
I also remember that the condo my parents shared during my early years had a white metal railing separating the sunken living room from the dining room. My parents divorced when I was 2, so this memory would be from then.
Anybody else have a fear of overwriting or garbling these memories just because you’ve recalled them? I used to remember details about the aforementioned toy from the hospital, which I’ve now forgotten, and I worry that I’m going to further muddy the waters by trying to remember the unrememberable and visualize the toy using extrapolation.
