The earliest event that I can put a date to was the day World War II ended. I was just passed my 2nd birthday. Mother and my aunt were shooting firecrackers in the yard and I asked them what or why they were doing that. One of them said that the war was over. I remember thinking that the war must be like a party. (No photos exist.)
It amuses me that the word party was in my vocabulary in 1945, but war wasn’t.
The next January at age 2.5, I went with my parents to “Old Mexico.” I have two clear memories from that trip and two fuzzy ones. One of the clear memories resulted in a black and white photo, but I can tell you the color of the sombrero I was wearing and what my thoughts were at the time. The other clear memory involved selecting a toy which I still have. I would think that such items and photos help to preserve all of the memory and not just the part captured in the photo or the knowledge that the toy came from Mexico.
I was three. I had a nightmare. I still remember it: A man was trying to burn me with a cigarette lighter. I woke up screaming and someone was comforting me and I told them all about it. It wasn’t mom. It was my grandmother, who had travelled a long way to visit me and my new brother. Everything was okay now. Christmas was coming.
This one may have taken place the summer before or the summer that my mom was pregnant with little bro’:
My Dad was trying to take me out on a canoe ride, just the two of us, in the early morning, on Edgewood lake in Sullivan county, but I was having none of it. I was terrified of drowning, and no amount of persuasion on his part was getting this 2 (or 3) year old into a boat. This would have been so perfect a dad-and-son kind of moment, of which we didn’t have many that I can remember, but I was too stubbornly neurotic (and he was too gentle) to overcome my fears. Or maybe he just realized that a canoe ride with a toddler pitching a fit might just result in my drowning.
I have memories from the age of about three. That’s how old I was when I was brought to California by my grandparents by car. I remember seeing the redwoods for the first time. I was so impressed by one giant tree that had a store built into the trunk of the living tree that I remembered it more than forty years later when I drove through the redwoods again. I described it before I got there, and sure enough, it was as I had remembered.
I have a lot of memories from age four. The post WWII housing project my parents, my sister and I lived in in Eugene, Oregon stands out. It hasn’t existed for many years, and I haven’t seen it since I was four (1946), but much that is not in photographs still stands out in my memory, including the linoleum floors, the tiny bathroom with a concrete shower, and the coal-burning stove which served for both cooking and heat. We also had an ice box that dripped into a pan. It got jostled occasionally, making a grimy mixture with the dust from the coal scuttle. My mother, a neat freak if there ever was one, couldn’t keep ahead of the coal dust. It drove her nuts.
I remember vividly the first time I was stung by a bee. It was dead, and I picked it up to investigate. It was fuzzy, and I wanted to see what the fuzz felt like so I rubbed it on my cheek. It still had its stinger, which I drove into my cheek. I was reminded of that when I saw an old movie called *To Have And Have Not * in which Walter Brennan had the tag line, “Wuz you ever stung by a dead bee?” I wuz!
Lots of other stuff from around that time. Before age five, most certainly.
I was about 18 months or 2 years old (I am sure Cheez_Whia can probably clarify my age) at the time of my first memory. There are some spotty details, but a few things I remember. The story:
The lady next door to my Grandma was having a yard sale or something; anyways, for whatever reason we were over there. I wandered off by myself thinking I was going to go to Grandma’s house and ended up halfway across our (small) town. The only two things I remember were passing by the park, and the police at my grandma’s house. They had a picture of me that I have now, a studio print of me in a blue dress. From what I was told later, I had wandered off and a lady took me in and gave me a glass of water and got me home. Evidently I was sitting in her front yard playing in the dirt and minding my own business. I don’t remember her, but I still remember the maintenance guys working on the sprinklers in the park and that picture on top of the police cruiser.
Wow, there’s some early memories being recounted here.
I remember walking around in the kitchen, with my brother in his highchair eating crackers. He’s 2 1/2 years younger than I am, so I was probably somewhere around 3 or 3 1/2 myself.
A more pinpointable moment was an argument I had with my mother. I had just turned 3, she was 30, and my father was 33. I insisted that SHE was the one who was 33, because 33 was better for Mom. I was a girl, and she was a girl, and we should both have all 3s for our ages. I hadn’t totally grasped the concept of math yet.
By the ages I can narrow this down to three months in the summer of '75. It was probably late June or July, because Mom was laying in her sunglasses and bathing suit on a lounge chair in the back yard, one of those metal-framed cheap ones with the tubular plastic strips of “fabric.” Hot and hazy, and the trees were dark green.
Since I last posted, I’ve been thinking all day about that first place we lived. I remembered more. I can see me in the jolly jumper, suspended from the doorframe. And the neighbors had hardwood floors and bleached-blonde '50s end tables and a coffee table in their living room. I only lived there for approximately a (my first) year and a half. I don’t have any memories of moving to the house in another town, where I grew up, until I was about four. I remember seeing JFK get shot on television. My mom was ironing and watching whatever was on, when they interrupted to show the President in Dallas, and it unfolded on the air. I was four then.
Earliest memory is just before my 1st birthday, confirmed by family members. They were convinced that the incident was a clear indicator that I would either be a lawyer or a politician.
I took a massive dump in my diapers, then proceeded to fingerpaint it all over the place. When my sister came into the room, I threw some at her. Her outraged screams got my mother involved, which is why I survived to see my 1st birthday. I remember it as clear as a bell.
I have lots of disjointed memories up until about age 4, at which time the memories start becoming a lot longer and more detailed.
My earliest memory is from when I was around 2 years old. My mother and I were visiting one of her friends who had a parakeet. I was fascinated by the little caged bird. While mom and her friend were chatting, I somehow managed to open the cage. The bird flew out and landed on my back. I ran around shrieking while it clung to me.
My first memory is walking up to my cat and giving it a hug. I don’t know how old I was, but to give you some idea of how young I must have been, when I walked up, hands straight out in front of me, I hugged the regular sized adult cat around the neck. I also remember someone coming to the house to tell us another one of our cats had disappeared. I looked up at both the person at the door and my mom as if they were giants.
This was when I was four or younger. I remember sitting with my dad in a room in our house in Saint John, where I was born; we were reading a book and he was explaining to me that a sentence has a capital letter, and that words are divided by spaces.
My earliest is from when I was about 3 or 4, and in daycare. I clearly remember eating orange cream oreos for lunch, since it was almost holloween. For some reason, most of my early memories are of me and my friends eating lunch in daycare.
I swear I remember being in a pram next to my twin brother, it being winter, and hearing everyone ask whether we were identical. I had a general sense that Pat and I were twins, and not identical, but I didn’t understand what either of those meant. The time of year means we must have been either 6-monthsish or 18-monthsish (July babies), but we didn’t ride in the pram after about our first birthday.
I regard the sense that this may or may not be a manufactured memory with a vague sense of sadness.
My earliest highly-detailed memory is of going to a drive-in movie that was showing Bwana Devil. I was four years old. My mother, and father and I were sitting in the front seat of a 1950 Mercury. I accidentally spilled a cup of Nehi orange soda on my father, and he smacked me in the face. This occurred right after a scene in the movie in which a lion leaps toward the camera.
Many years later I mentioned to my mother that the smell of orange soda always brought back this memory. She verified that the event had happened just as I recalled it.
I have fragments of earlier memories, but this is the earliest one that seems fully-formed, complete with visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory details.
I remember being very bored when my older brother first went off to pre-school during the day and I lost my playmate - particularly in the afternoons when my mother used to have a nap. I can clearly recall sitting in the lounge room, on the warm summer afternoons, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece, knowing that it somehow had something to do with how long it would be until my brother came home. I’d have been about three and a half at the time.
My very earliest memory was from before 3 years old, perhaps 30 months. Me standing on the sidewalk in front of our house, looking up at my father. I yell at him, hi daddy! and ask him what he’s doing, him answering that he’s fixing the roof. He was wearing green dungarees. A beige VW bug was in the driveway.
The really odd thing to me, is that at that time I noticed that it was my earliest “real” memory. In other words, it was as if I’d learned that very day to “hit record” on my internal narrative, and, having learned that trick, could now look back more easily on previous events, where before I couldn’t. I remember very distinctly how novel it felt that I could now do this new thing.
