My earliest true memory was watching my mother give my sister a bath in a rubbber bassinet thing with folding legs. It is also the earliest memory of my little sister. I remember staring at this red, wrinkly thing sqaulling away in the water and my Mother saying that was my sister.
I also ‘recall’ lying in my crib while my father hooked up one of those gizmo’s with beads and rings and stuff. He said it was so I could learn how to pull myself up. I reached up and instead pulled the whole contraption down.
But this must be a false memory because by the time I was sleeping in the crib, I had already caused no end of trouble wandering off from the back yard, having to be tied to the clothsline with a leash so I wouldn’t get away etc. all of which I have no memory at all.
In our family the baby slept in a giant wicker basket. When the next one came along you graduated to the crib with wooden sides, and then a genuine bed.
Yeah, me too. My earliest vivid memory is of being bathed in a bathroom sink, having a red chiffon scarf wrapped over my diaper and a banner strung across my chest. I distinctly remember waiting for Uncle Butchie to come over to my Gramma’s house to cut the cake, and I can still remember the cake itself - it had pink flowers all over it. I relayed this memory as I recall it to my grandmother, along with describing the apartment we were in at the time in detail. Gramma was shocked - this was apparently my first birthday (I was born on New Year’s Eve) and Gramma was babysitting, and my godfather Butch was coming over to sit with us. Gramma moved out of that apartment when I was 18 months old.
Seeing drops of rainwater clinging to the washing-line outside the window and thinking they looked like motorbikes. No, I don’t know why.
My sister pushing the toy wheelbarrow to the compost heap to tip grass mowings onto it, and I wanted to tip some too, so I scooped some of the mowings from the heap into the wheelbarrow. They weren’t as fresh and green as the ones she’d tipped out.
A cement works a mile or two away on a hill.
Playing in a pram - not sure if it was my pram; if it was, it was definitely after I needed it.
Way before 2. I can remember being in my crib, and the white teddy bear with the red music box inside it. I figured out how to get the zipper undone and get at the music box.
I also remember where my mom would place a chair against the door to her room (where my crib was, also) when she nursed me. I don’t recall the nursing, but my mom was stunned years later whan I told here I could remember her putting the chair in that spot, that’s when she told me why she put it there (to keep people from walkin in on her).
My first memory is the view of a cloudy, gray rainy sky, from the inside of a pink stroller, being pushed along by my dad as we went down the curb to the local park. It was wet outside, and the leaves were rustling and dripping, and everything seemed very lush and green and fresh and new. It was a peaceful soothing memory, and I’m glad it’s my first.
I was about 3 (within a couple of months) and my mother took my younger sister and I on a train from El Paso? to Los Angeles. She got a sleeping compartment with bunks. My sister was about one at the time and was very fussy for the whole trip. Mom put me in the upper bunk and I slept through the night but I remember watching the sky get dark and waking up just before dawn. Curiously, I don’t remember getting on or off the train. This memory was not place in my mind later, as my mother never talked about it unless I mentioned it first.
I do remember playing with my sister before she could crawl very well (she’s 23 months younger than me) but I can’t pin the time down. I do remember the place in the house, the doorway of my bedroom.
My most vivid early memory was when I was 5 and put a wire both sides of an electrical socket. That is something I will never forget.
My first memory is of waking from a nightmare. I don’t have a definite date for it.
My approximately-three-year-old eyes snapped open and I looked at the blue-painted wood of my crib around me. The fear and terror of the dream was still with me; I can definitely remember seeing the evilly-buzzing cartoony lightbulb from the dream superimposed, in my mind’s eye, over the top of the footboard of my crib. I remember the shape of the filament and how it was orange… I think that even at that age I had an idea that it needed electricity and wires to work.
Much later I learned that I was born three months premature and spent those months in an incubator. I haven’t seen the particular model of incubator that I spent all that time in, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it had a lightbulb where I remember it from the dream.
A feature of my early drawings was ‘the clutches’. These were two groping clawlike hands that came down from the top corners of the page. A couple of years ago I saw an incubator at a hospital exhibit at the Ukrainian Festival in Toronto, and I discovered to my surprise that it had a pair of rubber manipulatory gloves sticking inward through the walls, like those used to handle radioactives in isolation. Could those have been the source of ‘the clutches’?
Another early memory is of the first night I slept in a Real Bed, outside my crib. The bad was so big and cool and smooth… ot was really nice. I was so proud. No idea what age that was, but it was before the age of four.
I have a definite memory from age four of looking out the living-room window and watching the big kids go off to kindergarten and wondering what it would be like. Later I saw my mom coming up the walk with a paper bag of groceries in her arms, and sticking out the top was a book for me. I even remember the book–it was a paperback science book.
I remember that ladybugs taste BAD! I was just barely tall enough to see out the screen door, maybe 18 months old. A ladybug was crawling across on the screen. I remember wondering how it would taste… then sticking my tongue out. gulp. Blech!
My earliest coherent and verifiable memory is from when I was almost 4 years old. My dad had been stationed overseas for the past 18 months in Japan (he was in the Marines). I remember one day my mother, dressed in her 1950’s housewifey white dress with black polka-dots, bringing my attention to a giant who had just come in the door. She said, all smiles, “This is your Daddy!” I looked up, and up, and up, and up… to a terrifying giant silhouetted against the bright sunshine outside the door. This shadowy monster stuck out his hand and growled, “Hello, son!” I promptly fled screaming down the hall to hide under my bed! I vaguely recall him bribing me out later with some toys he had brought back from Japan. (I also remember playing with the toys and wanting to show what they did to my mother, but her bedroom door was locked!)
I’ve got fragments that could be earlier, and earlier memories that have been overlaid with parent/family recalling the situations back to me so that I can’t be sure if I’m remembering or if I’m remembering being told about… but the earliest I know explicity to be my own memory, and which I can nail down for timeframe, was from when I a bit more than 2.
My Dad was speaking to my Mom in the new kitchen where we’d just moved, and at some point in the conversation he described something, “blah blah blahblah blah, …drip, drip, drip… and blah, blahblah”. The ‘drip, drip, drip’ thing caught my attention and provoked my curiosity, and when there was a lull in the conversation, I tugged at his pants leg and said, “Daddy, you went ‘drip drip drip’!”
He looked over at me and smiled and said “I did?” and then went back to talking with my Mom.
I remember being frustrated because he hadn’t answered my question! (Understandable, in retrospect, since it wasn’t phrased as anything an adult would comprehend to be a question, but to my mind I was clearly asking him to explain why he said ‘drip drip drip’).
I found out many decades later that the water heater in the new apartment had a leak in it when we first moved in, and he’d been talking with my Mom about the leak. It was right there in the kitchen and leaked onto the linoleum and made a mess.
I have other memories dating to shortly after, which weren’t observed/overheard by any family members and therefore also don’t have that overlay of remembering the event being described back to me by other people, etc. So… 2 years old.
Daaaaang. You would think, given that I seem to be quite a bit younger than most of the people who have shared memories, that I could do as well or better. Alas, my earliest “memories” are foggy at best, usually consisting of just a single image in none too great detail. I can just barely remember going to a Patriots game with my father, but the only thing I really remember is him asking me if I wanted to leave at halftime, and I said yes. I don’t actually recall him saying it, I just remember that he did. I’m told I was 3 at the time.
My earliest highly-detailed memory is of going to a drive-in movie that was showing Bwana Devil, a 3-D movie. I was four years old. My mother, my father and I were sitting in the front seat of a 1950 Mercury. I was in a little car seat that enabled me to see out (unlike the protective child car seats of today, this one didn’t really offer any safety, just a good view).
I accidentally spilled a cup full 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.
Although more than fifty years have passed, every now and then I still have a dream in which my father hits me in the face, and immediately thereafter a lion jumps at me.
My earliest memory is from when I was about two years old. We lived in a little house that had windows on either side of the door. On these windows were low little curtains that hung from a stretchy cord. Whenever my dad would leave for work, my sister and I would pull down the curtains and wave goodbye to him. I remember those windows quite well, along with the layout of the house we lived in at the time, which we left when I was about 2 1/2.
I also remember taking one look at my baby brother when he came home from the hospital, thinking that he was rather boring and yelling for my mother to pick me up. I was almost three at the time.
My earliest memory is when I lost the tip of my pointer finger in a freak accident. I was a little under two years old.
Here is what I know only because I have been told:
There was a flatbed trailer that had been used to transport some sort of heavy machinery parked across the street from my house, and my brother and our cousins were on the trailer messing around with some stuff (wooden boards, pipes) and jumping around. I walked over to the trailer and placed my hands on the edge (probably to try and climb up). The boys’ jumping had caused enough vibration that the skids—the “tracks” connected to a trailer so that something on wheels can be rolled off—fell flat onto the trailer bed pinching my tiny pointer finger between the two pieces of heavy metal.
Here is what I know because I remember it:
I can remember the weirdest sensation of pain I had ever felt, and I remember running up the driveway, screaming and holding my fingertip, which was hanging by a skin-thread. I remember that my dad wrapped my hand in a blue towel and held it while my mom drove to the hospital. I don’t remember the hospital, but the ER doctors gave me some kind of “disassociation” drug (or so I am told), so that explains that. But I do remember the trips to the doctor’s office to get the 16 stitches removed and bandages replaced until it healed up.
The damage to the tip was so severe that they were unable to get a reattachment to take, so to this day, I have a missing fingertip.