Sometime around age 2. Playing in our driveway in Arkansas, where we lived for a while from when I was 2 until just before I turned 6.
I’ll bet it was one of these beasts:
God, how I wish I had been born at least ten years earlier so I could have flown on liners like these. The biggest piston-and-prop plane I ever flew on was a DC-3 back in the spring of 1966 (I was just 11), and it was something I remember to this day!
My two sons started walking (1) one week before his 1st birthday (2) one week after his first birthday. My mother used to say that I started walking at 10 months old but I don’t believe it.
My first memory is of pulling myself up on a wooden dressing table (vanity?), drawers on either side, big mirror in the middle. I was clinging to the right-hand side. I shit a big long turd and remember thinking the equivalent of “I’m going to have to sit in that.” I don’t quite remember plopping down.
Not sure which came first, but either way it’s a labrador:
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We were having lunch under the verandah, I was at the little children’s table. Pup was half under the table, looking at me with his doggy eyes. I knew he was saying: “share that sammich with me?” So I slid my sandwich with bright red jam off the plate and onto the floor for him.
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Holding on to Misty, my fingers fists curled into her fur. We walked together. ETA: I know she taught me walk. I’m told she would turn and give me a big lick over my face to stop me from crying every time I fell, then she would stand with he, let me hoist myself up again, and we give it another go. Yes, my parents did try to stop her from licking my face. Oh well, I lived
cold winter @ my grandpa’s farm. looking at how the cow’s drank from the stock tank. [there’s a flame beneath, to keep the surface free] I remember wanting to drink like the cows…
arms reaching for me under water. My Grandfather crying. and being wrapped in a blanket. being unsure what my Grandfather meant. He said, “what would your parents think?”
I have a brief memory of a birthday party when I was very little. My dad took a picture of me showing my grandfather one of the gifts I received. Years later, my parents found the picture and I told them I remembered it being taken. Turns out the party was for my second birthday.
Not sure if there is anything in between that I can recall, but I also remember being in a minor car accident a week or so before my third birthday. I wasn’t initially aware of the time of year, but later learned the accident occurred while my parents were going to the store to buy party favors. My dad was driving, I was sitting on my mom’s lap in the front passenger side (this was 1983, can only imagine the hell she would’ve caught if that happened now), my sister (who was 8 at the time) was in the back. The car was a late 60s/early 70s yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Don’t remember the other car involved. I remember my parents and sister saying “OW!” upon impact, then I did the same thing even though I wasn’t injured. Guess I was just trying to fit in 
The accident was nothing more than a fender bender, though I do remember going to the hospital (the now-defunct JFK Hospital in Northeast Philly) to get checked out. Aside from some bumps and bruises, my mom sustained the only injury. Evidently, when I said “OW!” I snapped my head back and cut her lip enough where she needed to get stitches. I think that was the last time I ever sat in her lap in the car!
My earliest clear memory I was seven years old. My best friend and I were hanging out on the brick wall that separated our yards. We were singing Saturday Night by the Bay City Rollers. I spelled Saturday S-A-T-E-R-D-A-Y and my friend corrected me. We got into a huge argument and I pushed her off the wall and vowed never to speak to her again.
The next memory is of us getting in to an argument about whether my hair was red or auburn. She said red. I insisted it was auburn. Soon after she smashed me on the head with her plastic typewriter.
Yes we’re still best friends.
I wonder sometimes if I really don’t remember this, I just remember telling the story for so long I only remember my own retellings.
Probably 2.5, standing in our yard by the gutter on the 4th of July, watching black snakes burn.
I think I was probably 3ish. I was playing with a neighbor or cousin and we were picking up the stepping stones in the front yard and looking at all the bugs under them. Probably around the same time, I remember taking a piece of straw from a broom and sticking it in a hole in the ground “fishing” for doodlebugs. I have no idea why bugs fascinated me so. I hate bugs.
I’m not sure which of these memories is the earliest:
–Accidentally going into my morning bath with my dress still on (I was around 2 or so.)
–My mother telling me that it was my birthday and that I was turning 2 years old.
–I seem to remember my younger sister receiving a zoo toy for her birthday, but she’d have been turning only a year old, and I would’ve been not even 2 years old yet, so… maybe that was a dream?
–When I was really young, I’d have recurring nightmares about cars driving through the house.
Anybody else recalling more and more early memories after thinking about this thread?
I was about three. My dad took me to Dallas to meet up with an old buddy of his, at his workplace, a very big building. I got bored just sitting there listening to the two of them talking on and on, so I wandered off. I walked into a stairwell and walked up a lot of stairs and finally found an unlocked door that I opened into a big room with lots of books in it. I see this skinny guy over by a windowsill rubbing something long and thin with a rag, by the light of the sunlight coming through the window. Rambunctious lad that I was, I snuck up toward him slowly. As I got closer I could see it was a rifle he was cleaning—it looked like my BB gun back home. Then, I sprang up in front of the guy, startling him, and start jerking the barrel from him, saying, “hey mister, lemme play with your BB gun!” POP! POP! POP!, it sure sounded a lot louder than my BB gun. Next thing I know, the skinny guy looks out the window, with a look of horror on his face. “Good lord, kid, what the hell did you make me do!” Then he high-tails it out of there, like a bat out of hell. I’m pretty sure he was some type of TV star, cause I saw him on TV a lot after that.
…or maybe it was just a dream.
It still is but fewer tots get it nowadays (so I noticed.) I got it from an infected nannie.
Being in a public swimming pool with other kids. I was 4.
My earliest memory is the smell of gasoline. The first house I lived in was next to a garage, and I’m told that I would toddle over and watch the mechanics work. I was definitely younger than three, probably around two years old.
I have a couple of memories - or maybe memories of memories - of a family vacation to take in the Seattle World’s Fair in September of 1962. I’d have been about a month shy of turning two. At least one of our visits must have been at night, or maybe it was one of Seattle’s infamous dark days, the lights were on at any rate and I have a vivid memory of the play of colored lights on the international fountainnear the entrance. Also I remember having the Space Needle pointed out to me, although we never went to the top.
SS
I have a few memories of my mother being pregnant with my sister, so I would have been shy of 2 1/2 years old. My most detailed memory is of feeding a goose a piece of my bologna sandwich at the park and laughing as he waggled his head in disgust at the taste of the mustard.
I remember my baptism; that is, I remember being held up by my father and the water being sprinkled on my forehead. Naturally I didn’t have a clue about what it was supposed to mean, or even about what it means to have meaning. It would be nice to think I was only a week or two old, and that wouldn’t be unheard of for a mainline Protestant baptism, but it’s possible I was a couple of years older. It might have been done around the time I entered the church’s preschool which would mean I was around three. I’m really curious now and I might just have to drive over to the church and find out when it was. I still live in the same city.
From about 18 months to 3 years I have isolated memories here and there: Dad or somebody holding me up so I could see the city lights from Mulholland, Mom taking me into hotel pools on a couple of occasions, somebody giving me a full-body wipedown while, bizarrely, I was holding a half-eaten hamburger in one hand–stuff like that. In the same age range I was frightened by the airport because I was scared to fly and thought I might somehow end up in an airplane. Fortunately we didn’t fly as a rule and only went there to meet visiting grandparents or see them off. By the time I was a couple of years older my attitude about flying had done a complete 180.
I used to have nightmares that the street light across the street was turning into–what? I still don’t get it.
While this isn’t really an earliest memory, there’s a picture of me, aged five years, sitting in my kindergarten classroom next to a wooden toy train. I’m deliberately touching the locomotive with my index finger to strike a pose and thinking that later I would be able to see the picture and remember having done that. Which I did, and do.
At least you have that to look back on. In California smaller jets like the DC-9 and the Boeing 727/737 pretty much eliminated anything with propellers from the commercial aviation market, at least between the major cities. Even if you flew from Burbank to San Diego (not as pointless then as it would be today), you’d be riding in a jet.
First memories - 6 to 8 months old.
We were living on base at Ft. Bragg. One memory - I’m in my crib, I’ve pulled myself up. Mom and Dad silhouetted in the open door, Dad leaving for work, and then I fell to the floor. They had to buy plywood to put over the top of my crib and playpen as I was notorious for climbing out.
The other, same time frame, pine needles in a picnic area and big pines around us. Picnic with Mom and Brother on base.
At one and a half we moved into the house that Dad and Grandpa had built for us. I am standing in the foyer and can see the road in front of the house, it’s not a paved road but the dust doesn’t fly when a car goes down it, Dad is carrying Mom across the threshold of the new house. A month before I had become not the youngest child.
At three and half I’m in the back seat of the Valiant. The family is headed for the drive-in. The usurper is in the front seat messing around with stuff she shouldn’t. I tell her she shouldn’t mess with stuff and she knocks the car out of gear. I look over and see Dad and Brother and Mom one month away from delivering my next sister on the stoop as the car rolled down the driveway. I came to a rest about 30 yards later when a stump catches the front end.
Didn’t make it to the drive-in.