What is your earliest memory? From what age is it?
Mine is of being in Algeria, and going down to the kitchen of the house we were staying in and eating pizza. Very obscure, but the earliest nonetheless.
It’s pitiful, but that is from age 4.
My memory is so good that I can remember the night I went out with my father and came home with my mother.
::d&r::
My earliest memory is of camping with Dad… he took me (just me and him… this was before my brother… or maybe just after he was born) to Vancouver to visit my cousin Jennifer. It was great… I even remember losing a hotdog or two in the fire and charring one so bad I wouldn’t eat it but Dad did and he gave me his smiles slightly Ah the good times…
My earliest memory is playing the board game family fued with my older sister. I don’t know why I would be playing that at such an early age, but she probably wanted to win. I also remember my sister’s birthay party and getting to eat a giant piece of cake. I don’t know which one came 1st.
Jumping off the couch at 6:30 AM to see my dad out the door, and begging for some Melba Toast and orange juice. I think I was 2 or 3.
Walking down the driveway, when I suddenly think of my tricycle, so I promptly started heading in that direction.
I remember being in a feed store and looking at the baby chicks and ducklings. My parents tell me the store I remember closed when I was 2.
I also have very vivid memories of a house my great-grandmother lived in, and she moved before I was born. This didn’t stop me from saying ‘Gummo lives down this street!’ once when we drove past the neighborhood. I also remember the day my Dad gave a star sapphire ring to my Mom, which was a year or two before I was born - I described the lobby of the hotel very well.
A half a dozen memories of the hill I lived on in Japan. Walking and crawling along a high wall toward the house, climbing over a set of stone steps down to the Japanese Village at the bottom of the hill. Hiding under a bamboo gazebo in the neighbor’s back yard.
I was in Japan for two years, age two to four. The gazebo burned down in a fire before I was three. The memory of walking along the wall is the most vivid early memory I have. (I was alone, and I don’t think I was supposed to be where I was.) I can still remember individual stones and cracks in the wall, and the moss that grew on the stones. I remember the fear feeling as the height above the sidewalk got higher and higher. I remember the smell too, and the feeling of the stone on my hands and feet.
Oddly enough, I don’t recall the house at all. Or the earthquakes, which I am told, frightened me horribly. I don’t remember any of the people other than the ones I continued to know later. I used to speak Japanese, too, according to my mother. I don’t remember it at all. But after fifty years I can still feel the moss rubbing against my hand, and smell the earth and stone. I see the sidewalk below me, and the dark stains of water seeping out of the cracks in the wall. I have not the faintest idea what I was doing there, or even what was behind me, on the hill.
Tris
I was in the sunroom of my home. It was my second or third birthday party. I’ve always found it odd that I became fully sentient (as I like to put it) pretty much exactly two or three years after I was born.
Interestingly, I remember a brief moment of nothing, just a split second black and silence, before anything else. Weird.
Two early memories from when I was (I think) three years old. I’m not sure which came first.
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My mother was reading me a story but she fell asleep in the middle of it. I went upstairs to watch “Electric Company”. (I could tell time at the age of three, if you can believe that). My mother woke up and came running up the stairs. I thought she was mad at me, but it turned out she was just worried, not knowing where I was.
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I went with my father to pick up a lathe he had bought at auction. I waited in the car while he and another guy loaded it in the back of the car. When we got home, he and my oldest brother had a hard time getting it inside.
Sitting in my highchair in the kitchen, drinking a mug of strawberry Nesquik. My mum was there, too. I would have been about 18 months, I think.
Standing in front of my parents’ big console record player. The lid was propped open and I was looking into the top, watching the record spin round and round. I was two.
Although the memory includes a strong feeling of being two (it might have been just after my birthday?), I doubted it for a long time because a two-year-old wouldn’t have been tall enough to look into the top of the console. But when I mentioned it to my mother, she laughed. I was remembering correctly all right. Seems I had taken some albums of my dad’s old 78s from the cabinet in the front of the console. I’d made a stack of them and climbed on top to look at the record spinning. Dad had been suitably horrified 
No 78s were harmed in the making of this post.
Waking up in the morning, standing up in my crib, holding onto the edge and crying. Not because I was hurt or hungry or scared, but because I knew that was what I always did.
I remember that it sounded really fake, because I couldn’t make it come out “right.” I must’ve been barely a year old.
Two things I remember from early childhood, but I’m not sure of the order:
[ul]
[li]I remember my mom giving me a birthday card with a large “2” on it. I was playing in my bedroom at the time.[/li][li]I remember sitting in my high chair with a bowl of Super Sugar Crisp. I also remember flinging spoonfulls of it (along with milk) onto the wall behind my high chair. I remember my mom being upset by this for some reason. :D:D[/li][/ul]
hmmmm… not much that comes to mind here, except for a few vaqueties:
1: Dad snatching our (me and my brother) pacifiers and hucking them in the fire, stating that we were to old for them.
2: Dad’s dog doing horrible things to my teddy.
3: Dad’s dog doing horrible things to my brother’s face
4: My brother grinding my finger through the meat grinder and the subsequent trip to the hospital.
5: living in a flea infested pit after my mom took my brother and I and left my dad (and his dog).
Woa.
Never realized how crappy my first few memories are…
I was 2 or 3, playing on our front lawn. My grandmother called me in for lunch. I didn’t want to go in. I can remember the feeling of being really annoyed. Ignoring her didn’t work, so I turned around, stood up and bellowed…“Poo Poo Dummy”
Like Tris, I too remember the feel of the warm grass on my bare feet, the smell of earth, and the cloudless sky above.
I also remember Gramma trying to get at me with a broom as I hid underneath her kitchen table.
I can remember running past the sliding glass door in our first house. The sun was shining outside, the dog was looking in, and the TV in front of me was turned on.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but we moved out of this house when I was 2.
I’ve got a bunch of miscellaneous early memories, but the oldest one I can reliably put a date on is my (then) baby sister coming home from the hospital. I was about 2 1/2 at the time. I also have a memory of sitting in a puke-green vinyl highchair and eating a bowl of spaghetti (well, playing with it, mostly) that I think is older.
My earliest memory is of my Aunt throwing snowballs at me. This was pre-walking and language, I was proped up in the back of my parents blue beetle, watching my parents and my aunt out on a field throwing snowballs at each other. My aunt then bent down and made a snowball and threw it at me. Now I had just been watching them throw snowballs at each other, and sort of knew what to expect, and it looked rather unpleasant, and they were so much bigger! Imagine my horror at witnessing this hurtling ball of white death heading my way and I couldn’t move out of the way. I could see it coming and couldn’t move, couldn’t dodge, would have to just sit there and take it when -BLAM!- it slams into the window a few inches in front of my face and disintegrates. Not fully comprehending the nature of glass at this point, I can only assume some divine force has seen fit to spare me from the horrible fate that was bearing down on me. I shriek in laughter at my good fortune and huge relief. Just as I’m coming down off of that terrifying adrenaline high, I can see that my aunt is making another snowball! I don’t know what bizarre circumstances saved me from that first snowball, but I know this second one is Going To Kill Me, and There’s Nothing I Can Do About It. So she throws it at me and it disintegrates on the window again, and I shriek in laughter again. This goes on for quite a while, as, to them outside, it looks like I’m having a great time, when, in fact, I’ve just been terrified out of my mind.
It’s difficult to express the almost animalistic fear and relief I was experiencing at that age.
Interestingly enough, this is also one of my aunt’s earliest memories of me.
I had to be 2 years old or younger, standing in the metro with my folks ( the metro is the subway in Montreal, my home town. ) The train pulled up and stopped, and I remember a guy on the train with a HUGE afro. It was really big. Heh, that was about 1971 or 72 though.
Weirdly, every time I go to Montreal now and go in the metro and smell that strong ozone smell, I think of Afro Guy.