My earliest memory is from about 2 or 3 years old. I had a pet box turtle who stayed in one corner of our backyard. One morning I went to his corner, and he wasn’t there. I freaked out, crying and searching for him. I found him near a tree in another corner of the yard. Whew.
Long memories run in my family. I remember a lot of stuff, though most of it is fragments:
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Nursing. Just the feel of it with my eyes closed, just for a fraction of a moment. I can feel the shape and texture of the nipple, and the structures under the skin (all flattened and stretched). My mom stopped nursing me when I was about 6 months old.
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Being carried to the laundromat sitting in the laundry basket (on top of the clothes). I can smell the air (sunny slightly damp morning smells), smell the laundry detergent, and feel the swing-thump of the basket as it bumped against my mom’s leg. This was a regular activity, and I loved it. Maybe 6-8 months old? I could sit up but don’t know if I could crawl. Secondary memory on that, though - I remember that one because I remember having remembered it when I was about 2, when I wanted to ride in the laundry basket like I used to, but I was too big. I recall being very disappointed (at 2), and being angry that the basket seemed a lot smaller than it had been. It seemed to me that I was always the same size, but everything else kept shrinking and shrinking, and it frustrated me that I couldn’t make it stop.
I remember a ton of other cool things, like the visceral joy of hearing my mother laugh with delight at something I did (pre-walking), and moments when I was really proud of myself (like when I figured out all by myself that the still water in a pool was really ice, and therefore could be walked across…), and moments when I learned something new about someone, like that my mom couldn’t fix everything because she couldn’t fix my busted balloon (sew it, sew it!). Loads of stuff from about 1-3 years old, some stuff for the next few years, almost nothing from around 6-7, and gradually more again later. Fortunately, I forgot most of the awful stuff about my early years. More than plenty of that, too, but I didn’t store it for easy recall (hence the variations in volume of recall over the years).
sliv, that story is priceless… remembering what it was like is one of the reasons I find watching my son so amazing. I hope he manages to remember some of this stuff, too…
My earliest memory is screaming my head off at the doctor’s office as I got a shot in the butt. I was 2 or 3.
I remember cutting the tip of my finger off when I was 3.
My earliest memory is of when I was either 3 or 2. It is of me and my dad at the park and i am pushing myself along on one of those plastic minituare cars.
…I miss my dad.
My earliest memory is watching the fireworks from the vantage point of my father’s shoulders on the 4th of July, 1976 in Philadelphia. I was almost 2.
I remember being in my crib playing with my Busy Box. It had this cool thing on it where you pushed down something and it made a little metal ball shoot up a tube and ring a bell. Hit it over and over.
I must have been about 2. I thought it was rare to remember that far back, but I guess not!
Mom carrying me up the stairs of our neighbor’s split level ranch house. Debbie (neighbor) offers me candy from a crystal holder. Mom says I can’t have any. Mom puts me on the brown shag carpet, as my brother Jacob pushes by to play in Jason’s room down the hall. I want to play, so I crawl down the hall after them. They don’t want me in the room, so they put a giant teddy bear blocking the hall. I sat and cried because I was disappointed.
We moved out of that neighborhood when I was about 18 months.
–Tim
Earliest memory: being in my family’s apartment, watching the new battery-operated toy robot my uncle bought for me walk across the tabletop, stop, open its chest, fire flashing “laser” lights, close its chest, and repeat.
Second-earliest memory: watching a TV commercial talk about something you can buy by calling a number right now. So I promptly toddled to the phone and started dialing away at random…