The other memory thread made me think of earliest memories.
So here’s mine. I was in the back seat of my parent’s '62 Cadillac, playing with a toy,
when all of a sudden I looked up and, in the late afternoon sky, I saw a tiger in the
orange clouds. It was almost like my consciousness clicked on. Much later I quizzed
my mom and she confirmed we were on a trip to Canada, going up US 2 towards
Buffalo, and (in those innocent days before child seats) they had put a mattress in
the back seat for me to play on. It was 1963, and I was 10 months old.
The very first time I remember consciously thinking something was one night when I was 3 years old. I had two short dreams, one involving riding in a car and opening the door while it was moving. The other was something about a purple mailbox and a tunnel. When I woke up I distinctly remember thinking the words “My eyes are hot.” Ah, memories…
I must have only been about a year old or so. My mother came in to my bedroom in the middle of the night as I must have been crying over a bad dream or something, and picked me up and carried me out to the living room. The room was dark, lit only by the street light outside shining through the drapes. My mom must have then rocked me to sleep.
My first memory is of sitting on a big pile of dirt and scooping up a fistful to eat. I don’t know how old I was-- must have been really young (or else I was stupid.)
I think it’s this one: I’m in bed at night with my parents nearby. They keep trying to turn off the light but every time they do I see a vision of a red cartoon car in the darkness. For some reason I find this terrifying, so I whinge until they turn it back on.
I was 2. I was playing in the “playground” of our rental unit. I crossed the street, climbed a bale of straw and remember singing “I’m the king of the castle…”
This was in Scotland. I visited the same place a couple of decades ago and was AMAZED at how small it all was.
There must be something about opening a card door while the car is moving that fascinates kids. I believe that’s my first memory also.
I was somewhere in the neighborhood of two years old. I was in the back seat and opened the door of our slowly moving car. It must have been slow because I hung onto the door handle which swung me out of the car. I then let go and fell to the pavement. I can clearly remember watching the back of the car receding before they could get it stopped.
There is another possible first but I’m pretty sure that the car door is the one.
I don’t rightly remember which one was actually my first, but I think it was when I was 2 or 3 (which would put it around 1973 or 74) – my mother and father were still together, so it must have been my first as my other very early memories was when they were divorced. Anyway, my father, a jazz trumpet player, was playing a gig at some place. I remembered very little about it except three things:
The sign had this cool neon flower type arrangement where the lights of said flower-type arrangement would rotate around the center and flash and stuff. It was quite mesmerising to a toddler such as me and probably triggered my inner geekitude that would provide me with further years of fascination for shiny things.
The room in which we stayed to prepare for the gig (for it was a motor hotel of sorts) had green paisly-type upholstery. Very 70s chic.
I remember wandering about backstage as the band members readied their gear and wondering what was behind that huge flowing curtain. As it turned out, people were behind that huge flowing curtain. All seated and waiting for the show to start. “Sing!” they all started to shout at me. Mortified, I hastily returned to the safe side of the curtain, doubtless disappointing the assemblage who were hoping for a bit of swing in miniature.
In a freak coincidence, back in 2002 I took a job as a tech for a barrel-scraping remerchant of refurb goods. Next door was a quasi-strip joint/bar/motor hotel called The Sword and Sheild. It had a big neon sign in a flower type arrangement where the lights of said flower-type arrangement would rotate around the center and flash and stuff.
I was in my bedroom looking out the window. On the window was one of those vinyl stickers with a fireman on it that said that a child was in the room (so firefighters would know to look for a child should the house be in danger).
My parents were taking me to my first theater movie (Empire Strikes Back) and we stopped at the mall first where they looked around in a store called World Bazaar and I wandered around pretending my hand (all fingers together) was the millennium falcon.
I have a herd from about the same time. The spring and summer of my 3rd or 4th year (seems like we lived there for an entire childhood, but I’m sure we moved before I turned 5) we lived next door to this cute little girl. Ah, what a sweetie she was… Her dad worked nights so we had to be vewy vewy quiet in the house but we spent most of the time in the backyards. She had a big tree, but I had a sandbox. It snowed on the first day of spring that year, I felt betrayed by god… Nights in that house seemed to be full of terror. Not abuse or anything, I think I was probably afraid of the dark and had nightmares (seems my sons had a lot of nightmares at that age, too).
One day my sister walked into the room, she had eaten all the outside part of a carrot and had only the core thing and told me some kind of big sister fib about where it came from.
Got bronchitis in the winter, I don’t know if it was before or after that glorious summer, but I spent a few days in the hospital.
All of those are jumbled together and I have no way of telling what order any of that happened. Those are just a few - I remember Easter at that house, I remember endless days of playing in the yard and in the street. But mostly I remember that little girl.
My older brother and I are Irish twins- born less than a year apart, and my first memory is of him taking my bottle and drinking it. So between 1 and 2, I’d say.
I was less than 2. I had a little red wagon, and I had pulled it into our back yard, where a couple of “older” boys were digging a hole. I asked them what they were doing, and they said they were digging a hole to China. I watched them for a while, and when they still hadn’t reach China, I left with my little red wagon.
Around the same time: I was in a wicker stroller, and someone was pushing me down a stone path. On each side there was a pond of large goldfish. I tried to reach out to catch one of the fish, but I couldn’t reach that far. At the end of the path, we entered a building that was filled with thousands of flowers. (Many years later, I mentioned this memory to my mother. She said we did have a wicker stroller, and the apartment we lived in at the time was right across the street of the botanical garden. And yes, they had a pond with goldfish, and it was bisected by a stone path.)
I have a very vague memory of lying in a basket on the livingroom floor and watching the TV upside down. That basket was passed down to a cousin when I was about two but we didn’t get a TV until I was nearly a year old, so that puts it somewhere in that second year. (Still got that TV, a B&W RCA. Doesn’t work though.)
I can clearly remember seeing plywood over the kitchen window during Typhoon Freda, in October of '62, when I was a few months short of three. I can also remember going to Stanley Park and having to return to the house first because I didn’t have my panties on! Mom says I was about two, just out of toilet training.
Can’t recall the ages, but one of the earliest memories I have is being pushed in a stroller in a shopping center.
Another memory I have is walking with my dad at San Jost State University. One day, about twenty years later, while walking down the hall of the Faculty Office, I froze, suddenly remembering that I had been in that same place 2 decades ago.
I was around 2, and about the height of a lower cabinet door on a kitchen counter. I opened the door, sat down, pulled a bunch of cans out, and put them inside my shirt. My mom has a picture of me with the cans.
Another early memory is of my first day at preschool or kindergarten, don’t remember which. A cute girl with flaming red hair ran up to me and said, “What’s your name?” I told her, and then she said, “That’s a stupid name!” and ran off. Thus began a lifetime of difficulty with chicks, and a thing for red hair.
I had to be less than two, because we were still living in Virginia. My dad and I were in the car. I have no memory where we were or what we were doing, but we were driving home, thru a small town, a developement (I guess) with lots of stop signs and turns. I was standing in the middle of the front seat (it was late '63 or early '64 ). At each stop sign, dad asked me which way to turn. I’d point left or right. I guess we made it home…
I remember lying on my back, might have been in a cot, and the telly must have been on in the bedroom because there was a square of moving colours above me. I had a bit of a cold, and my mother had put some Vick vaporub on my chest. Bad move, because my kiddy fingers wiped across the stuff, and then across my eyes.
There’s that, and remembering being on the po (potty) in the bedroom havin’ a wee.
). At each stop sign, dad asked me which way to turn. I’d point left or right. I guess we made it home…