Earliest Memory... - digg this
Janet and Sid have both done posts regarding early childhood memories. So I figure I'll throw my two cents in.
Memory is a tricky thing and mine has always seemed to be reeeeally strange and unpredictable in what it will cache and what it won't. Forget dates and names, but I have an affinity for faces, passwords, aaaaand something else, I forget. *rimshot* My childhood was incredibly chaotic. By the time I was five, my Mom had been married three times and I'd already lived in four states (five if you count an extended stay with my uncle). Most of my childhood memories seem ot be similar to pictures I've seen in albums so I'm not sure that those are truly memories or just my brain making little home movies.
The only one that I think I truly remember is a flight I took when I was three. My mom and dad had moved to Texas and I was staying with the aforementioned uncle in San Diego or thereabouts. I needed to fly to where my mom and dad were and so they concocted this great idea to convince me that I was five so that I could fly alone. I was a big child (I'm not so small now) so that made it easy. I was given to story telling even then so the lying was probably easy to. The only part of the memory that's really clear is the visit to the cockpit.
See this was back in the seventies. In those carefree days it wasn't unusual to get a cockpit visit and I even got the little pin on wings. I see the whole thing through this sort of gauzy haze. It was my first grand adventure. It was also a pretty shoddy display of parenting. I love my mom, but come on, not good.
Well that's it. The rest of my childhood is pretty much a blur until I hit five and things start to perk up, like getting all four Shogun Warriors, my kindergarten class, the Evel Knievel bike that I got and refused to ride without training wheels.
What about you? What can you dredge up from the memory pool?
Total Number of Comments: 5
Very interesting. Early memories have always been a fascinating topic to me.
Before age 4, I can recall only vague shapes and hazy half-memories. I have several clear memories from age 4, in 1971. A visit to KFC in Buxton and evacuating due to a forest fire are the two most vivid.
Come on Spiritual Trampers, contribute your earliest memories to this thread.
Well you already know my first memory but your post proves my theory-we may never know why we hold on to what we do.
The human brain is a funky thing. If it were easily understood then that would put a lot of folk out of a job.
i too am fascinated by early memories. and i've lost some i used to remember that have turned fuzzy and disappeared as i got older. (it seems silly when you still remember them to write them down; now of course i wish i had.) still, none were as dramatic as taking a plane ride at age 3. that is huge
Yeah it's good to try and record them while you can. In my family we have a big "tradition" of trying to keep all sorts of memories alive through oral storytelling. Not a gathering goes by that someone doesn't recount some past family action.