Weekend Question Thread

What is your earliest memory?

Mine is of attending a Lutheran church service. It was my father’s family’s church, and I remember dark wood and red carpeting. I think I was three.

A.

12 thoughts on “Weekend Question Thread

  1. Being bathed in the kitchen sink. It was really bright. My dad was sitting at the table and he was laughing, ginger hair in the sun. I don’t know how old I was, but not very if I was in the sink I guess.

  2. Roughly the same age — three — several different things…they’re kind of like little film loops in my head.
    But to name just one, going to a place called the Dennis the Menace Park in Monterrey. The park’s still there almost 50 years later, and still has the old train engine I remember playing in and around.

  3. Two, both from late summer ’63 when I was 3 1/2: Riding in my older neighbor Charlie Vinroot’s convertible, with the top down and sitting up on top of the back seat, around the back lot of Charlotte’s Park Road Shopping Center (where a 50-year time capsule commemorating the Park Terrace Theatre’s 1964 opening will be unsealed tomorrow), and my youngest brother’s baptism.

  4. not sure which, but both musical. i am in the car paked by my great-grandma’s house + i never promised you a rose garden on the radio. or i am being held up and see a teevee by a doorway + the monty-python theme song is playing. 2 or 3.

  5. Being afraid of Pete’s Dragon in the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disney World. I was about 3 years old and my cousin never let me forget it.

  6. I remember standing out in the yard, must’ve been spring/summer, and looking at the sky and watching 4-plane formations of bombers going to Great Britain, I suppose. It seemed as if the sky was full of 4-plane formations, maybe over 100 aircraft.
    I was born in Feb ’41 so this was either the summer of 1943 when I was two and a half of a year later in 1944.

  7. Helping my grandmother push my uncle’s wheelchair from their living room into their kitchen. He was afflicted with, we believe, muscular dystrophy, and died in 1948 at the age of 36. Since I was born in 1946, I was no older than 2.

  8. I was around three years old, living in Biloxi, MS, and I was outside fucking around. Unsupervised, as was the style at the time. Well, I saw a cocoon hanging from some kind of little evergreen bush. Now, I had seen Sesame Street and the like–I knew that BUTTERFLIES came out of cocoons! And butterflies never hurt anyone, right? So I reached out with my stupid little child’s hand, and lightly squeezed the brown silk sac.
    At which point a motherfucking spider about three feet wide came boiling out of that goddamn thing. I managed not to shit myself somehow, but I never trusted nature again.

  9. going trick-or-treating in a home-made mouse costume on halloween 1949, a month before my third birthday. i was terrified someone would stem on my “tail” (actually, a piece of rope).

  10. I remember sitting on my big-boy bed, looking out the window and watching some small birds build a nest under a red tile on the roof of the house next door. The sky was so blue that it would make any artist blush to paint it; no one would believe it fi they did.
    One bird was flying in and out from under one particular tile and one twig at a time building a home, and sometimes another bird would poke her head out and chirp (which I could hear through the other window that was not painted shut and was open and the air was cool), and the first bird would show up with a fresh twig, and they would both disappear under the tile. I remember hoping that I would see the babies someday, but I don’t remember if I ever did.
    Rgds,
    Tengrain

  11. I have two memory fragments from when I was very young. The first is playing with the mail slot in an aluminum screen door – just poking at it from indoors with my fingertips so that it would pop open because I liked to listen to the noise it made when it clinked back shut. The second is a pattern of glitter and abstract boomerang shapes in a 50’s era formica table top. My parents have confirmed that both of those memories are from a house that our family moved out of when I was about 18 months old.

  12. My grandfather took me to the opening of the Verranzano Narrows Bridge in NYC. It it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time. It was 11/21/64, I was born 11/1/61.

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