What is your earliest memory?
I don’t know exactly what age I was when it happened but I can recall, dimly, visiting my great-grandmother, my dad’s grandma, in her nursing home. I went with my father when he went to visit her, and I remember the thin blue light in the room, and holding her hand. She died before my brother was born so I must have been 2 or 3.
I also visited a Lutheran church (I was raised Roman Catholic but my father’s family was Lutheran) when I was so small my mother was startled when I told her I remembered it. It was full of dark woodwork and red carpet.
A.
Lying on a pallet on the floor under a hanging quilting frame. My maternal grandmother’s house. Listening to women talking as they work on a quilt, watching their needles punch down through the fabric.There’s a radio on .
Being in the sink being bathed. Apparently. I can see the kitchen looking outward from the sink, and the front edge of the sink is at the bottom. My mother says it’s impossible that I remember it because I had to be under a year. It’s not a full sensory memory though, just a snapshot, bright around the edges.
My family used to go beach hopping down the coast in a beat up old VW bus. (Single mom, five kids, it was the only vacation we could afford.) We were at Big Sur, and I was alone in the van. I was playing with one of those half red/half white spherical fishing floats, and got a hook stuck on the inside of my cheek – just like a fish! I think I was about three. I remember getting lost in the sand dunes at Pismo. And in one town, for gas money, they put me in a big, blue-tiled fountain that was in some sort of town square into which people had thrown coins. They kept telling me to get the big silver ones, but I liked the pennies because back then I thought the man on them was David Bowie.
I remember white bars in front of my face, and even now my forehead gets tight with rage – my mother told me that I would scream when I was awake and in my crib if there were people in the next room – I once managed to throw myself out of it, less than a year old. My parents invested in a bigger crib for me, and no more problems.
A pickle jar. I was probably two in Key West Florida and even then I loved sweet gherkin pickles. And there was this jar in a hallway cabinet almost as big as me full of pickles. And since even then pickle jars only came as big as a gallon it meant I was tiny, which I always was anyway. Not quite a poignant as a first memory of holding hands with a great-grandmother who probably marveled at seeing the day but piquant. So close enough.
My Uncle Earl had muscular dystrophy, and he spent most of his life in a wheelchair my grandfather made for him by adding wheels to a high-backed wicker chair. I remember my grandmother towering over me as I helped her push Earl in his chair from her living room into the kitchen of their farmhouse. Since he died in 1948 when I was only 2 years old, I had to have been very young indeed when the event took place. it’s my only memory of him.
i have 2 musical ones. i must have been a toddler. sitting on the front seat of a car in front of my great grandma’s house. the radio was play nobody promised me a rose garden. i would prefer it being held in the middle hall of our duplex & seeing the tv from a shoulder & hearing the monty python theme song.i had deliberating piking THAT one.
My very earliest memory is a dream I had, apparently after going to church with my mother, of Jesus being crucified on the posts holding up our clothesline in the back yard. Fun.
My earliest dateable memory is seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan the first time they appeared; I had very cool great grandparents and they wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I remember jumping up and down in front of the TV (I used to dance to American Bandstand as a youngster too). So Feb 9, 1964, I would have been about 3 years, 3 months old.