T w e n t y S i d e d
I may not have energy for creative writing right now, but I do have energy for non-fiction, which was actually my specialty in college. I’m not going to promise any schedule or series, if there will be one or forty. But, if the inspiration strikes, I do have many amusing short stories from my real life that I’ve meant for a long time to write down.
This one in particular is from 1999, and my first tangible memory ever. Usually someone’s first memory is a mildly amusing but confusing, like being told about someone else’s dream. It just doesn’t hold the same oomph to the people listening as it did the person living it, and really only people who are in the story are interested.
“I’m in the living room, Sesame Street is playing, I have a block in my mouth and I’ve just noticed I have free will.” Good, but just doesn’t fill up a story like something later in life might. That snippet is actually my third or forth memory.
My first is far, far more entertaining.
It is 1999, likely November. My mom is very, very pregnant with my baby brother; Peter. I am one year and ten months old. I am standing in some dusty basement with both of my parents, likely a church event, although being less than two makes the details of exactly what event too vague to make out.
I am wearing tights, which I despise, the seam rides up under my toes in my teeny tiny mary janes and brings me immeasurable rage. My skirt does not swish as much as I would like, I like fabrics that swish, not denim, denim is boring. The floor is slippery and I am experimenting with sliding my shoes on the linoleum. The room is cold, but I would still rather not have a long-sleeved shirt on under my dress, I don’t like things on my wrists.
A man walks up to us. He is tall; everyone is tall compared to me. I instantly don’t like him; he is using a exaggerated voice when he greets me, and my parents seem not to like him either. He is talking a lot, they are not engaging much. I am distracted by slipping my shoes across the floor back and forth until he leans down to smile at me, talking to me directly. “You’re not even going to remember this, are you, little lady?” Rude, how does he know what I’m going to remember? He is talking a lot about the ‘nineties’, and how I’m not going to be old enough to remember these ‘nineties’ at all, I am offended, my parents are laughing and agreeing.
I don’t understand every word he’s saying, but he keeps talking to me and I get the gist. “This is an important time. You’re barely going to be a part of it. Silly toddler doesn’t know what’s happening or how important it is.”
I decide he is going to be wrong, I am going to remember this so good, this stupid man doesn’t know what he is talking about. The nineties are important, and ending. I am almost two. I do not like this man, and I do not like being underestimated. He holds out his hand to my dad and shakes it. I imitate the motion, holding out my hand for him to shake. He seems delighted, and shakes my hand too, but what he does not know is I am proving him wrong as we speak, silly man.
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First memories are so weird/random, yeah. The earliest of mine that I can clearly remember is probably back when I was 3 or 4. I was standing in the car porch of my house, and I was playing with what I know now was an egg. I remember squeezing too hard and the egg cracked/broke, and some of the egg white dripped onto the car porch in an area that gets heated by the sun. That’s about all of the memory that I can recall, but the reason why I remember it is because that egg white basically got cooked into the tile and every time I walked past it, the memory of how it came to be would leap back into my mind.
I love the defiant energy of your earliest memory being someone telling you that you wouldn’t remember it.
I’ve no idea what age my first memory was, young enough my parents didn’t believe that I remembered it when I told them. [content warning: abuse mention & familial death under the spoilers] It was riding in the car with my parents
on the way to see a dying grandfather, it was the mountains we drove through to get there, the beautiful sedimentary rock outside my window that was all I could see from my upwards-facing angle in the infant car-seat/cradle thing. I more vaguely rememberthe tension and horror of my father meeting his abuser for the first time in decades, the many tubes the man was hooked up to, my refusal to go near the man despite encouragement that “this may be my only chance to meet him.” (Only technically true – I got plenty of opportunity to become familiar with the essence of the man through my father’s own abuse.)The color of the rock in the cool sunlight is what stuck in my brain as if snared in a steel trap though.I have no idea what my first memory is; my folks recorded home movies so my first memory may be watching other, older memories.
Like that time I turned 2 and someone got trick candles for the birthday cake.
I think I’m in a similar position. We had a lot of old photos and slides and first both my parents than my mom had us watch those very often, in what I know believe was first an attempt to keep the family together then an attempt to relive “the good times”. As a result I don’t know if I actually genuinely remember stuff or if my brain fabricated the images from those pictures and what you expect a small child experience to be.
My oldest surviving memory is seeing the ocean on a trip to Florida to visit some semi-distant relative. It was just so big, going out to the horizon with nothing else in sight, and the vastness of it was terrifying.
I also vaguely remember gathering seashells and putting them in a stocking, for some reason.
Yo, that memory rocks.
It is incomprehensible to me that people can have memories below 4 or 5, but this is one I can definitely get behind.
I have a handful of fairly boring snippets from around 4. A kiddie pool in the yard at my (20 some years older) sister’s house, I think one of the staircase there and my (5 years older) niece with some fairy wings, mom picking me up in the driveway at home probably for the last time, slipping in a reservoir or something (still can’t swim) and having been fished out. Definitely got bag lunch from home on first day of kindergarten, though I don’t think I got much of the rest of that year (I do remember once falling asleep on the bus home), but after 1st grade the system was functioning.
I think my first memory is seeing a baby crawl around in our living room. My mom picked him up and then we all went outside.
That’s basically it, except that I distinctly remember that I was wearing a suit. Maybe we were going to church? There is also a family photo at about that time, so we might have been heading out for that. My brother is 22 months younger than me, so if he was crawling I would have been about 2 and a half.
One of my first memories was of me playing in the living room by myself when I was four or five and thinking “I will remember this years later”. I still do. I even remember what I was playing, I was pretending to be Mario.
I think I’m in a similar position. We had a lot of old photos and slides and first both my parents than my mom had us watch those very often, in what I know believe was first an attempt to keep the family together then an attempt to relive “the good times”. Tap Road