Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Earliest Memory
Jeff asks, and so does gekko, what is your earliest memory? Mine is of the extended family gathering for a portrait in our back yard, great-grandparents to little kids -- and off to the side is a sad little boy in drab clothes whom no one can see. When I was fifteen months, my eldest brother died of leukemia. So if this is a real memory, it's of seeing something I have since lost the ability to see.
5 comments:
I've seen these posts cropping up around but I honestly have no clue what my earliest memory is. Of the early ones, I couldn't possibly put them in chronological order.
That's spooky.
That's interesting, Don, even if a manufactured memory. If real, then I agree with Paula: spooky--and yet somehow OK. You didn't say how old you were at the time of the family gathering. I've sometimes wondered what very little kids can see before they have the ability to communicate with us, or to retain their memories.
Roy
For me, such an early memory would mean three at the most. When my brother died he was just five, and four years older than me. I might have manufactured it out of surrounding feelings, or I might have seen a ghost, some kind of echo. A friend of mine has a child (now sixteen) who when three or so would talk about the nice lady who also lived with them in the house. Later they discovered that the earlier resident had died there (old age).
My earliest clear memory is pulling up to our house in Berkeley in 1960 and seeing my granddaddy's old green Dodge which we referred to as "Sara" (short for triceratops). We got out of the car on a very sunny day and I remember walking into the house and seeing the grandfather clock, and my Dad's brother, and thinking he was my Dad, who at the time was deployed to Okinawa. I remember feeling confused and my granddaddy telling me to get my thumb out of my mouth. It was a rough year, but spoent in a lovely place with wonderful people.
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