I've always been fascinated by attempts to figure out when one's earliest memories are.
I suspect that we all remember the sensation of our warm residence inside our mothers, and the early days of seeing daylight for the first time, and much more, but for some reason, have suppressed those memories, just as we lose sight of our dreams within moments after waking up from them.
Similarly, my mother claims that a new mother forgets the agony of labor and childbirth as soon as she holds her baby -- suppression of memories of pain as an adult due to the magic of the great excitement of welcoming a new baby.
Anyway, I'd like to start blogging about some early memories, significant or not, sentimental or analytical. Along the way, I will probably get distracted and ramble on about related topics that come to mind as a result.
Among my very first conscious memories are the following (I think I must have been younger than 2 when all of these occurred):
+holding onto my father's legs as if they were tree trunks that would provide safety and stability
+sitting in a chair (captain's chair type, probably with a pillow for a cusion) in a corner of my grandmother's kitchen in Irving, which I perceived as huge. I remember her as a beautiful goddess-like lady dancing around an island of sorts in the middle of the kitchen, making rolls or cookies or something . . . .and some of my young cousins, older than myself, running around laughing.
Since I was born in summer, and this is a very early memory, I have to wonder if this may have been perhaps the second Christmas of my life? Lots of baking was going on. Mostly I perceived my grandmother's bright and energetic spirit.
+seeing a cat for the first time --I know I was less than one year old when this happened -- and badly wanting to have it. I believe it was a stray in our yard that I petted. There are, in fact, family movies of me doing that, somewhere. I remember lots of crying later, as some of us got ringworm from that cat. I remember the kids across the street crying about that.
+being "teased" by my brothers quite a bit, especially my #2 brother. They liked to trick me and see me be confounded and cry as a result.
I'm very ashamed to confess that as a result of how MUCH such teasing went on, I believed it was a normal part of being an older sibling, and years later when my sister was born, I engaged in several phases of deliberate teasing of her with the same goal that my brothers had when they teased me. My teasing of her left her with some bitter memories though I meant it in fun.
Anyway, I, too, felt beseiged by teasing at a young age, by my brothers.
Of course, we also had a lot of fun times in each other's company! Such as when my #2 brother and I jumped for a very long time on trampolines set up in a retail store's parking lot in Canada, where we spent the summers of 1961 and 1965.
He and I actually had quite a lot of fun and funny times during those summers. Our usual friends from back home were gone, so we were forced to be each other's companions. I don't remember as much any interactions with my #1 brother on those trips . . . . perhaps because he had to leave early for Boy Scout camps and such.
+lots of flower garden scenes with my father and my maternal grandmother, both of whom did quite a bit of gardening. In my memories, I would be playing nearby while they did their gardening in their respective yards.
She grew lots of roses and peonies. He grew lots of iris, and once I got old enough, he helped me plant my own pansy garden each year while we still lived on 15th Street in Oklahoma City.
Since I left that home at age 7, that makes me think that the pansy gardening probably took place between about age 3 and 6.
+seeing dust float in sunbeams in the dining room in the house on 15th Street while my mother ironed and watched soap operas. I was truly fascinated by that floating dust and would try to catch the dust particles in my hands. I couldn't figure out why, after apparently grabbing some, I didn't see any dust on my hands.
That's enough early memories for the first blog entry beyond my list of proposed random topics.
1 comment:
I have enjoyed reading your blog posts! Since I studied memory, I thought I would make a comment about what you said about not remembering everything when we were young. Rather than suppressing memories, not being able to remember things of the womb and youth has a lot to do with how our brains are developing at that age. There are very few neural networks in our early brains. Our perceptions are very different and the way they are stored are very different than when our brains already have a network built upon which to draw and add. Science now admits that it really knows very little about the brain compared to how amazingly awesome it is. Science used to posit that once we reached a certain developmental level that we stopped making new neurons and that our brain didn't change much anymore, especially that once damage or loss occured that it just remained that way. We know more now about brain plasticity - the ways it can still change and heal and grow - even new neurons and new neural networking pathways. Many new discovories about how our brains work are occuring all the time. Maybe one day we will have the wisdom and/or technology to access more of our early perceptions. In the meantime, it is great to write down our recollections and ponder about how amazing life is. Thanks for sharing your stories!
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