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These Things Used To Be Mine, I Want 'Em Back
by anna at 07:05 PM on January 30, 2003
Growing up my parents ran a popular, upscale restaurant. It had distinctive chairs upholstered in a hideous red. When my son was just one year old, he used to crawl around on them. Soon thereafter my dad died and his restaurant shut down, an historic landmark to be replaced by rows of nondescript townhouses. All the furniture was auctioned off, but my sister managed to snag a couple of the chairs. She breaks them out when extra seating is needed.
So we're gathered over at her spread. My boy pipes up saying he remembered crawling around on the red chairs. In fact, he claimed to have a vivid flashback of it. I thought, no way. Someone must have told him about it. After all, no one recalls stuff that happened when they were tots. Or do they? As it turned out, he was on the level.
Deadpan comic Stephen Wright used to open his shows with this line: "A funny thing happened to me on the way over here. Oh wait, that was someone else." I was reminded of this quip when a lively discussion then ensued about my siblings' earliest memories. I volunteered one about a brutal Baptist baptism where the preacher dunked me underwater in a stream. Turns out that wasn't me, it was my older sister. I'd watched her suffer through this ordeal and adopted the memory as my own. Having never been baptized, I've been taking communion illegally all these years. It's just one more thing for me to feel guilty about.
The discussion turned to the fact that my mother was convinced we'd all contracted chicken pox as children. Which is why I'd figured it was safe to play poker at my friend's house even though his daughter had come down with it. Wrong! I wound up in intensive care as a result of my high fever and a series of grand mal seizures. If chicken pox can do this to you, I don't even want to think about smallpox.
Memory lapses must run in my family. All I recollect about the blur that was my twenties is this smoking party where this chick I'd just met cooed, "No matter what you do, never use me." She then proceeded to plant a slobbery kiss on my lips. You don't forget something like that.
My first childhood memory is of coming home from church at age five. I hastened to shed my dress clothes in favor of something more comfortable. My mom told me to leave them on as Easter pictures were planned. The photographer was late, and I threw a fit. When he arrived at last we all went down to a heretofore forbidden meadow adjacent to the bistro that doubled as our home. We three kids posed on a boulder with bunny rabbits bounding about the waist-high grass. My mood brightened somewhat as I tried to determine which one was the actual Easter Bunny on hand to hide the plastic eggs.
Soon thereafter I began school at Willston School, which made national TV after sniper John Lee Malvo shot a Home Depot shopper dead from there. That year the seventeen year locusts emerged en masse. I can still hear that crunching sound they make when you trample their carcasses. And that's it. That's about all I remember about my early years. Guess that ten (15) year binge wiped out the neurons where it was stored.
Enough of my pointless blather. Let's hear from readers as to their earliest memories in life.
comments (11)
My earliest memory…
It was before my brother was born, perhaps while my mother was pregnant, so I must have been between 3 and 4 years old. My mother let me stay up and watch a scary movie on the television. It was about an ape on a train, which was killing off the passengers. I only remember he was mean looking and had a knife. I don't know if he was supposed to be a man in an ape suit, but that is what he looked like. I don't think I was particularly scared during the movie but when mother laid me in my crib, (where I slept until my brother was born) I suddenly thought the ape was outside. I could see our trailer from the outside. I could see the light on our door. I could see my window. I could see from the ape's point of view that he was getting closer and closer to my window. At this point, I began screaming like a…well a little girl. Mother rushed in the room and I told her the ape was outside. She consoled me, promised he wasn't, and said she would leave the light on. Nevertheless, the minute she stepped out of the room I could feel the ape closing in again, so I began to scream. I don't know how long this lasted. I know I cried a lot and pleaded for my mother to stay in the room. I must have eventually fallen asleep. My poor mom.
by syd at January 30, 2003 9:27 PM
Interesting topic! I have all sorts of memory issues. This is an except from something I wrote a while back...
In the fall of the year I was five, I started kindergarten and began to know the space beyond the walls of our house, but my relationship with the world started out with a misunderstanding, which aroused in me much fear and anxiety.
Before my actual first day of school, I had no concept at all of school, that at a certain age, children leave the house and go to a place, with other children, to play and eat cookies and drink milk from little paper cartons and even to learn things, from someone they call the teacher. That morning, as my mom was dressing me, I wondered where we were going so early in the day and I knew it wasn't the time of year for the Mid-Autumn Festival because there wasn't any moon cake in the house. My mom pulled a pair of jeans over my legs, over the PJ bottoms she made for me, with elastic waistband and all, and she tugged one side of a brown flannel shirt up to my right shoulder and bent my left arm back and guided it into the other sleeve. Then she bundled me into a beige jacket that was dirtied on both cuffs and at the collar and in the front along the zipper, but it was already dirty when we got it. She zipped the zipper up snug to my neck and I began to fuss but my mom just touched me lightly on my face and said, "Lai, gen ma ma," Let's go, follow Mama.
We walked alongside a big street, the one that ran in front of our house, the one with six lanes of traffic, and my mom warned that I should never cross the big street by myself. She pointed to a building across the big street and said, there, that's where they take little children to sell, so you need to be careful outside. We crossed several small streets and came to a building with a big yard beside it and a fence around the whole thing and my mom took me past the open gate, into the building, where we saw a man in a uniform at a desk and my mom asked him something and he pointed down the hall and she nodded. I reached for my mom's hand. She took me to a big room, which struck me as being more colorful than any room I had ever seen, and it was filled with more children than I had ever seen. In her English that sounded Chinese, my mom had a few words with a woman who struck me as being older than any woman I had ever seen and afterwards my mom crouched down so her face was level with mine and said, "Guai guai de gen zhe xie xiao peng you wan," Be good and play nicely with these children. I felt like crying right then, but in the moments that it took for tears to gather around my eyes, my mom had already stood up and turned towards the doorway. I felt the outside corners of my lips turn downward and I started to sob, but quietly, because I didn’t want my mom to hear, because if she wanted to sell me to an old woman who collects children, I didn’t want her to know it scared me. I looked at the old woman's face and wondered what kind of mother she would be to me, and I looked at the other children and thought my new brothers and sisters all had nicer clothes than me.
by at January 30, 2003 9:31 PM
I don't know who wrote the entry above but man, that's intense. Selling children?
by Anna at January 30, 2003 10:20 PM
My first memory is of... what was the question?
I swear there is supposed to be some script running that stops people from posting without a name. I'm such a damn bad coder though. Anyone wanna help a brother out here? And, not that I think about it, why is that anonymous? I know who wrote that, do you really not want your name on it?
by mg at January 30, 2003 10:38 PM
Dude, how hard is it to check for a blank input field. Cmon now. You could even do it in Javascript so you wouldn't have to code a separate PHP page to handle the error.
Oh yeah, the long post above is mine. I didnt mean for it to by anonymous, but I was sufficiently distracted by having to flip back and forth between Star Search and Smackdown.
by Eviltom at January 30, 2003 11:05 PM
I really don't have any realllly early memories, but I vaguely remember being pretty young (4 or 5?) and we got our first dishwasher. Basically, I only remember about 2 seconds of that day: somehow, the dishwasher fell on top of me from my waist down so that I was trapped underneath it for a little while. It didn't hurt-- I just remember it being weird that I was underneath it.
I checked with my mom a few years ago to make sure it wasn't just something I dreamt... she said that it did indeed happen.
by Leaffin at January 30, 2003 11:48 PM
Chinese parents love to tell their kids they're going to get sold. I used to hear that all the time. They also like to tell you that you're not really their kid, and that they found you in a dumpster, or on the doorstep... a lot of my Chinese friends got that.
My earliest memory... I was either two or three, and triumphant because I had just figured out how to eat noodles with chopsticks (it wasn't the right way, though). Other memories from that year were climbing onto a high stool while my father slept and my mother was away at work (she would've been horrified-- the things that fathers let their kids do!), falling asleep on a hospital bench outside the delivery room-- alone-- while my brother was being born (again, where was my father?!), and stretching to get the Nilla wafers off the landlady's kitchen counter. I still like Nilla wafers today.
by jean at January 31, 2003 12:15 AM
My earliest memories are
1) My father, my mother and me looking out to the night sky through a telescopic lens when I was about 2 and 1/2. I was really excited so I didn't want to go to bed. Just then this bald woman appeared and sat across the street from our house. My parents told me she was the bogeyman. "He takes away little children who don't obey their parents." So of course I said my prayers and went to bed.
2) Me taking a goldfish out of the living room aquarium so my little sister could get a better look at it. Thankfully it didn't die or suffer any permanent damage.
by Lucy at January 31, 2003 12:35 AM
It's that one! That bunny!
No, baby sis, it's that' one.
Yeah but, the fuzzy one has an egg...
That scene is so cute it made me sad. I actually sighed after reading it.
I came up with a new spread bet last week:The ratio of IDF/PLO casualties. For example, if you're short the spread, you assume there will be many more Palestinian casualties this coming month. Example month of January 5 Israeli Defense Force soldiers killed/31 Palestinians... so it's a ratio bet. MG do you wanna start it up for the month of FEBRUARY? We can set dollar prices at the medium of 0/0, with the starting Bid at $10 and the Offer(to sell) at $11, and with each ebb and flow of life, it goes a dollar in either direction.
by Alphaheed at February 1, 2003 1:13 AM
p.s. We have to have the ratio as follows, 3 x IDF- PLO, So every ONE Israeli Soldier killed in action counts for 3, and one PLO is just one PLO, that will level the killing field.
by ALPHAHEED at February 1, 2003 1:24 AM
What a concept! But what strikes me as sad about that never-ending cycle of violence is how routine it's become. Somobody sets off a bomb in a crowded market, Israeli soldiers retaliate by buldozing hovels and so it goes. The world shrugs 'cuz there's nothing we can do.
by Anna at February 1, 2003 8:14 AM