What Is Your Earliest Memory?

July 26, 2001 10:19 AM

What Is Your Earliest Memory? The San Francisco Exploratorium asked this question and got these responses on their website. The project is over now, so you can't add to their list, but that's not to say you couldn't mention it here.
posted by briank (29 comments total)

The first thing I can clearly remember is being at Sears with my brother and mom. An elderly woman offered to watch my brother and me as Mom goes to try on some clothes. She asks me how old I am, and I say "Two." And I remember visualizing the number 2, like it was sketched out in 3-D, and colored a dark blue. Then she asks my brother how old he is, and he says "Five," and I visualize the number 5, sketched and given perspective, colored red this time. I think the visualizing had something to do with something I saw on Sesame Street. My first memory includes the influence of television... go figure.
posted by jason at 10:27 AM on July 26, 2001

I was born in Washington DC. I remember seeing the Washington Monument at night, the red lights at it's tip peeking out at me through the window.

Scared the crap out of me.
posted by dong_resin at 10:35 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember my great-grandmother looking down on me while I was being held by my mom - we were in my grandparents back yard. I think I was around 6 months old.

After that, I have scattered memories - one clear one of my grandfather bringing my sister and I licorice shortly before he died. I was 5 or 6 then (my sister was old enough to be walking and talking).

He died the year I was six - I remember looking at him in his coffin, wondering what was going on. I think about that day often... my great-grandmother (the one listed above) died 2 weeks ago, and her funeral was held in the same funeral home as my grandfather's. I met a friend of hers who told me I looked just like my grandfather when he was my age. Made me wonder (again) who he was and how my life would be different if he were still here.

...

Sorry about the rambling. Been sorta mulling these things over recently. She was a huge influence on my life, and I miss her. (but hope I make it to 95, too)
posted by Irontom at 10:37 AM on July 26, 2001

Hmm, earliest I can think of would be my dad + family launching an old wood 29 foot Egg Harbor boat, and it almost sinking as the wood was not prepared with the garden hose for the week prior so it would swell. I don't know exactly how old I was, but I can find out from my family. I was really young though. 2-4 I estimate.

Next memory would be stealing a cap gun from the local five and dime, getting away with it, until my mom noticed it after a successful getaway, and then being forced to go return it and confess to the cashier. I was crushed.
posted by a3matrix at 10:54 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember my mom not being too happy about my pouring a whole bottle of shampoo on a hot radiator and then blaming it on my teddy bear. Luckily, my personal accountability skills are much better now...
posted by machaus at 10:57 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember when my younger sister was born. That would have been when I was 28 months old.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:58 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember when I was 10 or 11. Everything before that is a blur.
posted by corpse at 11:00 AM on July 26, 2001

dunno, can't remember anything. I've been told I smoked pot once or twice, though.
posted by msacheson at 11:02 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember looking out a window and seeing a squirrel eating at a bird feeder. I think I was thinking something along the lines of "fluffy tail!" I was 3.
posted by christina at 11:08 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember my mum being pregnant with my sister, and I can clearly see now my father pacing and chain smoking in the hallway of the hospital waiting for Rachel to be born. I was 2 1/2. I was so bored at the hospital that the nurses gave me one of those life-size baby dolls they use to teach new mothers how to safely hold and bathe their babies - I named her baby Rachel and so I went home from the hospital with a baby just like my Mum. heh. That was the only doll I ever owned.
posted by hannahkitty at 11:13 AM on July 26, 2001

Birth of my brother, age 32 months.
Age 2-3 seems to be the earliest verifiable age in most cases. I also remember around this time noticing for the first time that I was "talking without making sound" -- thinking -- and asking my mother what it was. Anybody else remember their first consciousness of the thinking process?
posted by beagle at 11:17 AM on July 26, 2001

i remember some time around christmas, and everyone was decorating the christmas tree. i was too young to walk, but i figured out how to scale the bars of my crib.

the first time i got out was cool, but my mom put me back in after i'd crawled out to the living room. the second time i tried getting out wasn't as successful, as i fell and hit my head. it was one in a string of head injuries at an early age.
posted by moz at 11:21 AM on July 26, 2001

I remember floating in a pool with my dad. I was wearing a clear inflatable ring with an anchor on it. My parents confirmed the memory. I was about 2 years old, and we were in San Diego.
posted by waxpancake at 11:28 AM on July 26, 2001

I was just under two, and the Amway reps were by selling my parents some smoke detectors. My mom hit the test button and it made a loud screeching smoke detector noise, and I jumped up on the Amway lady to get away from it.

After than and up until the age of six or so, I was so scared of loud noises that every time there was a fire drill at my preschool or kindergarten, I would just stand in the middle of the room with my hands over my ears and scream.
posted by Vetinari at 11:30 AM on July 26, 2001

Had to be around 2 or 3 - had those colored wood blocks of different shapes and sizes, built a pile of blocks and was pushing it around the floor, arrived on the heater on the floor and left them there, parents weren't too happy with the burning smell and I wasn't happy with charred blocks. Also remember we lost our dog and my dad was out looking for it and calling for it.

Some time later, out looking at old rusted cars with my dad. He had a camera, we still have a few nice prints from that. Maybe I remember from the pictures but I don't think so, I think they just reinforced the memories.

My sister being born, I would have been 3 months shy of 3. My parents tried to have her at home but she was breech birth so there was a quick trip to the hospital.

A backpacking trip with my father and my uncles, followed them into the lake and almost drowned. Mostly memories of wonder and exploration, I've been back to that area many times but never 'over the mountain' that we went to on that trip so that always created a special desire to go back there and see what is over that mountain.

Similarly (and drifting from the first memories topic) I was lucky enough to return to another spot that held very early memories. I had rememberd coming over the top of a mountain pass and looking down into a valley with the sun setting on the other side, a very picturesque view that was worthy of a fine painting. For some reason this view would come back to me occasionally in dreams and so returning to it and figuring out where it was was very good for me.

Seems like I remember quite a bit...
posted by mutagen at 11:53 AM on July 26, 2001

I have three memories vying for earliest - I think I know what order they come in, but I have no one to verify it for me.

1) I'm laying in a crib, and I see my mother and my uncle's faces smiling down on me blurrily. I could be anywhere from 6-9 mos. old.

2) I am one. I am standing in my dining room, and my mother walks past me into the kitchen. Once she's gone, I turn around and walk out onto the front steps through the screen door. Our dog Bandit follows me, and I have a vague comfortable sense that I used to be frightened of Bandit, but now I understand how he protects me. His fur is warm with sunlight, and he licks my face as I lean against him. He seems huge. He's wearing a bandana/kerchief around his neck, and I practice saying "Bandana" as I look up to the finial atop our garage. It always fills me with a weird, otherworldly horror when I look at it, as though it were staring at me, ready to crawl creepily across the garage roof and "get me". Later on I would learn the word "alien" and I would think of that finial.

3) I am still one. I am asleep in my parents' bed, and they are sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor. I have a dream that wolves are breaking into our windows (I had just learned the word wolf, probably from Little Red Riding Hood), and I sit up and yell, pointing at my window. It's just Bandit, our dog, trying to come in through a broken screen. My dad wakes up, yells at Bandit, and goes back to sleep. I don't think he even looks at me. I climb off the bed carefully, sneaking down the hallway to the kitchen. I am wearing diapers and they hamper my walking. I see a loaf of bread in a plastic bag on the counter, so I pull a chair over to it and climb up. Not knowing how to open the package, I simply poke my finger through the bag and start pulling out chunks of bread. My great-grandmother walks down the hall and scolds me when she sees what I am doing. I remember feeling resentful, knowing that it would be *forever* (5 or 10 min. to a 1 year old) before my mother would wake up and feed me.
posted by annathea at 12:09 PM on July 26, 2001

It was a week or so before my second birthday, and I wanted new toys, but I was told I would get them only on my birthday. So I threw a few of my dinky cars out the balcony, we used to live on the 4th floor (5th floor for you folks in the US), and by the time our maid went down to collect the cars, someone had stolen 'em.

There was this time when my family were driving towards the suburbs in Bombay, and there was this car ahead of us that was leaking petrol, so my dad speed up, overtook 'em and asked them to stop. I remember the petrol trail being on fire for some strange reason, but I am not sure whether it was or not. I do know that my dad did stop the other car, and tell them about their leak.

When I was a kid, I used to bug my mom a lot by asking her about things that had happened. I would remember things by the clothes she and I were wearing, but wouldn't remember what happened. So it would be basically like this, I'd go up to my mom in the kitchen, and ask her "What happened on the day when I was wearing a blue t-shirt, and black shorts and she wearing a green sari?" and she
posted by riffola at 12:11 PM on July 26, 2001

oops :)

... and she would furrow her brow, and think for a few seconds, surprisingly enough she usually knew what I was talking about.
posted by riffola at 12:12 PM on July 26, 2001

I remember the day of April 26, 1970. It was two days before my 3rd birthday and we were visiting my grandparents in Houston, TX. I was being a brat about something and turned over a full bowl of cereal and ran out to the patio barefoot. Moments later, I was bitten right between my big and second toes by a fire ant. My foot got hugely swollen and I had to go to the hospital, where I just couldn't be calmed down. Consequently, I was given a shot of sedatives with the biggest needle I had ever seen, and I passed out almost instantly.

Oddly enough, I have absolutely no memory of anything that happened from then until literally one year and two days later, when I have a clear memory of my 4th birthday party. From there on I remember all of the major highlights pretty clearly.
posted by Dreama at 12:17 PM on July 26, 2001

It's the country's bicentennial, July 4th, 1976, and there's some sort of celebration in a parking lot near my grandparents' home. I'm on my grandfather's lap, sitting at the steering wheel of a giant hook-and-ladder fire truck that is decorated for the day. I'm having the time of my life playing on that fire truck. I'm about three and a half at the time.
posted by mathowie at 12:23 PM on July 26, 2001

i remember burning up with a fever of 105, not understanding why i was so hot. mom was frantic and incoherent, emptying bags of ice into a tub filled with cold water and then - to my surprise - dunking me.

it was scarlet fever. mom tells me i was fourteen months old. she still cries when anyone in the family mentions it: she feels guilty that it's my first memory. i told her i prefer to think the memory as being rescued.
posted by patricking at 12:29 PM on July 26, 2001

I remember being in a Home daycare run by some lady named roxanne i must of been like 2 or 3 and i remember getting angry with some girl who keeped on pushing me around so i pushed her back and she hit her head on a table.

i felt bad but it felt so good to fight back.

crazy.
posted by Qambient at 1:04 PM on July 26, 2001

It was just after my second birthday, summer in Montreal, and we were at a friend of my parents' pool. My dad has photos of me running around the pool. That would be just before I couldn't restrain myself any further and jumped in.

What I remember clearly is the bubbles on the way down, the feeling of my hair floating around my head and then the feeling of being in control on the way up paddling, just before my father zoomed underneath me and jettisoned me to the surface. I remember being annoyed that he did that, because I was doing fine.

The rest of the story is that my dog jumped in after a tennis ball and unlike me, didn't have the ability to dog paddle and started to drown. A big day for Rescue Dad, but I don't remember that part. I just remember the corner of the pool and the bubbles and my hair and the feeling of being entirely and completely in control.

Next clearest memory is about a year later, before my sister was born, when I was almost three. I was sitting with my mom reading a book and I recall the words turning from shapes in a book into words that I understood. It was a big "ah ha!" moment, that it wasn't just shapes but that each shape MEANT something. Specifically, I recall the word "the". It was the start of a life-long addiction to reading and meaning.
posted by Suzanne at 1:18 PM on July 26, 2001

I remember being in my father's arms on a subway platform somewhere in Manhattan (I was born in the city, all of my earliest memories are urban). I must have been two or three years old. I watched an express train go by on the center tracks and asked my father why it didn't stop (or something to that effect). He tried to explain express trains to me, but I didn't really understand. I thought that the only way to get on the express was to climb over the tracks, slide through the bars, and jump for it when it came by. I remember being very glad we weren't taking an express.
posted by swerve at 2:39 PM on July 26, 2001

I remember Metafilter when it was blue text on white background. I was 37.
posted by ParisParamus at 3:54 PM on July 26, 2001

I remember Metafilter when it was blue text on white background. I was 37.
posted by ParisParamus at 3:54 PM on July 26, 2001

I have many memories of my grandmother, the one who for a time cared for my brother and I when we were infants, but I couldn't tell you if those memories are during that time or after. For me, although she's 91, curled in a fetal position in the nursing home, waiting for God or some other mercy, my grandma is forever in that little trailer in the woods, waking up before everyone to take a walk as the river fog lifts, the dew dries and the sun comes over the hills. I don't particularly need or want to place a date on those memories.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:14 PM on July 26, 2001

I didn't realize that my first memory was a real one and not a dream until last year.

I was in a completely dark room and standing up in a crib crying. I was crying because I heard my mother and father in a terrifically loud an seemingly (from an infant's point of view) violent argument. At some point, silence breaks the arguing and I hear my mother's footsteps. She opens the door and light floods the room. She picks me up and holds me tightly crying along with me.

I told my mom about this "dream" last year. My mom stopped and looked at me in astonishment. Apparently I was only about 7 months old. That was the big fight which led to my parents divorce a short time later.

It's still hard for me to believe that I can remember an event like that, but that some people like corpse and my Ex can't remember anything before 10 or 11.

How does that happen?!
posted by fooljay at 9:11 PM on July 26, 2001

yanking, and the cool of a talcum powder puff as my father's mom stuck it under my neck. she's only bathed me once when i was about 2 weeks old, so i can't be sure if that's a real memory or if it's just a concoction of pictures and actual memory of powder puff experiences later on.
posted by elle at 2:32 AM on July 27, 2001