my earliest memory blog | my earliest memory blog
Jul.28.2010
In the summer of 1961, 2 or 3 months shy of my second birthday, I was with my family on vacation on Cape Cod. I remember beginning to climb a dune with my mom and two older sisters. My dad must have stayed behind on the beach with my baby sister. The sand was warm and bunches of grass grew randomly...
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Jul.28.2010
First Memory
Rain pouring outside the car
My daddy changing the tire
I stand on tiny toes looking out the window
Never have I seen so much water
Rivulets go down his nose
His hair the rain runs down
Inside his jacket the rain hides
No no poor daddy
Help I cannot offer
One year...
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Jul.28.2010
I am two and the gray Smith Corona typewriter case yawns empty in the middle of the floor inviting me like all small open things. The thinner top lid sits a few inches of the floor. I pounce on it with both knees, instantly pulling up the heavy bottom. The sharp metal edge meets the bridge of my...
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Jul.28.2010
What I remember first--crying about a doll I left outside in the backyard--doesn't make that memory the best memory. It's not a memory I go back to and hold and stare at, thinking about time and place and chance. It's no Proustian madeline. More than anything, that first memory is just the time...
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Jul.28.2010
Hard white winter sun streamed through the bay window, washing the big high-ceilinged room with glaring light. The room was meant to be a formal front parlor, but during the war the house had been split into apartments, and although the war had ended, the housing shortage had not. So the parlor was...
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Jul.28.2010
It was unseasonably hot.
That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night...
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Jul.28.2010
Ice Cream and Water Fountains
The year was 1959 and I was five years old. My dad was in the Air Force and we had returned from an overseas assignment to Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. After about two weeks I had made a new best friend,...
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Jul.28.2010
Some people say that babies remember very little, but I think they underestimate the power of infant memory capture. I recall many things from before I could walk and from shortly thereafter. I remember being carried by my maternal grandmother in a blue blanket to her house up the street from ours...
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Jul.28.2010
My earliest memory is from the age of 3. I was playing with my sister Peggy who was 4 ½. I had a brother who was 5 ½ and a younger sister who was 1 ½. We lived in a tidy suburb of Philadelphia and the whole neighborhood was our playground.
That summer morning, Peggy and I were riding my tricycle...
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Jul.28.2010
Rad Bradbury said he could remember back to his moment of birth. I can't go that far back, but I remember incidences from my first year.
I remember my first steps, probably because my parents fussily oohed and ahhed, but those tottering steps left their mark.
And since then, I try not to stagger...
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