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Day 14 - Your earliest memory
Memories are a tricky lot - you can be so confident in their veracity and realism until you try to align a memory with someone else's who was there and find that there is either a lot missing or one of you has it wrong.
That said, I can pretty well pin my two earliest memories in reality, since they were both centered around events. There are other memories that float around in my head from that time, but since I have no reliable way to say when they happened, or in what order, I don't know if any of those came first. I wonder sometimes, if Florida had seasons, if I would have been able to remember those things better.
Memory number one, which I'm pretty sure came first, is of being in a car as we drove somewhere a bit hilly along the coast. We were going to the beach with mom's Finnish friends, and I just remember the hill and the white sand and the road. I would pile on my adjectives, describe maybe the houses that I saw, but that's the other tricky thing about memories - once you write them down, they become a little less true. Because now you're deciding whether or not you actually saw that color or that detail, when maybe you didn't. My mind extrapolates from our subsequent trips to the beach and likely that area, and I want to describe the heat radiating off the asphalt, looking like water always a little ways off, the puffy clouds and the dead hot air, the houses on stilts and the expansiveness of the sea. But my memory doesn't include all that, at least not that one.
Just the hill, and the car, and the sand.
My second memory, which was likely later, is of standing at the sliding glass window in the first house, watching as large machines rolled around our backyard. I want to say my hands were pressed against the warm glass, but I might as well have just been squishing my nose against it. But I do remember the machines, and how large and loud they were. Within a few weeks they would remove a number of trees, dig a hole in the ground, and then others would come in and make that hole into a swimming pool. Then before they filled it with water, we would all walk around the bottom of the pool and it would the utmost of surreal.
But that memory is not all that; that memory is just the glass and the backyard and the loud, rumbling yellow and black machines. No operators - I don't know how I thought they were controlled.
Of course, now that I've sat and written about those two memories, all these other memories are popping up from when I was tiny that I haven't thought about in years. It makes me worry I might forget it all one day, if I don't sit down and remember on occasion, sit down and recarve those neural pathways. I don't think about my early childhood much - I think a lot more about middle school and high school and how miserable I was then. Maybe I should sit down and write them out one by one, pinning them in reality and risking that loss of truth that comes upon simplifying something into words. Is it worth losing those details or risking fabrication in lieu of losing them altogether?
Memories are a tricky lot - you can be so confident in their veracity and realism until you try to align a memory with someone else's who was there and find that there is either a lot missing or one of you has it wrong.
That said, I can pretty well pin my two earliest memories in reality, since they were both centered around events. There are other memories that float around in my head from that time, but since I have no reliable way to say when they happened, or in what order, I don't know if any of those came first. I wonder sometimes, if Florida had seasons, if I would have been able to remember those things better.
Memory number one, which I'm pretty sure came first, is of being in a car as we drove somewhere a bit hilly along the coast. We were going to the beach with mom's Finnish friends, and I just remember the hill and the white sand and the road. I would pile on my adjectives, describe maybe the houses that I saw, but that's the other tricky thing about memories - once you write them down, they become a little less true. Because now you're deciding whether or not you actually saw that color or that detail, when maybe you didn't. My mind extrapolates from our subsequent trips to the beach and likely that area, and I want to describe the heat radiating off the asphalt, looking like water always a little ways off, the puffy clouds and the dead hot air, the houses on stilts and the expansiveness of the sea. But my memory doesn't include all that, at least not that one.
Just the hill, and the car, and the sand.
My second memory, which was likely later, is of standing at the sliding glass window in the first house, watching as large machines rolled around our backyard. I want to say my hands were pressed against the warm glass, but I might as well have just been squishing my nose against it. But I do remember the machines, and how large and loud they were. Within a few weeks they would remove a number of trees, dig a hole in the ground, and then others would come in and make that hole into a swimming pool. Then before they filled it with water, we would all walk around the bottom of the pool and it would the utmost of surreal.
But that memory is not all that; that memory is just the glass and the backyard and the loud, rumbling yellow and black machines. No operators - I don't know how I thought they were controlled.
Of course, now that I've sat and written about those two memories, all these other memories are popping up from when I was tiny that I haven't thought about in years. It makes me worry I might forget it all one day, if I don't sit down and remember on occasion, sit down and recarve those neural pathways. I don't think about my early childhood much - I think a lot more about middle school and high school and how miserable I was then. Maybe I should sit down and write them out one by one, pinning them in reality and risking that loss of truth that comes upon simplifying something into words. Is it worth losing those details or risking fabrication in lieu of losing them altogether?
