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Today I had my writing your memoirs class, and I read out loud the "Colored Memories" assignment I posted a few days ago. I got a lot of good response, and it put me in the mood to do more memoir writing. In my April 5 entry I started an "interview with myself" and I am going to continue it with another question that I will answer in this entry. What are some of your earliest memories? When I was younger, I used to lay in bed and try to remember every possible event in my life. Not only did I write constantly in my journal, I thought it was important to retain as many memories as possible. I never understood people who didn't remember their childhood, and yet I couldn't relate to people who carried around their earliest childhood memory like a treasure to protect from the outside world. For me, memories float in and out of my mind on a continous basis. My dreams all full of childhood memories, and often I wake up thinking about one or two particular events all day. Most people who talk about their earliest memories talk about discrete moments which exist almost in a vacuum, and only continous memories much later. However, my "continous" memories begin at a very early age. One early memory I have is when I am around the age you wear diapers and can walk. My reddish hair is shoulder length at this point, and I feel comfortable walking around with nothing on. However, my mother is trying to put a diaper on me, and I am babbling away. I stand up, and begin to march, and my mother keeps asking me to lay down. She ends up having to put the diaper on while I march in place. I was always fascinated by the fact that young children do not remember much before they are two or three. When I taught at children's school in a classroom of four and five year olds, I would ask each of them what their earliest memory was. I once had a discussion with a four year old about the fact that his two year old sister probably wouldn't remember most of what he did to or with her until she was older. This fluke of consciousness and memory is probably one of the motivations for my memory game, where I tried to remember as much as I could. When I was four years old, my sister was born. On the day when she came home from the hospital, I offered her cereal to eat, only to be told that she didn't have any teeth. Later that evening we lay on the kitchen floor because the air conditioning was out, and we didn't want my sister to suffer in the humid suffocating Houston heat. I knew intuitively that my sister could provide me a wealth of information about events I had no memory of. My mother breast fed both of until we were two years old, so while my sister was still breast feeding, and also could speak, I asked her what breast milk tasted like. I gave her a lot of things to compare it too, and finally she answered, "badanas." Before my sister was born, I would spend hours sitting inside the house in my inflatable pool, surrounded by stuffed animals, and try to remember the earliest memory I possible could. I thought that I tried hard enough I could remember my birth, or even what it was like in heaven before I was born. The closest I ever came to was right after my birth, laying in a bassinet, with people piling stuffed animals on top of me. My grandmother, and great mother and other friends and relatives were visiting the "new baby." I sat, staring up at everyone, feebly holding my new bunny. But try as I might, I couldn't get any further back. I turned my attention to my sister, asking her questions, poking and prodding her, to try to trigger my own memories of life before age three. Discrete moments remembered earlier than that, only frustrated me, by reminding how fleeting consciousness actually is. Melissa 04/07/00 02:14:05 AM |
