→ 17 answers so far ↓

• 1 phil // Feb 17, 2009 at 9:25 am

  I think that I remember things that I don’t really remember, because there are photographs or cause my family has retold the story. My memory is generally poor.

  I remember being dropped off at preschool. I also remember being at preschool and throwing a bunch of gravel up a slide with Shawn Mielke and then the preschool people asked us what we were doing, we told them “it’s ass”. I must have been about 3 or 4. Also going to the racetrack with my godfather around the same era and picking horses for him.

  My parents split up right around that time, so you’d think I’d have some memory of that, but I don’t.

• 2 prof. fancy pants // Feb 17, 2009 at 9:44 am

  my first memory is of walking through golden fields and having the sun shine brightly in my eyes. Shortly after being aware of my surroundings, the next moments were filled with a gut wrenching pain followed by evacuating my bowels in my pants. It turns out you’re really not supposed to eat mud pies. I had contracted a bacterial infection. Seems like most of my earliest memories are some jarring or scarring moment like this one.

• 3 hadas // Feb 17, 2009 at 9:55 am

  my first memory is being passed from my father to my mother in glider plane high up in the sky.

• 4 LukeG // Feb 17, 2009 at 10:57 am

  I remember finding a rattlesnake on our rental house in the hills above Santa Rosa with my brother Pete. It was in a bush in front of us and we were being babysat. I remember the babysitter freaking out and the snake ending up in the garage.

  Around the same era I remember lighting matches and throwing them off the bunk bed, jumping on to a tonka truck naked, and my brother throwing a paper airplane into a lit candle (or was it me?), and us having a party in the driveway with styrofoam peanuts. It was a good era. In many ways things are the same.

• 5 Joe // Feb 17, 2009 at 11:11 am

  I remember being spanked in a sunbeam on the pea green carpet of our house. I remember my Dad’s hot rodded 2002 catching on fire and having my dad get me and his golf clubs out of the car and waiting on the side of the road. I remember the poncho my mom wove for me. I remember taking the training wheels off of my bike so that the bully couldn’t steal it from me (because he could only ride with training wheels). I remember my stepmoms super long hair and her doing coke on an etched mirror. I remember getting forgotten in Longs and having to wait for my mom to drive back to pick me up. I remember riding around in my mom’s backpack and being really happy. I remember living in the lighthouse and playing with the cool old stuff. I remember staying in the tepee with all of the skulls of dead animals on the walls. I remember hiking throught the hills to water secret pot plants.

  All of these memories are in one big jumble and I have no idea of when any of them occurred.

• 6 zjyw // Feb 17, 2009 at 11:54 am

  1. First day of kindergarten: It was the first day of school and I saw this huge loft thing you could climb and sit atop of and I said to myself “I gotta climb that!”. So it was before the school day started and kids were climbing the loft and I went to too. I didn’t know that another kid was climbing on the other ladder right next to mine. When I got on top he got there at the same time and I said something but he gave me a funny look and started climbing down. Then when I was thinking about this moment I realized I didn’t speak English when I entered school.
  2. I don’t know when this occurred in relation to my kindergarten experience. I was wrestling with my mom and my younger brother and all of a sudden I stopped because I had figured out how to not think out loud. I sang in my head Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was the weirdest revelation. I made my mom stop and told her I could talk without my mouth and proceeded to have her hold me and look at me process how I was talking without my mouth.

• 7 feverishpoptart // Feb 17, 2009 at 1:14 pm

  I remember being held by my mother as a baby, riding in a car. I remember it was night, looking up at her and she was singing to the radio.

• 8 beth // Feb 17, 2009 at 2:44 pm

  There are a jumble of memories that I can’t really put in chronological order, so as far as “my first” I don’t really know.

  Here are some of my earliest memories from ~the age of 3:

  1) Crying for my mother at the window of a nursery school & later that day looking for my doll at nap time, crying because I thought she was lost. That might have been my first official “bad day”.

  2) Sitting in a grocery cart at the market, while my mother sounded out words on the products, teaching me to read. (I specifically remember the word ‘yogurt’.)

  3) A lady smearing Vaseline on my face and then me mashing my face into a big bowl of cotton balls. (It was a party game.)

• 9 beth // Feb 17, 2009 at 2:52 pm

  BTW, everyone’s memories are very entertaining!
  @Phil: What is “it’s ass” supposed to mean?
  @zjyw: Amazing story about talking without your mouth! Incidentally, when I was in Kindergarten, I had many Laotian classmates. My mother told my that I often came home speaking a language she couldn’t decipher. My new friends were teaching me!

• 10 DirtyDanSin // Feb 17, 2009 at 3:39 pm

  I am 2 years old. I am at the rodeo. I think that it was the Red Bluff Round-Up. The clowns are running into and around an outhouse. When one clown is ‘using it’ the others set a bomb and it explodes, causing the clown inside to run around fanning his smoking ass.

  Imagine my surprise upon discovering Mr. Bungle, a band seemingly generated by my own id.

  I know I was two years old because my grandpa John is there and he passed a month before my 3rd bday. I also remember him taking me to such old-ass Ukiah landmarks as the poker room behind the ‘white owl cafe’ (that is kind of a guess), Western Auto, The Tack Room (R.I.P.) and The Hub.

• 11 zjyw // Feb 17, 2009 at 6:24 pm

  @ Beth: Ya my mom didn’t even care that I could talk without my mouth. She was so intent on playing with my younger brother.
  I went to school with Laotion classmates too, but that was in high school in my small little town in NorCal in the valley.

• 12 c lo // Feb 17, 2009 at 10:04 pm

  I actually think about this question a lot….do we have our early memories because we’ve been told them? Are your earliest memories truly those glimpses of life or are those just impressions?

  I would say that probably my earliest full memory that I remember an actual chunk of time is when I was 4 and in preschool and I remember the teacher, Ms. Freda, sending me to the bunk to nap, and me not wanting to nap and laying there in the dim room waiting for naptime to be over.

• 13 tariann // Feb 19, 2009 at 11:13 am

  I have a horrible memory and assume that most old memories are just made up from stories people have told me later.
  However, I have some vague memories (mostly of being at our old apartment -my parents moved to their current home when I was four) that I know were real. I remember playing alone in my parents’ bedroom while my mom suntanned on the roof or the time I stole an egg from the fridge and tried to hatch it by sitting on it every day until the day it broke and it was the stinkiest smell and I was appalled and convinced I killed the chicken. I remember my mom getting into a fight with my dad on the phone and telling me to grab my swimsuit and we went on an impromptu weekend trip to a hotel somewhere sunny with a pool and I got to swim all day. I remember being at some sort of Easter party and i ate a hard boiled egg with a piece of shell still stuck too it and promptly threw up. I never ate hard boiled eggs again and just thinking about that story makes me want to barf.

• 14 phil // Feb 19, 2009 at 11:35 am

  Tariann do you like eggs now? It seems like you have had some negative experiences with them.

• 15 beth // Feb 19, 2009 at 1:22 pm

  I love that you tried to hatch an egg. so cute!

• 16 tariann // Feb 23, 2009 at 11:42 am

  @ phil No I hate eggs!

• 17 stefan // Feb 27, 2009 at 4:56 pm

  kindergarten… not the first day, but various scenes and random pictures come to mind.

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