What Are Your Earliest Memories?

I'm curious. Think as far far far back as you can.

We create memories when we experience something our brain recognizes as something significant enough to catalog and there often seems to be little rhyme or reason to what sticks with us.


My earliest memories are three moments from the apartment I first grew up in which must have been when I was around 3 years old.

I remember eating watermelon in front of a tv.

I remember climbing up the big winding staircase in the building. It was very dark.

And I also remember looking over into a pitch black dumpster and having my mom point out the three pairs of eyes of raccoons looking out at us. I think we were throwing out cake. It was cold and overcast.


That's it. I don't even remember anything else about the building or our apartment.

Watermelon.... so bright and colorful and vivid.... kinda like your avatars.

Like the eyes peering out of the darkness of your avatar.

My earliest memory is when my next door neighbor came and knocked on our door to ask if we wanted a kitten.

It was 1985 and I was four years old. We chose a male orange tabby from the litter and my dad named him Timmy. He started out as a family pet, but my mom hated him so he became my cat. He was my companion for 18 years and is responsible for my love of orange cats.

__________________

My earliest is when I was at a daycare center, drawing something because it was art time. My teacher sees my work and compliments it. I don't remember my reaction, but I must have had a huge smile on my face. I love it when people say nice job upon seeing what I've made, and that's partially why I keep reviewing films.

__________________
Letterboxd Profile: https://letterboxd.com/GatsbyG/

I tend not to remember compliments or insults. I guess I just got used to insults and favored self-recognition.

I remember around 3 or 4 playing hide and seek with my mom, and I would always hide in the shoe closet in the hallway

And when I was around 4 I remember a red/yellow fisher price motorcycle I rode around on and would pretend to be the terminator with my dads sunglasses. I never watched the film, but my parents owned the VHS and I thought Arnie looked cool.

__________________

Neg rep from honeykid.

Ah, your first day.

__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.

My earliest memory is of watching Saint Seiya on TV.

Even then you were watching anime? Nice.

I remember my mother being furious because my father didn't come home from work. She would drag me all around the neighborhood at night looking for him, peering through bar windows. We'd finally find him and join him, and I'd sit on my mother's knee drinking kiddy cocktails til 3am. That was the average night.

Damn.

It seems like most everyone else's earliest memories informed their lives in some way. Mine are just bizarre by comparison.

__________________
Movie Reviews | Anime Reviews
Top 100 Action Movie Countdown (2015): List | Thread
"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

I remember three things from the house I lived in when I was three and four years old, all three are bad. I know I was that age because we lived in a different house when I was five and I have a lot of memories from there. I remember stepping on a nail in my cousin's backyard, they lived across the street. I remember running out of my friends house who lived about a nlock away. I tripped and hit my head on the fill pipe in her yard. Only time I have had stitches in my life, her mom was my nurse. Third one I was coming home from church with my aunt and uncle who lived across the street. One of my other uncles was with my dad in the driveway wrapping up my cat in an old rug. My uncle had hit him by accident pulling in the driveway.

Good stuff, thanks for bringing those memories back to me.

__________________
Letterboxd

I'm not sure what my earliest memory is, but the earliest one I can definitely put a date to is my parents bringing my sister home when I was 2 and 1/2. I was out in the back garden playing cricket with the neighbours eldest daughter and my parents come in through the garden gate with a white blanket in a bundle. It was very sunny and around lunchtime, I think.

My brother wasn't born, so I had to be about 2, I remember my fingers touching the broiler or something, and then when my parents put my fingers under cold water, it hurt worse, and I thought to myself "Are these people stupid?" - this hurts more!

"I remember nothing, but pain."

Spoke about this before on here, think it was with SC.


I can remember stuff from being a few months old, breast feeding and being burped, I can remember stuff from around the same time, before a year old , sitting sucking on my toes while snooker was on the telly.


And... I have memories from inside the womb.
Hard to explain, but I remember speech patterns from my Mum, Dad, Brother and Sister and I can remember a touch and sound sensitive environment. No sight, just touch and sound.
When I say no sight, I don't mean darkness or blackness like when you close your eyes... I mean no sight, just touch, warmth and sound.


No sight is hard to explain. It's like explaining what sound is to a deaf person or what chicken tastes like to someone who's never eaten it.


It's a memory I've never let go of. I do have memories from a year old, 18 months, 2 years and so on as well.

__________________

One of my earliest memories is sitting on a wall having my picture taken by my dad, another early memory is looking at a rabbit in a hutch in our back garden, he was eating lettuce leaves.

My older (3 ½ years) brother’s First Holy Communion in the Catholic Church. I was a little older than 4 ½. I vividly remember his communion suit and taking photos out back. I have other hazy memories from that point on.

By the way, I don’t believe people who claim to have memories significantly earlier than 4 ½. I believe they are actually remembering stories their parents told them when they were young, maybe six or seven, and in the haze of time came to believe that they recall the events themselves. For example, I once worked with a man who was born in 1939. He swore up and down that he remembers being in his crib at around age 2 1/2 listening to radio reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I told him: “Jim, you remember your parents later telling you that when Pearl Harbor happened you were in the crib and the radio was on.”

This childhood amnesia has never been absolutely explained, I think. My guess is that before a certain age (again, 4 ½ to 5), the human brain isn’t sufficiently developed to form long term memories, though it is certainly capable of forming short term ones. Doubtlessly, some will disagree with me, but that’s my assessment.