A while back, I started asking friends and family members
about their first memories. It’s a
subject that has always interested me, perhaps because I have several odd ones
myself, and I’ve wondered why certain early events stick in the head and others
don’t. I can’t give you the complete
answer to that question, and nobody else can either, though the topic has been
studied for many years. Even Freud
(remember him?), had something to say about it.
My go-to guy on brain matters is a saxophone player named
Dr. Richard Harner, who claims he once studied brains and operated on them at
the University of Pennsylvania. (I know
he still has a prescription pad, so maybe he’s telling the truth.) He told me about Wilder Penfield, who was often
described as being “so damn smart you can’t believe he’s Canadian.” Penfield was not only Princeton’s football
coach, but was also the first doc who operated on people’s brains while they
were awake, and had conversations with them as he electrically stimulated the
neocortex bits (much as Bill Belichick does today). One of the things that happened when he did
this was that people started remembering things that had happened decades
before, which led him to theorize that all of our experiences are stored away
somewhere and that “forgetting” is simply a matter of not knowing where to
look. There’s no way to prove this, of
course, partly because there is no way to prove that the tales Penfield pulled
forth with his electrical probes were actual memories rather than dream-like
concoctions.
An example? OK. I have a vivid childhood memory of a trip to
Alexandria, Virginia with my mother, to visit my Aunt Lorraine and my cousin,
Patrick. I may have been four years old
and Pat may have been five. Pat and I
spent most of an afternoon outside playing with his friends, culminating in a
fight when, from our “fort” in a wooded area, we threw rocks at the other boys
and they returned fire. The fight ended
abruptly when one of the other boys took a high hard one right on the
noggin. Pat and I ran home, uncertain as
to exactly what had occurred, but scared witless.
An hour later, a policeman showed up at the apartment and
questioned my mother and my aunt about the incident where a boy, we now
learned, had been killed. (We had told them nothing about our
adventure.) The policeman then took Pat
and me outside, questioned us separately, and we managed to convince him we had
come back home long before the war started and knew nothing about it.
For 35 years, I walked around with this in my head,
convinced I had been part of a rock-throwing war and was guilty of
homicide. Then one day, having dinner
with Pat after a twenty-year separation, I asked him about the incident. He looked at me like I was insane, or joking,
and then assured me that nothing of the sort had ever occurred. To this day, I remember what our fort looked
like. I could even identify the
policeman---I could pick him out of a police line-up. But it just never happened. No fort, no rocks, no dead kid, no cop. But just because there are things in your
head (or, at least, my head), that
never happened doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of real memories from long, long
ago.
For a long time it was believed that very little children,
under the age of four or five, simply did not have the brain architecture to
form enduring memories. This has been
shown to be not quite accurate. Memories
do form very early, and a six-year-old can often remember events that happened
when he was only a year old. At the age
of seven or eight, however, a phenomenon called “childhood amnesia” overtakes
us and we forget almost all of those earliest experiences. (No one seems quite sure why this
happens.) Often there will be one or two
fragments that remain, however, and stay with us into adulthood. These are the stories you get when you ask
for someone’s “first memory.”
I learned two things in my amateur research project. First, not everybody has an identifiable
“first memory,” meaning a specific event, and when you ask them for it, you
will get something (usually traumatic), that occurred when they were ten. If you then ask for something earlier, you
will get a vague response like, “Well, I remember the kids in the neighborhood
when I was little.” My only other
observation is that first memories tend to have a powerful emotional content,
usually a negative one. Kids don’t
remember the routine trip to the grocery store; they remember terror.
R. M.---“I was under
two years old, not sure exact age, could've been 6 months, could've been 20
months. I fell out of a high chair into the edge of a radiator. I took a nasty
gash in the eye area; any closer to the eye would have resulted in permanent
serious injury to the eye. I was rushed to Wills Eye, treated, bandaged and
sent home. I don't remember any of it! What I do remember vividly is laying in
my crib later that day or night in the middle bedroom on Pickwick St. and out
of the corner of I guess my good eye, seeing my father, who wasn't present when
the incident happened, emerging from the top of the steps, entering the
bedroom, and looking down at me with the big bandage over my eye.”
P.W.---“My first memory
is of being a toddler on a bridge at Maxwell Army base near Montgomery Alabama.
My mother and I are on a bridge over a small river and she sets me down for a
minute while talking to someone else. I must have waddled off a ways and was in
danger of falling off the bridge as I remember a uniformed army guy (a private
maybe) running to me, scooping me up and handing me back to my hysterical
mother. I also remember the very fragrant magnolia blossoms. They were
everywhere.”
Note in these and other tales that often, a horrific event is
not itself the center of the experience; rather, it is a parent’s reaction that
sears it in the memory.
J.V.---"Mom was
crying by the washing machine. President
Kennedy had just died.” (This is a
rarity---a first memory we can date precisely: November 22, 1963.)
L.B.---“I remember
desperately crying at the front door, trying to block my dad from going to work
and leaving me alone with my mom.”
J.W.---“I was three
years old and had to have my adenoids taken out, and I remember being in the
operating room and having the nurse put the mask on my face to put me under
anesthesia. I remember the bright lights
and the rubber mask and my fear that I wouldn’t fall asleep and I would be
awake while they operated on me.”
J.S.---“I was in the
station wagon, which was packed with boxes and siblings. We were moving to a new house and I was
looking out the back window as our old house got further and further away.”
S.P.---“I was sitting
on the floor in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, playing
with a box of kitchen matches I had pulled off the table. When my mother saw I was trying to light one,
she flew out of a chair about ten feet away and grabbed it away from me.”
L.M.---“When I was little,
we moved to a big house, but the second floor wasn’t finished so we lived
downstairs. There were construction
materials all over the yard. One night,
my mother was throwing a party and I climbed in behind a piece of wood that was
leaning up against a wall. When I heard
people were looking for me, I decided it would be fun to hide until someone
found me. What I didn’t know is that my
mother was extremely upset and thought I had been kidnapped. One reason I remember it is because she kept
reminding me of it when I was a child.
She still talks about it and how worried she was.”
D.F.---“Getting spanked
by my mother. That’s probably my first
ten memories.”
C.H.---“I was having my
diaper changed and my grandma lifted me up to the kitchen sink and started
pumping the water to clean me up. It was
cold!”
J.M.---“In a crib. I remember the bars.”
S.M.---“Standing up in
a playpen, wanting to get out.”
And finally, for sheer childhood terror, here’s my personal
favorite:
J.G.---“We moved to
Kenya when I was an infant, and I remember us being ‘on safari’ in one of the
game parks. My sister and I had to stand
in some tall grass in the middle of the plains for a photograph and I remember
being certain a lion was going to
jump out any second and eat us. We had
to stand there for what seemed like forever and all I wanted to do was get back
in the van.”
The unusual memories are the happy ones, and while they are
rare, they do exist.
S.S.---“It’s very
mundane, and very peaceful. I was in a
train riding to Wichita Falls, Texas when I was two years old, and I was
looking out at the fields going by and I was looking at my mother and father,
who were in the train compartment with me.
And that is probably why I remember it---my parents were already
divorced by then and the three of us never did anything together, but there we
were on the train.”
N.A.---“I was age three
or four, and I was just old enough to go across the street to the Oreland ball
field with an older neighbor girl. She
showed me how to pick honeysuckle flowers and split them to suck the juice out.”
B.P.---“I was two, and
I visited Honduras (where my mom is from) for the first and last time. I was floating in the ocean in my Minnie
Mouse floaty thing and the sun was setting and it was really beautiful. My mom was on the beach looking at me and
laughing and my Uncle Raoul was swimming underneath me. He touched my toes, and I knew he was
pretending to be a shark, but I felt very smart because I wasn’t fooled one
bit.”
And then finally, there's this first memory, which doesn't
seem to fit in any category:
“It was nighttime,
raining, somewhere in the late 1940’s. I was about 50 years old and I was being
rushed to the hospital in an ambulance because I had been in a car
accident. Then it all goes black for a
while until I realize I am inside my mother and I am about to emerge and be
born. I know this is going to happen, and then it does, and there are bright lights
and people running around and lots of noise and I start getting annoyed at all
the commotion. That’s my first memory---in
this life, at least. I was pissed off
that everybody was making such a huge deal about me being born.”
Copyright2016MichaelKubacki
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