EARLY STUFF

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