Monday, August 22, 2005
(7:30 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Earliest Memory
There are a few possibilities here. I can date these occurences with relative certainty because my family moved shortly after my sister was born, meaning that I was four or younger for any memory that takes place at the previous house.The one that always strikes me as the first is one time when I woke up after only a very short nap, thinking I had slept away the entire day, interrupting a conversation my mom was having with some other adults. I've asked her about this, and of course she has no idea. I couldn't get her to understand what I was saying, and in this, it is very similar to an event last month when I started kind of sleep walking -- I walked right outside my bedroom door, which opens onto the kitchen, and tried and failed to say something to Anthony. He could make out some words, but the context wasn't clear to him.
Another memory is sitting with my dad watching Star Trek -- I feel like I was up a little bit late for this one, maybe waiting for mom to get home. Maybe she was on a business trip, in retrospect. She used to run a home decorating store with my aunt and grandma, and they went to periodic trade shows to check out new products. I don't remember the episode, but maybe it was the same one that a bunch of us were watching in the common room of our house in Oxford, during some kind of down time. Our schedule had been thrown off in some way, so we were watching whatever was on TV, just to pass the time until something happened.
I remember my sister, when she was a baby, was on the recliner, and I was watching her. She spit out her pacifier, and my mom said, "Uh-oh," and I said it, too, and over the course of time I came to think that the pacifier really was called an uh-oh. I don't have any image of my sister -- in this memory, I am almost watching myself from behind the chair. It seems like I am watching myself from the perspective of someone coming in the door. I know what I looked like back then -- kind of a poor man's "Christopher Robin," the pathetic little kid who keeps to himself and creates all kinds of fantasy characters. I was pretty weird back then, making up new songs, etc. No one knew what I was talking about half the time. Things have not changed.
The first memory still seems like the originary memory. Waking from a dream, unable to communicate, my mother unable to understand me -- it's as if it were a repetition of birth.
