My Earliest Memories

This week, Long & Short Reviews asks about reviewers' earliest memories.

Babies, it is now believed, do form memories, but short, vague, disconnected memories that blur together and are hard to pin to a date. I believe this theory may be true because, although my mother and natural sister and I do all have a few memories that must have come from when we were two or three or even fewer years old, they don't form stories or seem even as significant as the memories that can't be placed.

I mean, there must have been a first memory of seeing our parents' faces, tasting foods, having baths, and suchlike, and these memories obviously form the emotional base of our overall impression of the world, nobody ever remembers the first memory of those things.

I have two well-worn memories that have to come from the year I was two years old, and don't come from photographs, but neither of them seems to have any emotional significance. 

I remember a chair with a brown calico cover. The chair was in Mother's parents' living quarters in the International House at a university in Indiana. There was unhappiness in the air. Nobody explained the unhappiness to me at the time; they tried to be very kind and hoped I wouldn't notice it. There were some ancient toys in the house, souvenirs of Mother's childhood, with which I was allowed to play. I took naps in the afternoon and woke up one afternoon in the brown calico chair, the room stuffy, the sun shining on a drawn curtain. Later I was told that the reason why we were at that house was that Grandfather had died. That would have been in February.

I remember a fluffy pink rug made of spun plastic, airy as cotton candy, brand new. I remember it as a good-sized rug, perhaps six feet long and three feet wide. Actually it was a hearthrug--one of the really stupid ideas of the 1960s, it would have melted and burned if a spark had landed on it--perhaps thirty inches long and twenty inches wide. I also remember the fireplace before which the hearthrug lay as big enough for me to stand up and run about in; it was seldom lighted, so I could. In that house the atmosphere was happy, though we didn't stay there long. That memory might have come from September or October of the same year.

This is not my rug. It's a new product for sale at Microless. I remember my rug being a slightly brighter shade of pink, but the size and fluffiness were as shown.

Is there any significance at all to these random choices of things to remember? I think so. Both are visual memories. They show that up to age five I thought in pictures. I remember being aware of a changeover when I started thinking in words, as I've done since age five.