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Let’s play.

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Because everyone loves a game.

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I have two early memories and I’m not sure which one came first or how old I was.

1. Wearing a Halloween costume that I loved. It was a frog, a one piece green jumpsuit thing with froggie feet that I apparently saw no reason to take off. My memory is hiding from my mother under a table thwarting her attempt to make me change.

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2. Nap time at some kind of nursery/play school. Everyone had to bring a blanket or quilt or something to sleep on and my mother being my mother bought me a fabulously soft and thick mini rug shaped like Humpty Dumpty. It was the envy of all the other kids and some of the bratty little bastards tried to steal it. I cried, the brats had to sit in the corner and the teacher made my mother switch it for something more mundane.

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Now you.

What’s your earliest memory?

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23 thoughts on “Let’s play.”

  1. I have early memories of Jamaica, but I went at age 3 and 6 so I never know which age the memory comes from. And like Jamaica, a kindergarten trip to Disney World has many photos, and I always wonder if my memories are pure, or aided by the photos. Thus, I’ll give you my first pure memory: it was the last day of kindergarten and we were instructed to draw a self-portrait. Then the teacher pulled out the self-portrait we’d drawn (and forgotten about) on the first day of school so we could see how our drawings changed. My classmate, Suzie, laughed and laughed when she saw her two pictures. I thought they were interesting, but couldn’t figure out why she was laughing so hard. This theme of “why is everyone laughing so hard? it just isn’t that funny” has stayed with me my entire life. Side note: I have some other random, hazy memories of preschool, but this kindergarten one is the strongest/longest.

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      1. I know I did. In my first-day portrait I was floating in the air. By the end of the year my feet were touching the ground. The husband likes to point out that, unfortunately, my drawing skills never advanced further than that, and I’m afraid he’s right.

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  2. Believe it or not, I was still in my crib, just big enough to stand up. The embellishments and explanations were added later by other people, but I saw and heard my mother screaming, and I looked out from the crib and sww things jumping up and down in front of her. So I screamed with her.
    What had happened was my crib was in the kitchen with my mother, and my mother was preparing to cook supper, fresh caught perch fishes– by fresh I mean caught by one of my brothers on his way home from school. We were living in a farmhouse, but not our farm, i was the 9th child, and all the bedrooms were filled so I got to sleep in the kitchen. My mother had just started cutting one fish into chunks for fish soup when the nerves in the fish, don’t ask me how, went into some kind of spasm, and the pieces looked like they eere Mexican jumping beans or something, is how my mother described it to me years later when I talked about rememebering her screaming. She knew the term, Mexican jumping beans, but had never seen them, but with the fish jumping up and down o the table, that was how che described them.
    This memory still exists in my head, almost 75 years later. It is the most vivid memory I have of my mom, who died while I waa a child. I can only think this is why I cannot est fish that look like pieces of fish. Canned stuff I can tolerate, but if it looks as all fishlike, I csnnot even look at it.

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  3. 1. I was three years old, standing in front of a the most beautiful Ferris wheel. All lit up in multicolored lights, going round and round. My small hands clutching the white metal fence around it. I was wearing a yellow dress with frilly lace around the hem and matching socks and white shoes. I was in total amazement of this huge carnival ride. Then I remember my dad running up to me and grabbing me and as he walked away from the Ferris wheel, then seeing my mom with so much worry on her face. Apparently I walked away from our house a block away to the baseball field where the carnival was being set up.

    2. I was around five years old having Thanksgiving leftovers with my neighbors, two sisters who never married, they reminded me of the Baldwin sisters from the Walton’s. They were very proper, they set out china and crystal for every meal, and even in Summer they had hot coffee with lunch and dinner. That was the first time I remember having cranberry sauce and hot yeast rolls with honey butter, then we all had ambrosia for dessert. In small crystal dessert bowls and silver spoons. They showed me how to eat soup without slurping or dripping. I loved those two old broads. One of them is still around, she’s 101 years old.

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  4. The late afternoon sun was shining on the west side of our house. My mom yelled “Don’t slam [SLAM!] the door!” as one of my older siblings ran out the screen door and down the steps. Since that side of the house was hidden by a garage when I was 3, I know I was 2 ½.

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  6. Sneaking around the living room, after adults all went somewhere, drinking the last sips of coffee from all the cups (people routinely left a bit due to grounds in perked coffee). I think I was about 4 yrs old.

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  8. Sitting on my grandfather’s lap in our house in Trenton, NJ, sharing cream of mushroom soup from a Thermos for lunch. I must have been 3 or so, because we were living elsewhere by the time I was 4.

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  9. I only have a couple vague memories from when we lived in an apartment during the first three years of my life…. but one of them, I swear, is seeing the intro for Barney Miller on TV with Hal Linden stopping to look back when his name appears in the opening credits. I always thought of that every time I watched it in reruns later in life…

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  11. Wow. What sweet memories!

    I have a memory of laying in my crib and my father changing my diaper. I’m guessing that was not a normal occurrence because when I mentioned it to my mother many years ago, she was baffled by it. Heck, maybe I dreamt it, but this has been a core memory as long as I can remember!

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