Memories, misty watercolour memories...

What's the earliest memory you can recall? Better yet, that you can date with any precision?

When I was younger, I used to tell people I could remember watching Sesame Street when I came home from the hospital after being born. Utter nonsense, of course. The hospital visit I was referring to actually happened when I was three or four--the first of a few eye surgeries I've had. And I don't remember coming home from that any more, if I ever did.

My closest friend in high school once admitted to me he couldn't remember a single thing before grade five. That gobsmacked me: I have vivid memories of everything from kindergarten on up. I can name every teacher I ever had--admittedly, it took me a few minutes of thought to recall Mrs. Capstick, who taught Junior Kindergarten, and Mrs. Harris, who taught Senior. But geez, there are days from grades two and three I can practically relive. I can tell you the name of my first crush (Alison Edmed, first grade) and the name of my first love (Laura Baldessara, grade three). I shared Laura (and her friends Sonia, Catherine and Anna) with my friend Gordon...for a period of months we'd all play kissing tag every recess. No jealousy accrued, incidentally, although all of us knew it was "supposed to"...the underlying easygoing tone of that experience has, now that I think about it, gone a long way towards shaping my current attitudes about love and sex. To this day, I wonder what would have happened had I attended that school another three or five years.

One thing I find interesting--now--is that playground-monitoring teachers in 1979 didn't give two hoots about what we were doing. They thought it was 'cute'. Today, I suspect...no, I know...we'd all be expelled. Which is patently ridiculous. Nobody was coerced into the game...many other Grade Three girls and a couple of other boys would occasionally join in the fun, but it was always their prerogative to play or not.
There was this one time we all faded off into the field that abutted the school property and swapped clothes on a lark. Everybody was dressed 'boyishly' that day, so I wasn't presented with anything I didn't know how to put on. As I recall I ended up wearing Catherine's clothes, since we were closest in size. Gordon and Laura swapped duds; Sonia and Anna, who were both tiny pixie little things, donned each other's outfits.

That was an odd thing. We knew, somehow, that what we were doing was--well, wrong isn't exactly the word I'm looking for here. Maybe "fraught". It was a Big Deal, we all knew it...but, speaking for myself at least, I didn't exactly know why. Even a year later, I don't think we would have had the requisite levels of naive innocence to pull that off. And ten years later, if something like that had happened to me it would have rapidly turned into the mother of all Penthouse Letters.

Just picture a current school administration's reaction to that little escapade. Expelled wouldn't even cover it: Gordon and I would be charged, I'm sure of it. Never mind that it was the girls, Laura and Catherine especially, who came up with the idea and dared us all to do it. Never mind that nobody touched anyone else inappropriately or even caught a flash of skin. And don't even imagine the truth: the next day, everything went back to normal, as if the cross-dressing episode had never happened.

Caught up in the memory riptide there for a minute...

Going back even further: The earliest memory I can precisely date: three weeks before I turned four, I can remember standing at the top of the stairs in my house and bargaining with my mother over the right to suck my thumb. She eventually told me I could do so, but only until I was four. Why I should remember that, and not the taste of the hot mustard Mom daubed on my thumb to help me hold up my end of that particular bargain, I have no idea.

I remember music. Ours was a musical household, and I came by a deep and abiding love for melody honestly. I used to prance around the house to the Bee Gees, Boney M., and Tony Orlando and Dawn. The first song I taught myself by ear was Neil Young's "Heart of Gold"...ranked number three, incidentally, on the list of the 50 Greatest Canadian Tracks of All Time". I knew there was a reason I love my country's music.

I have earlier memories, but I can't date them. There is, for example, the First Nightmare, the archetype from which all my childhood nightmares were drawn. I was probably a few months younger when that 'mare foaled itself. Most of my earliest memories involve something scary (to a three-year old, certainly not to an adult). I was terrified of many things; that clock, which for reasons lost in the sands of time I christened "The Herald Call"; blue spruces (you try being chucked under an ominously leaning, thousand-foot tall and unnaturally blue tree at an impressionable age and see where it leads you); and perhaps most interestingly, my Grandma's room divider (which I dubbed an OOM-di-ba-da, almost like it came out of a Discovery Channel special, or something). Again, it was the sheer height of the thing which disturbed me. Did it have to touch the ceiling?

And, of course, the closet. God alone knew what was in there, and He wouldn't dare open it after nightfall. Into my TWENTIES, I would reflexively shut that door before retiring for the night. By that age, I knew damn well that nightmares don't seep out of closetes. I also knew they couldn't if the door was well and firmly CLOSED.

My childhood had its moments of nastiness--whose doesn't? But it was also filled with warmth and joy and love. Mom used to regularly bake things for my school class. Can't do that now, either, lest little Molly over there catch one whiff of a peanut and keel over dead.

Oh, to be a child again...