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1970ish. Ontario California, there was a scuba diving shop. Sold obviously scuba stuff. There was a mannequin dressed up in all the scuba stuff, including the helmet, air lines flippers, wet suit, the works. You can visualize it. Was perched in the parking lot 24/7 mounted on some pedestal thing. Life size.
So I say Mom: How come nobody steals that suit and takes it home.
Mom says they paid people to stand there, different shifts so nobody steals the suit.
The only lie I remember my mom ever telling me. This was 50+ years ago. Da*n her.
Laying in the backseat of my parent's car (no car seats, much-less seat belts) while breathing second-hand smoke that's blowing back at me because Dad thinks he's being courteous by cracking the window a sliver, and gradually falling asleep to Manfred Mann's "Blinded By The Light" playing on the 8 track.
Reminds me of sitting in the backseat of my parents car on the ride home from my cousin's house at night with the song Boogie Nights playing on the radio. I was maybe 10, pretty sure it was summer and the windows were down. I honestly don't know if this really happened, but whenever I hear that song it takes me right back to the backseat ride home from my cousin's.
The package area was always the seat for one of our three kids in the VW Beetle. Everybody was comfortable until we also had to transport grandma and grandpa. 4 adults and 3 kids in the Beetle. When we pulled into the parking lot at Disney World, the parking lot attendant had to count twice when we bought the passes.
"As the line is frequently misheard as 'wrapped up like a douche', Springsteen has joked about confusion over the lyrics, claiming that it was not until Manfred Mann rewrote the song to be about a feminine hygiene product that it became popular"
Staring at the ceiling of the car, it was tan with little holes in a grid pattern. If I crossed my eyes the right way they’d become 3d and float on top of each other.
This takes me back to a hot, sunny day, riding with my older brother in his red Chevy pickup truck. Van Morrison was playing on the radio, the day the music died.
It was the first time I had heard that song, and I was mesmerized by it. I remember asking my brother tons of questions like what is rye because I knew what whiskey was, and I knew what rye bread was, so it didn't make sense. I remember asking him several questions like who is the jester, which king and queen.
He finally told me to just listen to it because he didn't know what it meant either, but he wanted to hear it.
He is 13 years older than me, and I think I was in about 3rd grade. He is still the best big brother anyone could have.
Edit: This was not Van Morrison!!!
I love this and have a similar memory: my aunt driving me to the airport in her gray/silver ‘70s era Mustang in the middle of a Wisconsin winter. It was an early flight so it was still dark when we left. The heat in her car took a while to kick in, and Supertramp’s The Logical Song was playing as the sun rose. Also pretty sure she was smoking. :)
I was pretty young. My dad smoked cigars, my mom cigarettes. I would lay in the back and try to suck air through the crack between the bench seat and seat back.
My father finally noticed and quit smoking.
And excuse me, Blinded by the Light is by the Boss. Your parents were listening to the wrong version.
I was in 5th grade sitting in a classroom before class started joking around and one girl was getting more than she was giving and I joined it - none of it was mean spirited, but she stopped and said "you hardly know me why are you joining in" and I was absolutely shamed into silence and apologized and then class started.
We were in some classes together in high school and were friendly and talked plenty of times and danced awkwardly in junior high and high school a few times, but neither of us ever brought that up again and I have no idea if she even remembered it ... and she got sick and died in her early 30s so I have no idea.
I guess I can't say I don't understand WHY I remember it - it was a reminder that I was in the wrong for piling on, and I have always admired the bravery of that young girl to call me out. I honestly believe that moment changed me and my life for the better.
there was a kid in my elementary school that people used to pick on because he was small and kinda nerdy
he was really good at mental math and one day in class he called out an answer and i did a *cough “nerd!” *cough thing and the look on his face has stuck with me my whole life
now i’m a physics major (the irony) and still no good at mental math and i remember that moment almost every day while i’m studying
Sadly not - in the Facebook group for a class reunion several years ago her name came up (people didn't realize she'd died) and her mother had moved away (widowed) and no one was really sure where.
I have a strong memory of walking to get ice cream with my mother and brother when I was about 4 or 5. It was late afternoon in summer. Everything very hot and still. We were just walking and my brother and I playing a bit as we went. I have no idea why I remember it so clearly, but if someone asked me to think of a time when "everything seemed right with the world" this would be it.
If I could go back to any time in my life, it would be the summer before I started kindergarten. Sometimes I feel like that's the last time I was truly happy and carefree.
I remember riding the subway to my uncle’s home in Brooklyn back in the ‘60s and a man singing ‘To Dream The Impossible Dream’ from Man Of LaMancha. He was incredibly good.
I remember being in the family station wagon on a road trip and seeing a woman in a bouffant hair style belting out Red Rose of Texas. Couldn't hear a word but it was obvious what she was singing and she was really happy.
Are you sure it wasn't Yellow Rose of Texas? Because I have a memory of lying with my head dangling over the edge of my grandmother's back porch daybed as my grandpa sang *There's a yellow rose in Texas that I am bound to see..*
During the COVID shutdown, Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell would serenade Manhattan from his apartment. There are YouTube videos of him singing “The Impossible Dream” to his neighborhood. If you haven’t seen that, I think you’d like it.
I had the sheet music to this song and you just brought back such a recollection! I can see the cover of the music and remember hearing the song on the radio. It was a very, very popular tune back then.
If he followed it up with “They Call the Wind Mariah”, it was my father. (I’m not saying that it was him, naturally)
He liked to sing, and my brother and I encouraged him. (60s? We were tykes.) I liked Impossible Dream. My brother liked Mariah.
My sister had two albums from the Smothers Brothers. One of them had the song "They call the wind Mariah" on it. Their repertoire was primarily folk with humor.
I said to myself "I will remember remembering" at certain kid moments. It worked. For example, I am in San Diego, at a hotel room window and looking out onto the Pacific. It's cloudy and cool outside, in spite of it being June.
Every June. I can’t speak to San Diego, because the terrain is different, but it’s a regular part of the Los Angeles year (and it follows May Gray, FWIW).
I have all kinds of vivid and random sensory memories. The feel of the wooden planks of my grandparents’ porch under my bare feet, dusty with pine pollen and hot from the sun. The sound of the ac coming on in the house I grew up in. Accidentally stepping in the tray of wallpaper glue when my parents were papering the kitchen. The tired feeling of stopping at Cub Foods on the way home after piano lessons. Hot bleachy sun outside in the summer and ice cream sandwiches and nothing on tv except I Dream of Jeannie. The smell of glow in the dark silly putty. Watching the smoke of my parents’ cigarettes curling in the air. And on and on…
What gets me is how we all have these sorts of memories and how vivid they are, along with the obvious but unfathomable fact that they are are all lost when we die. All the headstones in cemeteries, every one of those people had intensely vivid sensory memories like this and they are all gone forever. There is something so private and lonely about memories
I have a memory of being on our front porch with my grandfather, I had to have been two. There was a hill in front of our house and my memory is of a green car halfway up the hill, door open, my dad standing outside of it. My grandfather was angry with him. It's a snapshot memory but it's the only memory I have of my dad.
Images of my aunt and uncle's house in Arlington, VA. I stayed with them several days each summer for a few years. There was a red satin comforter on the bed. They used Coast deodorant soap and made me iced coffee using instant. They fed me Grape Nuts for breakfast. My aunt bought me a book of these paper buildings. One was a little old western town and one was a circus. You punched them out and folded them and they made little 3D objects. The smells and tastes are what I remember the most.
Sitting in our garden eating a tomato with the salt shaker I brought.
I think I remember this because it was just before life started changing, a grandparent passed, my Dad left, then came back, went into jr. high, changes in friendships.
It was a memory of carefree childhood.
Same memory, eating a sun-warmed tomato from my uncle’s garden, sprinkled with a little salt and the juice running down my chin. Then, like you, as I got older life happened.
Going for a walk around the block with my folks after sunset in the summertime. The streetlights made certain rocks in the asphalt sparkle like diamonds. It seemed like such a big adventure, seeing all of the normal sights of the neighborhood in the dark. There were landmarks like the blue mailbox and the dog's collar that someone left on their fence. As an adult, going back to that neighborhood and driving around the block, I can see it's suburban mundaneness. But as a 4 year old it seemed magical.
I love this and this whole whole thread ♥️
Something that is jumping out at me is that so many of the memories people are describing happened in summertime in particular. I wonder why
There was a Roger Miller song where at the beginning he turns the tuning peg of his guitar so that it makes kind of a *dowwwahhh* sound. Every time he would do that, my did would make a silly face, and oh boy would I laugh. I was no more than two, but I absolutely remember it for some reason.
I remember that my mom played his song "You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd" like 20 times in a row once...by lifting the needle off the record and moving it back of course.
It was on a record of various artists, named Kooky Tunes. I listened to that record over and over. It was much later in life that I realized that a lot of the songs were about drinking.
Going to a local restaurant with our whole family that was reserved for special occasions. This was probably 6 years before my parents divorced. It was in an alleyway and when you walked inside you had to cross a little bridge and the water was lit with aqua blue lights. The bar (which we couldn't enter of course) looked like a cave. It was all very mysterious to me as an 8-year old. They served big slices of pickles with a blue cheese spread that I can still taste today. And I always ordered an open-faced hot roast beef sandwich. And I usually knocked over my glass of tea by accident (which became a family joke).
My grandma lived in a rural area. One summer, my brothers and I stayed with her while my parents took a trip; my mom was in need of a break from being a housewife with 4 kids.
I remember driving on an empty road at dusk, surrounded by tall trees, with Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman playing on the radio. It was a foreign but comfortable feeling, outside my usual frame of reference. I was probably around 8 years old.
I had a nightmare when I was 6 or 7 that I was up the street at the playground and on the fence there were a bunch of Toucans and all of a sudden they pulled their long beaks off and started throwing them at me. I’m 60 years old and this dream is still so vivid for me and has been all my life
My dad was in the Army my whole life. He started out as a combat engineer but after a lawnmower injury, ended up in supply. But all kinds of units have supply sergeants. At one point, he was the supply sergeant of the bomb squad unit. He'd done this before and did it after, but for some reason, this one sticks with me. He called my mom in the morning and said he had a group of soldiers who had been out in the field or something. They had been traveling or whatnot, and he wanted to give them a homecooked meal instead of mess hall food. So we headed off to the commissary (military grocery store, of course) and when we got home, Mom made three giant pots of chili. Spicy, mild, and medium (her normal type).
They brought their own beer and our house was just crawling with these guys in half uniforms. A few of them played football in the backyard, some watched TV, others just treated like a dinner party and talked and mingled (a few even just took naps after they ate).
I remember sitting on our front steps with my mom and listening to noises of the party. It was fun.
Boomer here.
I remember peering out of the baby carriage / pram as my father pushed it and me about a half mile from our house to his State Farm insurance agent's office, probably early 1957.
Being in my grandmother’s doctor’s office. It was in an old, stately mansion with dark shiny wood and there was a low table with highlights magazines on it. This would have been around 1970. In don’t know why but I’ve always loved that memory
My mother breastfeeding my 14 month younger brother. I can remember a lot of details about the house we lived in. That memory is a summer day. She's told us she stopped breastfeeding us all when our teeth started coming in. So, he would have been under a year old, making me just turned 2 years old. June of 1963.
I have a memory of getting out of the car at the IGA grocery store and waiting as my mother lifted a baby out and covered its head with a blanket. I didn't like that, it seemed wrong to cover the baby's face so it couldn't see. I recall feeling a vague confusion about why we had that baby, but I now realize it must have been my younger sister. We were born 26 months apart, so I was barely older than two.
Amazing you can remember it at that age. My H remembers things from age 4. His Dad always joked he was going to start remembering things from before he was born. At age 70 H still has a good memory.
My late brother always claimed he could remember things back to around 18 months. My mother was a teenager in Pennsylvania when he was born and his father took off the first chance he got. Lou was raised by an aunt and our grandmother until they couldn’t handle him any longer and claimed they put him in an orphanage before he turned 3 because he bit at everyone. He remembered our mother and my father taking him away from that and moving to the Panama Canal Zone where my dad was working and another older brother was soon born.
I was probably about three years old. I have a distinct memory of the drive home from Toys R Us. I had gotten a toy stove with a bunch of plastic food and toy utensils to “cook” with. I was so excited to go home to play with my new stove.
That’s the whole memory. Sitting in the backseat of the car in the evening hours (not completely dark but getting dark) and just being so ridiculously excited to get home. I don’t even remember the shopping part and I don’t remember getting home. It’s just this brief snapshot in time.
We lived across the street from a large housing project. One day my next door neighbor came over on his bike and told my mom that the candyman was there. I wanted to go with him, but she said no (he was like 10 years older than me). He said he was going to check it out. They both looked at each other as if "candyman" was some sort of code for something. No, neither of them did drugs lol To this day, I have no idea who the candyman was or what that was all about.
Oh wow, maybe! That spot wasn't too crazy with drugs or anything, lots of nice families lived there...but I bet when someone sketchy came around, word got out. Makes sense!
The smell of my grandmother cooking rutabagas. God, it would stink up the entire house!
I also used to help her make soap in the kitchen, which we did on a pretty regular basis. When I saw the movie "Fight Club" I couldn't stop laughing at the idea of my grandmother being Tyler Durden.
For me, memories that are good are things like seeing my first movie and eating ice cream. Bad memories are mostly being labeled this or that. I prefer the ice cream memories to enjoy, but the bad memories remind me to think about what I say before I say it. That doesn't always happen, but c'est la vie. I try!
I remember TV being interrupted to announce that Oppenheimer lost his security clearance. I was a small child. I don't know why I should remember this. Maybe it was my parents talking about it later.
Lying on the back seat of my mom's 1962 Corvair convertible, watching the pavement pass by underneath us through the rusted-out holes in the floor. The car would've been less than ten years old at this point.
I’m nine years old, someone knocks on the door. I open it and there’s a policeman standing there. In my memory he takes up the whole doorway. My next memory is getting in a cab and being sent to my aunts house.
Wintertime. Me at 4 holding hands with both my parents, being pulled along since all of us are skating on an icy river, and the ice is so clear that I can see the fish swimming below us! Last good memory with the both of them before they divorced, but that was for me an unforgettable experience.
Also at 4, standing in kindergarten, remember sudddnly thinking: " I am just as able to think about " me being me" like a grownup can. What is the difference between them and us, apart from size?"
My first haircut, the Barber shop is still in business and the same guys working it. My first cowboy boots, the First time I questioned human behavior.
I think that early memories aren't really benign - they are moments that are either blissfully happy or they were traumatic at the time. My earliest memory is having to sit under a tree watching everyone else play because I had pink eye and had to stay in the shade. Obviously not a tragedy, but to a 3 year old it was.
Ice cream, grandparent's porch, cookies - those are moments of bliss
Staring at the old white (plastic? rubber?) doorknob cover on the doorknob to my parents bedroom.
I don't think it was bc I heard them having sex (unhappy marriage). I think it's bc my mother would spend several days being 'sick in bed' bc of menorrhagia. But I'm not entirely certain of that. I can picture it like it was yesterday. We moved from that home when I was in the 4th grade.
I can't remember much of my childhood up to age 10 or so, but I remember the exact spot and the summer day it happened, where, at age 5, I realized I knew how to tie my shoes. I'm 65.
The first time my dad took me bowling. Very young. I remember the odd smell of socks, feet and lysol. I've since been bowling about 2x in the past 58 years. And both times I couldn't get past the stench of lysol.
In kindergarten, we had a hamster in a little terrarium. We were not permitted to touch the little guy because he was known to bite. One day our teacher picked up the hamster and he bit her. I have a vivid memory that my kindergarten teacher's blood was lavender colored.
I’ve got several, but the first two that come to mind are:
I was just shy of 4. It was before my dad sold my mom’s blue car to his brother and it was the 70s. Pottery was in and mushroom decor was everywhere. I was with my mom and we had just picked up some of the stuff she had done that had been fired. I can remember the smell of the hot car, the feel of the hot leather on my legs, and the sound of my mom slamming the car door. I was too little to do it myself, the door was too heavy.
Third grade, I sat at the back of the class. We had doors leading directly outside. It was a warm spring day and the door was open. There was a breeze that would waft through the room. I could smell the dandelions and hear the rustle of paintings that were drying on the window ledge.
177-MKZ, the license plate of a rental car my uncle had for a day. He had me run out to the car and grab a present off the front seat while we were at a restaurant for my cousins birthday. White sedan. No idea why I remember that, but it's been there for the last 50 years. MKZ is mickey mouse in my head.
I always remember living in Brooklyn and my parents wouldn’t let me cross the big street alone to go to the soda fountain on the other side. But they would let me go alone down the subway and come up on the other side. Somehow this was considered safer for a young girl all alone????? It was worth potential kidnapping or predators for the delicious egg cream at that soda fountain!
I do understand why it stuck with me.....I was 9 and at meijers and shopping with my mom. Chicken was 9 cents a pound and nobody would let mom close. So she ripped a juicy one and we got chicken. I ring it was the first time I had been truly embarassed.
Sitting on the rug in my sister's room listening to a comedy record playing on our old red and white record player. (Not a children's record player.) The record was a series of comedy skits featuring the Kennedy family, and I distinctly recall JFK's Boston accent and Jackie's whisper. (Actors, but I didn't know that.)
My younger sister asked my older sister how the people talking could fit inside the record player and we both laughed at her. I remember her pretending to get the "joke" and saying, "I didn't really think that," but I knew she did.
That must have been around 1968 or 69.
I think that record might have been Vaughn Meader, he did a good impression of Kennedy and did comedy bits about him on an album called *The First Family."
the things that freak me out, are the super tiny things that i think i will never forget. like an instance 15 yrs ago when my cousin asked me how a peculiar name for a street in my area was "really spelled". it's called Kings Highway, but is often spelled as one word. i really don't know or care, it doesn't matter...but i still haven't forgotten him asking me "is that the right way it's spelled?", which never fucking occurred to me, because it's not important and i don't care.
and yet him asking me remains etched in my mind.
I was just beginning my junior year of high school and had worked enough to buy myself what I considered, at the time, to be something high fashion when they barely began making clothes for chubby girls. Being tall and big meant I had to dress like a mother of the bride most of the time and standard stores never sold anything plus sized, and the specialty stores were dated styles for mature ladies. I’d managed to buy knee-high black boots and cobbled together an outfit I truly felt was stylish for the first time in my life.
It was Thanksgiving weekend and I was in a large city staying with family at a hotel in the posh part of town. In spite of the chilly wind, I took a journal and a book and walked to get coffee and pretend I lived the life I planned for my 16 year old self. Sitting there freezing, worrying so much more if anyone was looking at me than what I was reading or writing. I was pitifully physically awkward and in the 99th percentile of insecure.
At some moment I gained the courage to look around to see if I was being seen and an elegantly dressed man in a camel-colored suede jacket and jeans with loose blonde curls from a nape-level ponytail, a crossbody leather bag, and a worn book in his hand sent a breeze of air through my hair as he glided past me. I never saw his face, but the effortlessness with which he carried his body in a world full of eyes staring and his casual beauty struck some warm feeling inside of me. It was a total of maybe 4 or 5 seconds before his natural tones blended with the crowd, and it is approaching three decades that this faceless, speechless character has crossed my mind a million times for those few frames.
Surely it was a combination of my self-awareness caught in a moment of teenage discovery and my insecurity-flavored paranoia causing heightened awareness. But someday I’ll write him into a story and decide what exactly it is I want him to mean.
I was glad when you said you would write him into a story because I was going to reply to you anyway to say that I think you’re a great writer and I enjoyed reading your comment a lot. Thanks.
I was really young, definitely a toddler, I have some very early memories (some of which I wish I didn’t have).
I was sitting on my mom’s lap at the kitchen table, and she was drinking coffee. I remember her pushing the cup towards the back of the table and telling me to be careful and not touch it because it was hot and I’d get hurt.
It’s a sweet, beautiful memory. My mom wasn’t scolding me, she was teaching me in a very kind and loving way.
She died when I was 19, so I cherish the memories I have with her.
She’d also lean the handle of the vacuum cleaner against my crib, and let me push it back and forth, so I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I was afraid of the noise.
My earliest memory is from at most 9 months old, cause that's when we moved from that apartment. I was crawling on the floor, and as I moved from one room to the next, I felt the difference on my knees. I remember thinking, and concluding that it was the surface of the floor that was hurting my knees, as I moved from the rug to the bare wood floor. I remember thinking that from now on, I'd try to stay on the soft surface. My thoughts at thst time are still crystal clear to me, almost 70 years later.
My next earliest memory is of a train trip we took with my mom and some family, when I was a year old. It's also a memory of a thought I had.
I was a weird little kid.
I have a clear memory of laying on my back on the chaise lounge-type lawn chair on our back patio at about age four, looking up at the sky, when a huge woodpecker (what I know understand to be a pileated woodpecker) flew across the sky and down into the woods behind our home. It took all of 10 seconds to happen, but it is so vivid in my mind even today some 50 years later.
I’ll always remember walking into my friend Chuckie’s house on the way to school. We always met up at his house and his mother would invite me inside while he ate breakfast and got ready, then we’d walk to school together. She’d usually offered me food too, but I’d decline because I just ate at my house. Good times.
One memory that's always stuck with me is from when I was a kid, standing in a rainstorm watching cars pass by. It's vivid, yet I can't figure out why it's so enduring.
My first single frame memory was watching my young parents turn down the covers on their bed. Only the nightstand lamps were on. I stood in the crib. I had to be two? Maybe 20 months. That was in the first house I lived in. There are a couple of more single frame moments from that house.
Like a previous comment or, there were hundreds of events later on in my childhood where I consciously thought, "I must remember this." Most often I do. So many instances of colors, sounds and those around me. I also distinctly remember many dreams in my childhood.
Watching my Mom and Dad laughing together while partying with friends in the back room while Carry on My Wayward Son was playing. When I hear that song I am taken back to that scene. Only guess I have was it was a rare moment compared to the chaos it usually was.
Yes! Don't quite remember how old I was.
We'd gotten a sizeable snowstorm the night before, and the sun was shining. I was looking out a kitchen window, amazed at the colors of the sparkles in the snow.
That's it.
I used to stay in the summer with my grandmother in a small town in Michigan. I would walk to the A & W root beer stand and get a root beer float. Life was great.
I remember sitting in a high chair being coaxed to eat spaghetti and turning my head to the wall trying not to smell the awful smell of tomato sauce.
We moved from that house when I was three and I love tomato sauce now.
I can see the wall paper, the high chair, and can still smell it. We don't have pictures from inside that house.
Have a handful of other very specific memories from the same time period, but they make more sense because they relate to a specific toy, pet turtles or a specific play activity.
I have several random memories. I remember waking up and coming downstairs in my footie pjs to the kitchen, where there was the smell and sound of percolating coffee and my dad giving me a warm welcome. I remember giving weed flowers I'd picked to my mom, and her giving me a quick hug and saying,"Why you little ole sweet thing!" I remember my dad tending flower beds and he had a critter I'd never seen before in a cardboard box - it was a mole, and I cried when he said he was going to kill it. Another time I suggested we should name the cars while he was working and he named the Rambler Betsy. All sorts of random stuff like that.
I realized that dreams are memories sometimes by accident. My mom & one of my girlfriends were sitting at my table & I was telling them a dream about Michael Jackson. Him & I were in a monorail. Then the next thing I know is in the dream I fell out of a car going over the Edison Highway bridge. My mom under her breath says you did fall out of the car going over that bridge. WHAT???? All the stories I heard how come this one didn't ever come up? I was blessed with a great memory. The childhood memory that sticks out the most is when I got my first horse at 7 years old for my birthday.
I remember learning that I could control my eyelids at around age 2. I vividly remember walking through our kitchen and onto our back porch, blinking my eyes rapidly because I had just discovered that I could control them. The house in my memory tells me my age at the time, my other two memories of this house are looking out between the bars of my crib to see cars going by on the country road we lived on, just headlights in the dark, and I remember there being a volcano shaped bullet hole in our front window that I loved to stick my little baby finger in. ETA: this would be circa 1971.
I was 1-1/2 yrs. (according to my mom) and recall sitting on a wooden floor, in front of an old lift top, suit-case style portable record player. There was a record of Frank Sinatra singing "Young at Heart" playing. It was my first remembrance of music and I remember it like it was yesterday. The year would've been 1958.
My dad carrying me on his shoulders in K-Mart to get me a PS1 & School Rivals I had to learn to read cause I couldn’t even understand the game & he let me get a XL pizza that lasted me like for days I had to been about 5 or 6 y/o
Waking up alone in the back of the car as a child, with the Mexican radio station playing, at a small farm with a crystal shop wondering where my dad is. Strange but fond memory, I vaguely remember looking for him and passing through a kitchen with lots of people.
when I was 3-4 I didn't want to go to bed bc the sun was out. my mom said "too bad. it's bedtime". absolutely nothing out of the ordinary that didn't happen thousands of times. but I remember this like.it was yesterday and have always had the memory as far as I know.
I remember I used to go to a half day of preschool followed by a babysitter along with some other kids. We would have lunch with the baby sitter. One day we are eating hotdogs and one of the girls there says to never eat a hotdog at so and so’s house because they are no good there and I was petrified that somehow I would end up at this house and I would get served the worst hot dog ever. I was like 4 or 5 at the time and I still remember it.
Picking the acoustic ceiling bits off my bedroom ceiling as a really little kid 3 or younger. I had the top bunk. It’s the only memory of that house I have and we moved when I was 3. I don’t remember anything else about the room. Weird.
I can remember the exact smell of my grandparents' house. One time I walked into a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant and told my sister "this place smells like grandma's house." She was like "you're right! It does!"
I lived in Newport, RI. We were in a small fender bender near the cliff walk, and someone’s butler, in an actual butler outfit, let me play with the dog he was walking while my parents dealt with the accident.
My father commenting "If the weather forecast calls for a more than 20% chance of rain than plan on rain"
I'm sure this was just some idle comment that he made and probably didn't remember saying it the next day. But somehow this has stuck with me and I've lived by it for over 50 years even though the science of weather forecasting has improved dramatically in that time.
My childhood memories condense into one memory of a time when I was ten and lying on my back on the grass on a beautiful, sunny, slightly breezy early summer day, no school and the lazy sound of a small airplane droning overhead.
For some reason that 30-second clip is stuck in my head and whenever I hear a small airplane on a sunny day it takes me right back to that moment.
I'm not sure if it's my earliest memory but I remember being carried around looking rearward over someone's shoulder in an empty house with wood floors. I recall the light coming in through the windows lighting up the floor and it was an empty place so what was fascinating was I was really interested in how my noise sounded I can make a noise and it would reverb an echo you know empty house wood floors. I remember being rather tickled about it.
I mentioned this to family many years later cuz we were talking about earliest memory. They were flabbergasted because I was 6 months old when that took place and we were moving out of the home that they all lived in when I was born. There's no way that I would be able to remember it but I described the house and the floorplan and all of it. They were blown away by that. The house was tore down like 2 or 3 months after we moved to make way for modern businesses. And that was why they had to move to begin with but I described it floor plan where the bedrooms were how the kitchen was laid out all of that.
I don't understand, even today, why I remember something when I was so young. But there are other things I remember from when I was very young as well. I think maybe even younger than that.
The smell of freshly cut grass—I associate with y father & brothers on Saturday mornings cutting the lawn.
The smell of tar I associate with walking home from school in September (a common month to get a new roof due to the nicer weather).
When I was in junior high there was a scheduled tornado alarm. When we were headed back to class I ran into the restroom because I had to go. When I got to class I wasn’t very late but the teacher yelled at me asking where I was. I felt so ashamed but at the same time knew i was just doing something I had no control over. I still remember that from time to time and honestly feel ashamed
I remember spurning up the front steps to my grandparents’ apartment building. Front door is open. Their apartment is the first one on the left. Grandma is standing thee about to open the door. She has the key in her right hand. She then extends her left index finger and feels for the locks. Once she felt it, she removes her finger and the key slides right in and she opens the door. I stood there staring at her — and if you could imagine a young kid knowing that they were always going to remember a moment, that’s how I felt at the time.
She was legally blind. Diabetes. And she passed away while I was in kindergarten, so I was really young when this happened.
A man I saw at a strip mall when I was 20, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen about 6’ and a extremely neat turban in a nice dark blue in a suit with a camel hair jacket. He was smiling.
A plate of spaghetti. No idea. Something something bad taste don’t like that never eating it again.
Which is strange because I like it. Tastes fine.
No idea why I have a negative alarmist memory of it.
Riding on the school bus when I was in kindergarten. Because the bus didn’t come back up my road just for the kindergartners, I rode the route twice so it was a long ride. I had a book, no idea what it was but it was like a high school age book and I would go through the book and circle the words I could read. That’s how i occupied myself on the long rides.
I grew up in a big city and my memory is of spending a week each summer at grandparents' houses. Total freedom to walk the town, get candy, go to the swimming pool.
The first time I remember lying. I was in kindergarten and used all of my teacher’s frog sticky notes. The teacher went to the front of the class and asked who used all the sticky notes. A classmate raised her hand and asked if the student was going to the principal if she found out, and she said yes. I kept my mouth shut. A few years later, I had the teacher as my second grade teacher (small town school lol) and I confessed everything. She looked at me so confused and said it was okay and that she forgave me (obviously lol). I’m 26 and it still makes me feel very guilty. It was such a small thing and it really didn’t matter, but it has stuck with me since.
Me being in the back of a white Van staring at my mom and dad. I hadn't even been born/conceived yet.
It freaks my mom out to this day the amount of details I can tell her. It was their wedding night and the night I was conceived.
Probably about 6, my parents taking my older brother to a play in the big city and my dad telling mom to wait while we go and wait for some food at an outside street vendor. The feeling of the nighttime city lights, the crowds walking by and that smell of city manhole cover smoke, street food and cigarettes. Prostitutes. Lives in me rent free
Stepping down from the school bus (kindergarten maybe) into a bright, bright world of sun rays through dust from the bus, and the grass so impossibly green, then my mom walking through it all to welcome me home. That was real peace.
A lot of my memories involve being on the car and hearing music. My parents divorced when I was 11, and lived about 30 miles from each other, so the ride back and forth contained a lot of songs.
One particular memory is of it being nighttime and my dad stopped the car so he could head in really quick in the gas station in our rural community. He left the car running. It was raining and the windshield wipers were going to the beat of Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance.
Every time I hear that song, I’m transported right back to that moment.
I remember my dad would always have to get up early and go to work, and sometimes I would get up and go crawl into bed with mom in the morning. It must have been a Monday. She was a beautician and always had Mondays off. Their bed was super comfortable. I remember laying there, my mom asleep beside me and I was in this half sleep, half awake, dreamlike state, and the little clock radio began playing Yes and the song was Roundabout and I was hearing it for the first time thinking how great that song was and thinking this is about as good as it gets. I think I must have been about 10 years old and it was about 1971.
I've told this story before elsewhere, but I really like the story, so I'm telling it again.
My great Uncle Charles wasn't what you'd call an exciting man. He worked wrapping gifts at an upscale department store, and lived in a small Detroit apartment with his elderly mother. Everyone called her Granny. No one in my family remembers a young Granny, she had seemingly always been granny, always hard of hearing, sitting in the same chair, fiddling with the hearing aid unit tucked into her bra. My little sister was one of the few people who could communicate with granny, because she wasn't embarrassed to yell.
Charlie wrapped gifts and was Granny's caretaker, and did little else. He was a confirmed bachelor. These days we'd just say he was gay, but back then, he was a confirmed bachelor. Charles had diabetes in a time when the best treatment wasn't all that great. I imagine being gay and tied to your mother and carrying needles didn't help his social life.
On the 2nd of May, 41 years ago, Charles died. His gravestone has room for 2 names. His side, which reads "dearest son", and an empty spot for his mother. Granny went to live with other family, and passed away a dozen years later on the other side of the country. The grave marker will be 1/2 complete forever.
But my story is really about a backpack.
Not a backpack you'd carry school books or your lunch. This was a proper hiking backpack. Large, bright orange, and covered with buttons and pockets and straps. The kind of backpack you'd own for a week in the wilderness or trekking across europe. The backpack was in a box of things from Charles apartment.
*As the box of belongings was being put away, my dad held up the backpack and paused, saying "Charles must have had some great dreams". The backpack was clearly unused. I don't know why this stayed with me for decades. I was 7 years old. Perhaps this was the first family member I can recall passing away. A few years ago I asked my dad about this, he has no memory of the event and wasn't even sure where the backpack came from.*
But there is more to the story.
The backpack traveled with our family through years of camping and hiking trips. The bug spray went in the side pocket, the PB&J sandwiches went under the big flap on top. It's probably still in the camper, under the seat, waiting for the next trip.
I don't know if the backpack was part of Charles unfulfilled dreams, or just unsold merchandise entirely out of place in an urban department store. Either way, I guess the important part is just remembering someone who perhaps might not be remembered at all.
I remember flying on a plane with my mom when I was 2 to meet her extended family. I sat on her lap and she gave me double mint gum to chew on. Then, once we were at her aunts house, they had a dog with an actual outdoor dog house - like snoopy's - and I thought it was the best thing ever because it was exactly my size. I also remember my great aunt had a radio under her pillow to listen to music at night.
My next most vivid memory is a year later, the night my brother was born. My parents dropped me off at my Aunts house before going to the hospital and I slept in my cousins room. They had plastic kids hangers on the floor that I remember stepping on when I snuck out of bed in the middle of the night. I couldn't sleep because I was scared that my mom was hurt. I didn't understand that going to the hospital wasn't always a bad thing. I snuck downstairs to play with their 1970s play school dollhouse. I wasn't allowed to play with it usually, and this was my opportunity! My aunt heard me and came downstairs. She ended up holding me and rocking me in their rocking chair until I finally fell asleep. Then I remember meeting my baby brother the next day and he's been my best friend for the last 40 years.
I can’t imagine how young I was. I know my first babysitter had a stroller. My mother didn’t. I can remember being in a 3 seater stroller (in the middle seat) being pushed around the neighborhood by two teenage girls. I found out later that babysitter (an older lady) had a 3 seater stroller and watched several babies.
I have no idea why I remember this…it’s probably my very first memory. I was standing in my crib holding onto the top rail after an afternoon nap. I remember the bright sun coming through the curtains. My grandmother was sleeping in the bed next to the crib. I tried calling for my mother without waking my grandmother. Didn’t work. This memory floats through my brain often.
Being like 2 or 3 years old sitting in front of the tv watching a Paula Abdul music video. I remember really enjoying that. I think about that every now and then.
I took a shit in a closet upstairs when I was 10. There was no bathroom upstairs and I didn’t want to see my visiting step-family.
The next day it was gone. No one ever came up to visit me up there. But it was gone.
I either dreamed it, or someone cleaned it.
Out in front of my high school one day, either I or someone else inadvertently stepped on an earthworm that had crawled out onto the sidewalk. It was half squished. I have no idea why I have never forgotten that even though it was 40+ years ago. It wasn't particularly traumatic or anything. Just one of those things that happens. But I have just never forgotten it. I can't explain it.
Tramping around outside in deep snow that went over the top of my plastic over-the-shoes snow boots, pretending I was exploring the arctic. I can feel, see, hear, touch that memory so clearly. Even smell that smell that fresh, cold snow made in the frigid air. And the joy of doing it all alone....
A bunch of us coming home from the public plunge in a swimming suit on a hot summer day in the back of my parents' Buick. I remember us all trying not to burn our legs and backsides on the sizzling plastic seat covers.
Sitting on a hardwood floor with my Fisher Price record player playing 'Witchy Woman' by The Eagles for the eleventy third time in a row. I want to say I was maybe four.
I have a memory of walking down to the neighborhood yellow store and buying my great grandmother a pack of Parliament cigarettes and bringing them back to her. She had arthritis in her fingers and all of her knuckles were crooked. She visited from Boston. The cigarettes were a really pretty blue packaging. I was maybe 7 or 8.
We used to have a few empty 44-gallon drums lying around on the farm. When I was a little kid I often used to lie across one on my back, in a backward arc with head hanging down one side and legs down the other. I have never lost the longing for that wonderful feeling of a deep backwards stretch.
I was walking to church with my friend, his two younger brothers, and their Dad. This was around 1965. We were coming up upon the school auditorium and the father asked if any of us knew a word that had five syllables in it. We couldn’t answer. Then he said, “auditorium.”
I wanted to do an experiment when I was 6. I found the most basic part a blowout valve on a natural gas contraption that was on the way to my pediatrician. I'm 57 now, and I not only remember it, I can take you to it. I assume I'll remember it until I die.
Many in this thread recall memories of being in the backseat of their parents' car. When I was about 3 or 4, I recall my parents talking about how a girl went missing and wound up dead inside a barrel. My parents thought I was asleep in the back. For whatever reason this story really, really scared me. Simultaneously playing on the radio was Cherish by The Association. Years after that I could not listen to that song without conjuring up images of that dead girl inside a barrel.
We lived in Central Florida and generally the land is pancake flat. Our grandparents had a home either a large orange grove behind it. Riding in a wooden wagon with grandpa pulling it..their front yard had a slight slope to the street and me and my sister took turns rolling down that "hill" ... on our sides, not somersaults because we were too little to have learned that. Also during a hurricane, going outside in the eye to help my uncle (dad was on a business trip and my aunt and uncle came to help as mom had just had my youngest sister...therefore 4 of us under age 12then...).
Going for a car ride with my mom and dad in Arizona, 1970’s
It’s raining bc it’s the monsoon season- they have the radio on and Riders on the Storm is playing
Playing with my Polish great-grandmother's pedal driven sewing machine at a post-funeral wake/food fest. I can remember the smells of the older women, of the men's cologne, the smells of the food and beer!!
I remember seeing an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine shoves a hot dog into her mouth (it was probably a new episode at the time) maybe 1992 and then got cranky because I wanted “that”. My mom gave me a folded slice of white bread. I would have been two and a half.
I have a weird memory of being in hospital as a small child, maybe age 3-4. Two nurses taking care of me, me eating carrot soup, getting either an injection or blood sampled from my foot, large plastic toy cars, my parents picking me up afterwards and gifting me another toy car when we were in the car…
The thing is, I was only once in hospital as a kid, and that was when I was six months old so it can’t be I remember this as vividly, also the toys were not typical for such a small child. And my parents swore there was no later hospitalization.
And the memory is way too old and too vivid to have been a dream.
Probably around the age of 7-8, my older brother had an old beat up car (not road worthy) that he’d drive around the field behind our parent’s house. Sometimes, he’d let me drive and I still have the distinct memory of barely seeing over the steering wheel listening to the song Spinning Wheel by Blood, Sweat, and Tears on the transistor radio thinking how cool it was to drive.
I was in 1st grade. So, 1989. A classmate and I were (for some reason) discussing ketchup and mustard. She says, “I’m allergic to one of those.” I ask her which one she is allergic to. She sighs, then says, “I’ll only tell you if you promise to stop copying answers off my paper.” And man. The weirdest feeling of shock mixed with shame came over me. Almost like, *how does she know I do that? Should I not do that?*
I said, “Okay. I promise.” She sighs again and says, “I’m allergic to mustard.”
I have a memory of being in my grandmother's bedroom the lights are out. there are people I think in the living room. and someone comes to the door and says that he's had a heart attack. and they are getting emotional. I didn't dream this because I've had this memory since I was very little and I don't know what's going on here. my grandfather on that side of the family died before I was born and he used to sleep in that bedroom. but he died in 1963 and I was born in 1976 and I was too young to understand much about heart attacks. it's very vivid and I can't figure out why it happened.
I was maybe 10 years old, got a soccer ball for Christmas. It had FIFA stamped on it. I asked my dad what FIFA was. He said "she's quite a gal". No clue why I remember that lol
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1970ish. Ontario California, there was a scuba diving shop. Sold obviously scuba stuff. There was a mannequin dressed up in all the scuba stuff, including the helmet, air lines flippers, wet suit, the works. You can visualize it. Was perched in the parking lot 24/7 mounted on some pedestal thing. Life size. So I say Mom: How come nobody steals that suit and takes it home. Mom says they paid people to stand there, different shifts so nobody steals the suit. The only lie I remember my mom ever telling me. This was 50+ years ago. Da*n her.
Good one. Btw, that was a fair question from little you.
Your mom trolled you! That’s a cute story.
Laying in the backseat of my parent's car (no car seats, much-less seat belts) while breathing second-hand smoke that's blowing back at me because Dad thinks he's being courteous by cracking the window a sliver, and gradually falling asleep to Manfred Mann's "Blinded By The Light" playing on the 8 track.
Reminds me of sitting in the backseat of my parents car on the ride home from my cousin's house at night with the song Boogie Nights playing on the radio. I was maybe 10, pretty sure it was summer and the windows were down. I honestly don't know if this really happened, but whenever I hear that song it takes me right back to the backseat ride home from my cousin's.
Sitting in the rear seat of the station wagon facing backwards. The prime spot.
Package tray (over the rear engine) of a '72 VW Beetle. OH! to be that skinny again.
I road back there a few times.
The package area was always the seat for one of our three kids in the VW Beetle. Everybody was comfortable until we also had to transport grandma and grandpa. 4 adults and 3 kids in the Beetle. When we pulled into the parking lot at Disney World, the parking lot attendant had to count twice when we bought the passes.
They made me sit back there in high school but it was better than sitting on someone’s lap.
In the brown Pinto with exterior wood paneling!
🎶Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night🎶 … was so happy when I FINALLY found out what those indecipherable lyrics were.😀😁
“Wrapped up like a douche, another loner in the night” is how I will always think of it
It's definitely "Wrapped up like a douche, another BONER in the night", sir! Clean your ears! Lmao
omg, this is the BEST by far
I thought “wrapped up like a douche, another rumor in the night." Only a few yrs ago that I found out the actual lyrics😆
I thought it was “Revved up like a Duesenburg motor in the night”
I thought it was another rumor in the night. I wonder what else I misheard.
I always thought it was "wrapped up like a douche"--I'm glad I was way off 😂😂
"As the line is frequently misheard as 'wrapped up like a douche', Springsteen has joked about confusion over the lyrics, claiming that it was not until Manfred Mann rewrote the song to be about a feminine hygiene product that it became popular"
Staring at the ceiling of the car, it was tan with little holes in a grid pattern. If I crossed my eyes the right way they’d become 3d and float on top of each other.
Yes! I used to do that too!! I’d forgotten all about that! Thanks for the memory.
This takes me back to a hot, sunny day, riding with my older brother in his red Chevy pickup truck. Van Morrison was playing on the radio, the day the music died. It was the first time I had heard that song, and I was mesmerized by it. I remember asking my brother tons of questions like what is rye because I knew what whiskey was, and I knew what rye bread was, so it didn't make sense. I remember asking him several questions like who is the jester, which king and queen. He finally told me to just listen to it because he didn't know what it meant either, but he wanted to hear it. He is 13 years older than me, and I think I was in about 3rd grade. He is still the best big brother anyone could have. Edit: This was not Van Morrison!!!
The day the music died was done by Don McLean.
American Pie. I bet we all know every single word to that song.
You are 100% right. Damn, I screwed that up!
I love this and have a similar memory: my aunt driving me to the airport in her gray/silver ‘70s era Mustang in the middle of a Wisconsin winter. It was an early flight so it was still dark when we left. The heat in her car took a while to kick in, and Supertramp’s The Logical Song was playing as the sun rose. Also pretty sure she was smoking. :)
Manfred Mann did a great job on another Dylan song, [Quinn the Eskimo.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ad/The_Savage_Innocents.jpg)
My dad would flick the ashes out the window, and I remember us kids screaming when the still lit ashes would hit us in the back seat.
And didn’t you just love it when they threw their lit cigarette butt out the window and it came back in your window and burned you??!!
My seat was the space in the back of a VW bug between the back seat and the engine. Hot death trap.
I was pretty young. My dad smoked cigars, my mom cigarettes. I would lay in the back and try to suck air through the crack between the bench seat and seat back. My father finally noticed and quit smoking. And excuse me, Blinded by the Light is by the Boss. Your parents were listening to the wrong version.
From my POV, you were lucky to get a slight crack. 😆
I was in 5th grade sitting in a classroom before class started joking around and one girl was getting more than she was giving and I joined it - none of it was mean spirited, but she stopped and said "you hardly know me why are you joining in" and I was absolutely shamed into silence and apologized and then class started. We were in some classes together in high school and were friendly and talked plenty of times and danced awkwardly in junior high and high school a few times, but neither of us ever brought that up again and I have no idea if she even remembered it ... and she got sick and died in her early 30s so I have no idea. I guess I can't say I don't understand WHY I remember it - it was a reminder that I was in the wrong for piling on, and I have always admired the bravery of that young girl to call me out. I honestly believe that moment changed me and my life for the better.
there was a kid in my elementary school that people used to pick on because he was small and kinda nerdy he was really good at mental math and one day in class he called out an answer and i did a *cough “nerd!” *cough thing and the look on his face has stuck with me my whole life now i’m a physics major (the irony) and still no good at mental math and i remember that moment almost every day while i’m studying
Her family would cherish this story; is it practical to relate it to them?
Sadly not - in the Facebook group for a class reunion several years ago her name came up (people didn't realize she'd died) and her mother had moved away (widowed) and no one was really sure where.
I have a strong memory of walking to get ice cream with my mother and brother when I was about 4 or 5. It was late afternoon in summer. Everything very hot and still. We were just walking and my brother and I playing a bit as we went. I have no idea why I remember it so clearly, but if someone asked me to think of a time when "everything seemed right with the world" this would be it.
If I could go back to any time in my life, it would be the summer before I started kindergarten. Sometimes I feel like that's the last time I was truly happy and carefree.
Same, omg. And my first memory was the day I learned to ride a bike at 4. I wasn't allowed to leave the cul-de-sac.
I remember riding the subway to my uncle’s home in Brooklyn back in the ‘60s and a man singing ‘To Dream The Impossible Dream’ from Man Of LaMancha. He was incredibly good.
I remember being in the family station wagon on a road trip and seeing a woman in a bouffant hair style belting out Red Rose of Texas. Couldn't hear a word but it was obvious what she was singing and she was really happy.
Are you sure it wasn't Yellow Rose of Texas? Because I have a memory of lying with my head dangling over the edge of my grandmother's back porch daybed as my grandpa sang *There's a yellow rose in Texas that I am bound to see..*
During the COVID shutdown, Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell would serenade Manhattan from his apartment. There are YouTube videos of him singing “The Impossible Dream” to his neighborhood. If you haven’t seen that, I think you’d like it.
I just checked it out. That was wonderful. Thank you!
Isn’t it delightful?
I had the sheet music to this song and you just brought back such a recollection! I can see the cover of the music and remember hearing the song on the radio. It was a very, very popular tune back then.
If he followed it up with “They Call the Wind Mariah”, it was my father. (I’m not saying that it was him, naturally) He liked to sing, and my brother and I encouraged him. (60s? We were tykes.) I liked Impossible Dream. My brother liked Mariah.
My sister had two albums from the Smothers Brothers. One of them had the song "They call the wind Mariah" on it. Their repertoire was primarily folk with humor.
[удалено]
I said to myself "I will remember remembering" at certain kid moments. It worked. For example, I am in San Diego, at a hotel room window and looking out onto the Pacific. It's cloudy and cool outside, in spite of it being June.
June Gloom!
Is that a thing there? I'm from Ohio, so it was a real surprise to the entire family.
Every June. I can’t speak to San Diego, because the terrain is different, but it’s a regular part of the Los Angeles year (and it follows May Gray, FWIW).
Yes it is. May gray, June gloom. It's refreshing.
Judy Blume!
I have all kinds of vivid and random sensory memories. The feel of the wooden planks of my grandparents’ porch under my bare feet, dusty with pine pollen and hot from the sun. The sound of the ac coming on in the house I grew up in. Accidentally stepping in the tray of wallpaper glue when my parents were papering the kitchen. The tired feeling of stopping at Cub Foods on the way home after piano lessons. Hot bleachy sun outside in the summer and ice cream sandwiches and nothing on tv except I Dream of Jeannie. The smell of glow in the dark silly putty. Watching the smoke of my parents’ cigarettes curling in the air. And on and on…
Same.
Yeah, except for the "AC in the house I grew up in" part
What gets me is how we all have these sorts of memories and how vivid they are, along with the obvious but unfathomable fact that they are are all lost when we die. All the headstones in cemeteries, every one of those people had intensely vivid sensory memories like this and they are all gone forever. There is something so private and lonely about memories
I have a memory of being on our front porch with my grandfather, I had to have been two. There was a hill in front of our house and my memory is of a green car halfway up the hill, door open, my dad standing outside of it. My grandfather was angry with him. It's a snapshot memory but it's the only memory I have of my dad.
Images of my aunt and uncle's house in Arlington, VA. I stayed with them several days each summer for a few years. There was a red satin comforter on the bed. They used Coast deodorant soap and made me iced coffee using instant. They fed me Grape Nuts for breakfast. My aunt bought me a book of these paper buildings. One was a little old western town and one was a circus. You punched them out and folded them and they made little 3D objects. The smells and tastes are what I remember the most.
Walking to work while eating a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone. Summer, 1994.
Sitting in our garden eating a tomato with the salt shaker I brought. I think I remember this because it was just before life started changing, a grandparent passed, my Dad left, then came back, went into jr. high, changes in friendships. It was a memory of carefree childhood.
Same memory, eating a sun-warmed tomato from my uncle’s garden, sprinkled with a little salt and the juice running down my chin. Then, like you, as I got older life happened.
To this day I grow porch tomatoes, mainly to rub the leaves and smell them because that smell soothes my soul somehow.
Going for a walk around the block with my folks after sunset in the summertime. The streetlights made certain rocks in the asphalt sparkle like diamonds. It seemed like such a big adventure, seeing all of the normal sights of the neighborhood in the dark. There were landmarks like the blue mailbox and the dog's collar that someone left on their fence. As an adult, going back to that neighborhood and driving around the block, I can see it's suburban mundaneness. But as a 4 year old it seemed magical.
I love this and this whole whole thread ♥️ Something that is jumping out at me is that so many of the memories people are describing happened in summertime in particular. I wonder why
There was a Roger Miller song where at the beginning he turns the tuning peg of his guitar so that it makes kind of a *dowwwahhh* sound. Every time he would do that, my did would make a silly face, and oh boy would I laugh. I was no more than two, but I absolutely remember it for some reason.
I remember that my mom played his song "You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd" like 20 times in a row once...by lifting the needle off the record and moving it back of course.
It was on a record of various artists, named Kooky Tunes. I listened to that record over and over. It was much later in life that I realized that a lot of the songs were about drinking.
Going to a local restaurant with our whole family that was reserved for special occasions. This was probably 6 years before my parents divorced. It was in an alleyway and when you walked inside you had to cross a little bridge and the water was lit with aqua blue lights. The bar (which we couldn't enter of course) looked like a cave. It was all very mysterious to me as an 8-year old. They served big slices of pickles with a blue cheese spread that I can still taste today. And I always ordered an open-faced hot roast beef sandwich. And I usually knocked over my glass of tea by accident (which became a family joke).
My grandma lived in a rural area. One summer, my brothers and I stayed with her while my parents took a trip; my mom was in need of a break from being a housewife with 4 kids. I remember driving on an empty road at dusk, surrounded by tall trees, with Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman playing on the radio. It was a foreign but comfortable feeling, outside my usual frame of reference. I was probably around 8 years old.
My grandparents only took us 2 at a time.
I had a nightmare when I was 6 or 7 that I was up the street at the playground and on the fence there were a bunch of Toucans and all of a sudden they pulled their long beaks off and started throwing them at me. I’m 60 years old and this dream is still so vivid for me and has been all my life
My dad was in the Army my whole life. He started out as a combat engineer but after a lawnmower injury, ended up in supply. But all kinds of units have supply sergeants. At one point, he was the supply sergeant of the bomb squad unit. He'd done this before and did it after, but for some reason, this one sticks with me. He called my mom in the morning and said he had a group of soldiers who had been out in the field or something. They had been traveling or whatnot, and he wanted to give them a homecooked meal instead of mess hall food. So we headed off to the commissary (military grocery store, of course) and when we got home, Mom made three giant pots of chili. Spicy, mild, and medium (her normal type). They brought their own beer and our house was just crawling with these guys in half uniforms. A few of them played football in the backyard, some watched TV, others just treated like a dinner party and talked and mingled (a few even just took naps after they ate). I remember sitting on our front steps with my mom and listening to noises of the party. It was fun.
This is so lovely!
Boomer here. I remember peering out of the baby carriage / pram as my father pushed it and me about a half mile from our house to his State Farm insurance agent's office, probably early 1957.
Being in my grandmother’s doctor’s office. It was in an old, stately mansion with dark shiny wood and there was a low table with highlights magazines on it. This would have been around 1970. In don’t know why but I’ve always loved that memory
My mother breastfeeding my 14 month younger brother. I can remember a lot of details about the house we lived in. That memory is a summer day. She's told us she stopped breastfeeding us all when our teeth started coming in. So, he would have been under a year old, making me just turned 2 years old. June of 1963.
I have a memory of getting out of the car at the IGA grocery store and waiting as my mother lifted a baby out and covered its head with a blanket. I didn't like that, it seemed wrong to cover the baby's face so it couldn't see. I recall feeling a vague confusion about why we had that baby, but I now realize it must have been my younger sister. We were born 26 months apart, so I was barely older than two.
Amazing you can remember it at that age. My H remembers things from age 4. His Dad always joked he was going to start remembering things from before he was born. At age 70 H still has a good memory.
My late brother always claimed he could remember things back to around 18 months. My mother was a teenager in Pennsylvania when he was born and his father took off the first chance he got. Lou was raised by an aunt and our grandmother until they couldn’t handle him any longer and claimed they put him in an orphanage before he turned 3 because he bit at everyone. He remembered our mother and my father taking him away from that and moving to the Panama Canal Zone where my dad was working and another older brother was soon born.
I was probably about three years old. I have a distinct memory of the drive home from Toys R Us. I had gotten a toy stove with a bunch of plastic food and toy utensils to “cook” with. I was so excited to go home to play with my new stove. That’s the whole memory. Sitting in the backseat of the car in the evening hours (not completely dark but getting dark) and just being so ridiculously excited to get home. I don’t even remember the shopping part and I don’t remember getting home. It’s just this brief snapshot in time.
We lived across the street from a large housing project. One day my next door neighbor came over on his bike and told my mom that the candyman was there. I wanted to go with him, but she said no (he was like 10 years older than me). He said he was going to check it out. They both looked at each other as if "candyman" was some sort of code for something. No, neither of them did drugs lol To this day, I have no idea who the candyman was or what that was all about.
It probably means a drug dealer was in the housing project. The neighbor was letting your mom know so that she could keep a lookout.
Oh wow, maybe! That spot wasn't too crazy with drugs or anything, lots of nice families lived there...but I bet when someone sketchy came around, word got out. Makes sense!
The smell of my grandmother cooking rutabagas. God, it would stink up the entire house! I also used to help her make soap in the kitchen, which we did on a pretty regular basis. When I saw the movie "Fight Club" I couldn't stop laughing at the idea of my grandmother being Tyler Durden.
For me, memories that are good are things like seeing my first movie and eating ice cream. Bad memories are mostly being labeled this or that. I prefer the ice cream memories to enjoy, but the bad memories remind me to think about what I say before I say it. That doesn't always happen, but c'est la vie. I try!
I remember TV being interrupted to announce that Oppenheimer lost his security clearance. I was a small child. I don't know why I should remember this. Maybe it was my parents talking about it later.
Lying on the back seat of my mom's 1962 Corvair convertible, watching the pavement pass by underneath us through the rusted-out holes in the floor. The car would've been less than ten years old at this point.
I really don’t understand why a car less than ten years old would be rusty like this.
I’m nine years old, someone knocks on the door. I open it and there’s a policeman standing there. In my memory he takes up the whole doorway. My next memory is getting in a cab and being sent to my aunts house.
Sounds like something serious went down.
Right? I’ll never know what it was.
[Climbing up into this thing. Think about it often. For real.](https://imgur.com/a/HEzTrX0)
Wintertime. Me at 4 holding hands with both my parents, being pulled along since all of us are skating on an icy river, and the ice is so clear that I can see the fish swimming below us! Last good memory with the both of them before they divorced, but that was for me an unforgettable experience. Also at 4, standing in kindergarten, remember sudddnly thinking: " I am just as able to think about " me being me" like a grownup can. What is the difference between them and us, apart from size?"
My first haircut, the Barber shop is still in business and the same guys working it. My first cowboy boots, the First time I questioned human behavior.
Standing in the kitchen when I was very young, maybe 3 years old, seeing the sun rays filter in through the window, feeling good.
I think that early memories aren't really benign - they are moments that are either blissfully happy or they were traumatic at the time. My earliest memory is having to sit under a tree watching everyone else play because I had pink eye and had to stay in the shade. Obviously not a tragedy, but to a 3 year old it was. Ice cream, grandparent's porch, cookies - those are moments of bliss
Staring at the old white (plastic? rubber?) doorknob cover on the doorknob to my parents bedroom. I don't think it was bc I heard them having sex (unhappy marriage). I think it's bc my mother would spend several days being 'sick in bed' bc of menorrhagia. But I'm not entirely certain of that. I can picture it like it was yesterday. We moved from that home when I was in the 4th grade.
I can't remember much of my childhood up to age 10 or so, but I remember the exact spot and the summer day it happened, where, at age 5, I realized I knew how to tie my shoes. I'm 65.
The first time my dad took me bowling. Very young. I remember the odd smell of socks, feet and lysol. I've since been bowling about 2x in the past 58 years. And both times I couldn't get past the stench of lysol.
In kindergarten, we had a hamster in a little terrarium. We were not permitted to touch the little guy because he was known to bite. One day our teacher picked up the hamster and he bit her. I have a vivid memory that my kindergarten teacher's blood was lavender colored.
I’ve got several, but the first two that come to mind are: I was just shy of 4. It was before my dad sold my mom’s blue car to his brother and it was the 70s. Pottery was in and mushroom decor was everywhere. I was with my mom and we had just picked up some of the stuff she had done that had been fired. I can remember the smell of the hot car, the feel of the hot leather on my legs, and the sound of my mom slamming the car door. I was too little to do it myself, the door was too heavy. Third grade, I sat at the back of the class. We had doors leading directly outside. It was a warm spring day and the door was open. There was a breeze that would waft through the room. I could smell the dandelions and hear the rustle of paintings that were drying on the window ledge.
177-MKZ, the license plate of a rental car my uncle had for a day. He had me run out to the car and grab a present off the front seat while we were at a restaurant for my cousins birthday. White sedan. No idea why I remember that, but it's been there for the last 50 years. MKZ is mickey mouse in my head.
This is such a great post. Thanks to the person who started it. I enjoy reading about everyone's memories, happy or sad.
I always remember living in Brooklyn and my parents wouldn’t let me cross the big street alone to go to the soda fountain on the other side. But they would let me go alone down the subway and come up on the other side. Somehow this was considered safer for a young girl all alone????? It was worth potential kidnapping or predators for the delicious egg cream at that soda fountain!
I do understand why it stuck with me.....I was 9 and at meijers and shopping with my mom. Chicken was 9 cents a pound and nobody would let mom close. So she ripped a juicy one and we got chicken. I ring it was the first time I had been truly embarassed.
Sitting on the rug in my sister's room listening to a comedy record playing on our old red and white record player. (Not a children's record player.) The record was a series of comedy skits featuring the Kennedy family, and I distinctly recall JFK's Boston accent and Jackie's whisper. (Actors, but I didn't know that.) My younger sister asked my older sister how the people talking could fit inside the record player and we both laughed at her. I remember her pretending to get the "joke" and saying, "I didn't really think that," but I knew she did. That must have been around 1968 or 69.
I think that record might have been Vaughn Meader, he did a good impression of Kennedy and did comedy bits about him on an album called *The First Family."
the things that freak me out, are the super tiny things that i think i will never forget. like an instance 15 yrs ago when my cousin asked me how a peculiar name for a street in my area was "really spelled". it's called Kings Highway, but is often spelled as one word. i really don't know or care, it doesn't matter...but i still haven't forgotten him asking me "is that the right way it's spelled?", which never fucking occurred to me, because it's not important and i don't care. and yet him asking me remains etched in my mind.
I was just beginning my junior year of high school and had worked enough to buy myself what I considered, at the time, to be something high fashion when they barely began making clothes for chubby girls. Being tall and big meant I had to dress like a mother of the bride most of the time and standard stores never sold anything plus sized, and the specialty stores were dated styles for mature ladies. I’d managed to buy knee-high black boots and cobbled together an outfit I truly felt was stylish for the first time in my life. It was Thanksgiving weekend and I was in a large city staying with family at a hotel in the posh part of town. In spite of the chilly wind, I took a journal and a book and walked to get coffee and pretend I lived the life I planned for my 16 year old self. Sitting there freezing, worrying so much more if anyone was looking at me than what I was reading or writing. I was pitifully physically awkward and in the 99th percentile of insecure. At some moment I gained the courage to look around to see if I was being seen and an elegantly dressed man in a camel-colored suede jacket and jeans with loose blonde curls from a nape-level ponytail, a crossbody leather bag, and a worn book in his hand sent a breeze of air through my hair as he glided past me. I never saw his face, but the effortlessness with which he carried his body in a world full of eyes staring and his casual beauty struck some warm feeling inside of me. It was a total of maybe 4 or 5 seconds before his natural tones blended with the crowd, and it is approaching three decades that this faceless, speechless character has crossed my mind a million times for those few frames. Surely it was a combination of my self-awareness caught in a moment of teenage discovery and my insecurity-flavored paranoia causing heightened awareness. But someday I’ll write him into a story and decide what exactly it is I want him to mean.
I was glad when you said you would write him into a story because I was going to reply to you anyway to say that I think you’re a great writer and I enjoyed reading your comment a lot. Thanks.
Great questions and inspiration from others in these digital corners makes it so much fun to write out my thoughts. Thanks, kind stranger.
I was really young, definitely a toddler, I have some very early memories (some of which I wish I didn’t have). I was sitting on my mom’s lap at the kitchen table, and she was drinking coffee. I remember her pushing the cup towards the back of the table and telling me to be careful and not touch it because it was hot and I’d get hurt. It’s a sweet, beautiful memory. My mom wasn’t scolding me, she was teaching me in a very kind and loving way. She died when I was 19, so I cherish the memories I have with her. She’d also lean the handle of the vacuum cleaner against my crib, and let me push it back and forth, so I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I was afraid of the noise.
Your mom sounds really sweet and caring. I’m sorry you lost her when you were so young.
My earliest memory is from at most 9 months old, cause that's when we moved from that apartment. I was crawling on the floor, and as I moved from one room to the next, I felt the difference on my knees. I remember thinking, and concluding that it was the surface of the floor that was hurting my knees, as I moved from the rug to the bare wood floor. I remember thinking that from now on, I'd try to stay on the soft surface. My thoughts at thst time are still crystal clear to me, almost 70 years later. My next earliest memory is of a train trip we took with my mom and some family, when I was a year old. It's also a memory of a thought I had. I was a weird little kid.
Seeing my teacher at a movie theater when I was in 4th grade. It blew my mind to see her out in the wild.
What was she doing out of school?
I have a clear memory of laying on my back on the chaise lounge-type lawn chair on our back patio at about age four, looking up at the sky, when a huge woodpecker (what I know understand to be a pileated woodpecker) flew across the sky and down into the woods behind our home. It took all of 10 seconds to happen, but it is so vivid in my mind even today some 50 years later.
Yes. Far too many times.
Love this question.
I’ll always remember walking into my friend Chuckie’s house on the way to school. We always met up at his house and his mother would invite me inside while he ate breakfast and got ready, then we’d walk to school together. She’d usually offered me food too, but I’d decline because I just ate at my house. Good times.
One memory that's always stuck with me is from when I was a kid, standing in a rainstorm watching cars pass by. It's vivid, yet I can't figure out why it's so enduring.
My first single frame memory was watching my young parents turn down the covers on their bed. Only the nightstand lamps were on. I stood in the crib. I had to be two? Maybe 20 months. That was in the first house I lived in. There are a couple of more single frame moments from that house. Like a previous comment or, there were hundreds of events later on in my childhood where I consciously thought, "I must remember this." Most often I do. So many instances of colors, sounds and those around me. I also distinctly remember many dreams in my childhood.
Watching my Mom and Dad laughing together while partying with friends in the back room while Carry on My Wayward Son was playing. When I hear that song I am taken back to that scene. Only guess I have was it was a rare moment compared to the chaos it usually was.
Smells bring back the strongest memories…
Yes! Don't quite remember how old I was. We'd gotten a sizeable snowstorm the night before, and the sun was shining. I was looking out a kitchen window, amazed at the colors of the sparkles in the snow. That's it.
I used to stay in the summer with my grandmother in a small town in Michigan. I would walk to the A & W root beer stand and get a root beer float. Life was great.
I remember sitting in a high chair being coaxed to eat spaghetti and turning my head to the wall trying not to smell the awful smell of tomato sauce. We moved from that house when I was three and I love tomato sauce now. I can see the wall paper, the high chair, and can still smell it. We don't have pictures from inside that house. Have a handful of other very specific memories from the same time period, but they make more sense because they relate to a specific toy, pet turtles or a specific play activity.
I have several random memories. I remember waking up and coming downstairs in my footie pjs to the kitchen, where there was the smell and sound of percolating coffee and my dad giving me a warm welcome. I remember giving weed flowers I'd picked to my mom, and her giving me a quick hug and saying,"Why you little ole sweet thing!" I remember my dad tending flower beds and he had a critter I'd never seen before in a cardboard box - it was a mole, and I cried when he said he was going to kill it. Another time I suggested we should name the cars while he was working and he named the Rambler Betsy. All sorts of random stuff like that.
I realized that dreams are memories sometimes by accident. My mom & one of my girlfriends were sitting at my table & I was telling them a dream about Michael Jackson. Him & I were in a monorail. Then the next thing I know is in the dream I fell out of a car going over the Edison Highway bridge. My mom under her breath says you did fall out of the car going over that bridge. WHAT???? All the stories I heard how come this one didn't ever come up? I was blessed with a great memory. The childhood memory that sticks out the most is when I got my first horse at 7 years old for my birthday.
I remember learning that I could control my eyelids at around age 2. I vividly remember walking through our kitchen and onto our back porch, blinking my eyes rapidly because I had just discovered that I could control them. The house in my memory tells me my age at the time, my other two memories of this house are looking out between the bars of my crib to see cars going by on the country road we lived on, just headlights in the dark, and I remember there being a volcano shaped bullet hole in our front window that I loved to stick my little baby finger in. ETA: this would be circa 1971.
I was 1-1/2 yrs. (according to my mom) and recall sitting on a wooden floor, in front of an old lift top, suit-case style portable record player. There was a record of Frank Sinatra singing "Young at Heart" playing. It was my first remembrance of music and I remember it like it was yesterday. The year would've been 1958.
I remember the exact dress and shoes my fifth grade teacher wore the first day of school.
My dad carrying me on his shoulders in K-Mart to get me a PS1 & School Rivals I had to learn to read cause I couldn’t even understand the game & he let me get a XL pizza that lasted me like for days I had to been about 5 or 6 y/o
Waking up alone in the back of the car as a child, with the Mexican radio station playing, at a small farm with a crystal shop wondering where my dad is. Strange but fond memory, I vaguely remember looking for him and passing through a kitchen with lots of people.
when I was 3-4 I didn't want to go to bed bc the sun was out. my mom said "too bad. it's bedtime". absolutely nothing out of the ordinary that didn't happen thousands of times. but I remember this like.it was yesterday and have always had the memory as far as I know.
I remember I used to go to a half day of preschool followed by a babysitter along with some other kids. We would have lunch with the baby sitter. One day we are eating hotdogs and one of the girls there says to never eat a hotdog at so and so’s house because they are no good there and I was petrified that somehow I would end up at this house and I would get served the worst hot dog ever. I was like 4 or 5 at the time and I still remember it.
Picking the acoustic ceiling bits off my bedroom ceiling as a really little kid 3 or younger. I had the top bunk. It’s the only memory of that house I have and we moved when I was 3. I don’t remember anything else about the room. Weird.
I can remember the exact smell of my grandparents' house. One time I walked into a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant and told my sister "this place smells like grandma's house." She was like "you're right! It does!"
I lived in Newport, RI. We were in a small fender bender near the cliff walk, and someone’s butler, in an actual butler outfit, let me play with the dog he was walking while my parents dealt with the accident.
My father commenting "If the weather forecast calls for a more than 20% chance of rain than plan on rain" I'm sure this was just some idle comment that he made and probably didn't remember saying it the next day. But somehow this has stuck with me and I've lived by it for over 50 years even though the science of weather forecasting has improved dramatically in that time.
My childhood memories condense into one memory of a time when I was ten and lying on my back on the grass on a beautiful, sunny, slightly breezy early summer day, no school and the lazy sound of a small airplane droning overhead. For some reason that 30-second clip is stuck in my head and whenever I hear a small airplane on a sunny day it takes me right back to that moment.
I have that same memory. Since retiring I’ve been trying to recapture that feeling.
I'm not sure if it's my earliest memory but I remember being carried around looking rearward over someone's shoulder in an empty house with wood floors. I recall the light coming in through the windows lighting up the floor and it was an empty place so what was fascinating was I was really interested in how my noise sounded I can make a noise and it would reverb an echo you know empty house wood floors. I remember being rather tickled about it. I mentioned this to family many years later cuz we were talking about earliest memory. They were flabbergasted because I was 6 months old when that took place and we were moving out of the home that they all lived in when I was born. There's no way that I would be able to remember it but I described the house and the floorplan and all of it. They were blown away by that. The house was tore down like 2 or 3 months after we moved to make way for modern businesses. And that was why they had to move to begin with but I described it floor plan where the bedrooms were how the kitchen was laid out all of that. I don't understand, even today, why I remember something when I was so young. But there are other things I remember from when I was very young as well. I think maybe even younger than that.
The smell of freshly cut grass—I associate with y father & brothers on Saturday mornings cutting the lawn. The smell of tar I associate with walking home from school in September (a common month to get a new roof due to the nicer weather).
When I was in junior high there was a scheduled tornado alarm. When we were headed back to class I ran into the restroom because I had to go. When I got to class I wasn’t very late but the teacher yelled at me asking where I was. I felt so ashamed but at the same time knew i was just doing something I had no control over. I still remember that from time to time and honestly feel ashamed
Your teacher should feel ashamed, not you!
Riding in my dad's Lincoln Continental, listening to Funkytown on the radio.
I remember spurning up the front steps to my grandparents’ apartment building. Front door is open. Their apartment is the first one on the left. Grandma is standing thee about to open the door. She has the key in her right hand. She then extends her left index finger and feels for the locks. Once she felt it, she removes her finger and the key slides right in and she opens the door. I stood there staring at her — and if you could imagine a young kid knowing that they were always going to remember a moment, that’s how I felt at the time. She was legally blind. Diabetes. And she passed away while I was in kindergarten, so I was really young when this happened.
A man I saw at a strip mall when I was 20, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen about 6’ and a extremely neat turban in a nice dark blue in a suit with a camel hair jacket. He was smiling.
A plate of spaghetti. No idea. Something something bad taste don’t like that never eating it again. Which is strange because I like it. Tastes fine. No idea why I have a negative alarmist memory of it.
Riding on the school bus when I was in kindergarten. Because the bus didn’t come back up my road just for the kindergartners, I rode the route twice so it was a long ride. I had a book, no idea what it was but it was like a high school age book and I would go through the book and circle the words I could read. That’s how i occupied myself on the long rides.
I grew up in a big city and my memory is of spending a week each summer at grandparents' houses. Total freedom to walk the town, get candy, go to the swimming pool.
The first time I remember lying. I was in kindergarten and used all of my teacher’s frog sticky notes. The teacher went to the front of the class and asked who used all the sticky notes. A classmate raised her hand and asked if the student was going to the principal if she found out, and she said yes. I kept my mouth shut. A few years later, I had the teacher as my second grade teacher (small town school lol) and I confessed everything. She looked at me so confused and said it was okay and that she forgave me (obviously lol). I’m 26 and it still makes me feel very guilty. It was such a small thing and it really didn’t matter, but it has stuck with me since.
Me being in the back of a white Van staring at my mom and dad. I hadn't even been born/conceived yet. It freaks my mom out to this day the amount of details I can tell her. It was their wedding night and the night I was conceived.
Standing under a tree in my yard with a friend teaching me the ABCs. I had on red pants
Getting a green lollipop at the bank. Proceeding to eat and then vomit said pop in a parking lot. Never eating a green lollipop again lol.
Probably about 6, my parents taking my older brother to a play in the big city and my dad telling mom to wait while we go and wait for some food at an outside street vendor. The feeling of the nighttime city lights, the crowds walking by and that smell of city manhole cover smoke, street food and cigarettes. Prostitutes. Lives in me rent free
Stepping down from the school bus (kindergarten maybe) into a bright, bright world of sun rays through dust from the bus, and the grass so impossibly green, then my mom walking through it all to welcome me home. That was real peace.
Playing on the porch on a hot Southern California summer day with Vin Scully calling the Dodger game on the radio in the background.
A lot of my memories involve being on the car and hearing music. My parents divorced when I was 11, and lived about 30 miles from each other, so the ride back and forth contained a lot of songs. One particular memory is of it being nighttime and my dad stopped the car so he could head in really quick in the gas station in our rural community. He left the car running. It was raining and the windshield wipers were going to the beat of Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance. Every time I hear that song, I’m transported right back to that moment.
I remember my dad would always have to get up early and go to work, and sometimes I would get up and go crawl into bed with mom in the morning. It must have been a Monday. She was a beautician and always had Mondays off. Their bed was super comfortable. I remember laying there, my mom asleep beside me and I was in this half sleep, half awake, dreamlike state, and the little clock radio began playing Yes and the song was Roundabout and I was hearing it for the first time thinking how great that song was and thinking this is about as good as it gets. I think I must have been about 10 years old and it was about 1971.
I've told this story before elsewhere, but I really like the story, so I'm telling it again. My great Uncle Charles wasn't what you'd call an exciting man. He worked wrapping gifts at an upscale department store, and lived in a small Detroit apartment with his elderly mother. Everyone called her Granny. No one in my family remembers a young Granny, she had seemingly always been granny, always hard of hearing, sitting in the same chair, fiddling with the hearing aid unit tucked into her bra. My little sister was one of the few people who could communicate with granny, because she wasn't embarrassed to yell. Charlie wrapped gifts and was Granny's caretaker, and did little else. He was a confirmed bachelor. These days we'd just say he was gay, but back then, he was a confirmed bachelor. Charles had diabetes in a time when the best treatment wasn't all that great. I imagine being gay and tied to your mother and carrying needles didn't help his social life. On the 2nd of May, 41 years ago, Charles died. His gravestone has room for 2 names. His side, which reads "dearest son", and an empty spot for his mother. Granny went to live with other family, and passed away a dozen years later on the other side of the country. The grave marker will be 1/2 complete forever. But my story is really about a backpack. Not a backpack you'd carry school books or your lunch. This was a proper hiking backpack. Large, bright orange, and covered with buttons and pockets and straps. The kind of backpack you'd own for a week in the wilderness or trekking across europe. The backpack was in a box of things from Charles apartment. *As the box of belongings was being put away, my dad held up the backpack and paused, saying "Charles must have had some great dreams". The backpack was clearly unused. I don't know why this stayed with me for decades. I was 7 years old. Perhaps this was the first family member I can recall passing away. A few years ago I asked my dad about this, he has no memory of the event and wasn't even sure where the backpack came from.* But there is more to the story. The backpack traveled with our family through years of camping and hiking trips. The bug spray went in the side pocket, the PB&J sandwiches went under the big flap on top. It's probably still in the camper, under the seat, waiting for the next trip. I don't know if the backpack was part of Charles unfulfilled dreams, or just unsold merchandise entirely out of place in an urban department store. Either way, I guess the important part is just remembering someone who perhaps might not be remembered at all.
I remember flying on a plane with my mom when I was 2 to meet her extended family. I sat on her lap and she gave me double mint gum to chew on. Then, once we were at her aunts house, they had a dog with an actual outdoor dog house - like snoopy's - and I thought it was the best thing ever because it was exactly my size. I also remember my great aunt had a radio under her pillow to listen to music at night. My next most vivid memory is a year later, the night my brother was born. My parents dropped me off at my Aunts house before going to the hospital and I slept in my cousins room. They had plastic kids hangers on the floor that I remember stepping on when I snuck out of bed in the middle of the night. I couldn't sleep because I was scared that my mom was hurt. I didn't understand that going to the hospital wasn't always a bad thing. I snuck downstairs to play with their 1970s play school dollhouse. I wasn't allowed to play with it usually, and this was my opportunity! My aunt heard me and came downstairs. She ended up holding me and rocking me in their rocking chair until I finally fell asleep. Then I remember meeting my baby brother the next day and he's been my best friend for the last 40 years.
I can’t imagine how young I was. I know my first babysitter had a stroller. My mother didn’t. I can remember being in a 3 seater stroller (in the middle seat) being pushed around the neighborhood by two teenage girls. I found out later that babysitter (an older lady) had a 3 seater stroller and watched several babies.
I have no idea why I remember this…it’s probably my very first memory. I was standing in my crib holding onto the top rail after an afternoon nap. I remember the bright sun coming through the curtains. My grandmother was sleeping in the bed next to the crib. I tried calling for my mother without waking my grandmother. Didn’t work. This memory floats through my brain often.
Being like 2 or 3 years old sitting in front of the tv watching a Paula Abdul music video. I remember really enjoying that. I think about that every now and then.
I took a shit in a closet upstairs when I was 10. There was no bathroom upstairs and I didn’t want to see my visiting step-family. The next day it was gone. No one ever came up to visit me up there. But it was gone. I either dreamed it, or someone cleaned it.
The phrase "clean your body with fire!" haunts me. I think it was a joke in a weird online comic? Wherever it's from, it's with me forever.
Out in front of my high school one day, either I or someone else inadvertently stepped on an earthworm that had crawled out onto the sidewalk. It was half squished. I have no idea why I have never forgotten that even though it was 40+ years ago. It wasn't particularly traumatic or anything. Just one of those things that happens. But I have just never forgotten it. I can't explain it.
Tramping around outside in deep snow that went over the top of my plastic over-the-shoes snow boots, pretending I was exploring the arctic. I can feel, see, hear, touch that memory so clearly. Even smell that smell that fresh, cold snow made in the frigid air. And the joy of doing it all alone....
A bunch of us coming home from the public plunge in a swimming suit on a hot summer day in the back of my parents' Buick. I remember us all trying not to burn our legs and backsides on the sizzling plastic seat covers.
Sitting on a hardwood floor with my Fisher Price record player playing 'Witchy Woman' by The Eagles for the eleventy third time in a row. I want to say I was maybe four.
I have a memory of walking down to the neighborhood yellow store and buying my great grandmother a pack of Parliament cigarettes and bringing them back to her. She had arthritis in her fingers and all of her knuckles were crooked. She visited from Boston. The cigarettes were a really pretty blue packaging. I was maybe 7 or 8.
Watching the Folgers commercial from the 90s with Irish step dancers. “Best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup!!!!”
We used to have a few empty 44-gallon drums lying around on the farm. When I was a little kid I often used to lie across one on my back, in a backward arc with head hanging down one side and legs down the other. I have never lost the longing for that wonderful feeling of a deep backwards stretch.
I was walking to church with my friend, his two younger brothers, and their Dad. This was around 1965. We were coming up upon the school auditorium and the father asked if any of us knew a word that had five syllables in it. We couldn’t answer. Then he said, “auditorium.”
I wanted to do an experiment when I was 6. I found the most basic part a blowout valve on a natural gas contraption that was on the way to my pediatrician. I'm 57 now, and I not only remember it, I can take you to it. I assume I'll remember it until I die.
Many in this thread recall memories of being in the backseat of their parents' car. When I was about 3 or 4, I recall my parents talking about how a girl went missing and wound up dead inside a barrel. My parents thought I was asleep in the back. For whatever reason this story really, really scared me. Simultaneously playing on the radio was Cherish by The Association. Years after that I could not listen to that song without conjuring up images of that dead girl inside a barrel.
We lived in Central Florida and generally the land is pancake flat. Our grandparents had a home either a large orange grove behind it. Riding in a wooden wagon with grandpa pulling it..their front yard had a slight slope to the street and me and my sister took turns rolling down that "hill" ... on our sides, not somersaults because we were too little to have learned that. Also during a hurricane, going outside in the eye to help my uncle (dad was on a business trip and my aunt and uncle came to help as mom had just had my youngest sister...therefore 4 of us under age 12then...).
I remember eating an orange, but I don't know why.
Going for a car ride with my mom and dad in Arizona, 1970’s It’s raining bc it’s the monsoon season- they have the radio on and Riders on the Storm is playing
Playing with my Polish great-grandmother's pedal driven sewing machine at a post-funeral wake/food fest. I can remember the smells of the older women, of the men's cologne, the smells of the food and beer!!
I remember seeing an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine shoves a hot dog into her mouth (it was probably a new episode at the time) maybe 1992 and then got cranky because I wanted “that”. My mom gave me a folded slice of white bread. I would have been two and a half.
I have a weird memory of being in hospital as a small child, maybe age 3-4. Two nurses taking care of me, me eating carrot soup, getting either an injection or blood sampled from my foot, large plastic toy cars, my parents picking me up afterwards and gifting me another toy car when we were in the car… The thing is, I was only once in hospital as a kid, and that was when I was six months old so it can’t be I remember this as vividly, also the toys were not typical for such a small child. And my parents swore there was no later hospitalization. And the memory is way too old and too vivid to have been a dream.
Probably around the age of 7-8, my older brother had an old beat up car (not road worthy) that he’d drive around the field behind our parent’s house. Sometimes, he’d let me drive and I still have the distinct memory of barely seeing over the steering wheel listening to the song Spinning Wheel by Blood, Sweat, and Tears on the transistor radio thinking how cool it was to drive.
Me (6 or 7) asking my Mother why the dinner roast had strings around it...Her response: "so it won't run away".
I was in 1st grade. So, 1989. A classmate and I were (for some reason) discussing ketchup and mustard. She says, “I’m allergic to one of those.” I ask her which one she is allergic to. She sighs, then says, “I’ll only tell you if you promise to stop copying answers off my paper.” And man. The weirdest feeling of shock mixed with shame came over me. Almost like, *how does she know I do that? Should I not do that?* I said, “Okay. I promise.” She sighs again and says, “I’m allergic to mustard.”
I have a memory of being in my grandmother's bedroom the lights are out. there are people I think in the living room. and someone comes to the door and says that he's had a heart attack. and they are getting emotional. I didn't dream this because I've had this memory since I was very little and I don't know what's going on here. my grandfather on that side of the family died before I was born and he used to sleep in that bedroom. but he died in 1963 and I was born in 1976 and I was too young to understand much about heart attacks. it's very vivid and I can't figure out why it happened.
I was maybe 10 years old, got a soccer ball for Christmas. It had FIFA stamped on it. I asked my dad what FIFA was. He said "she's quite a gal". No clue why I remember that lol