Early Memories

One of my 11.5 regular readers asked for a discussion of my early memories, where “early” means around four years old. That’s easy — I have almost no memories from when I was that young.

I should be careful here — it’s not that I have a big blank in that part of my life. It’s more that I don’t have many crisp, specific memories. I do remember feelings, having been part of certain kinds of activities (though not specific instances of them), and of course the people who were an important part of my life.

With that caveat, here are all the specific early memories I can muster up right now:

The Flagpole: my parents are skeptical that I can remember this, as I would have been very young (still an infant, perhaps), but this is one of my clearest, most vivid early memories. I’m looking out a window (I think it’s my bedroom window), and a long truck backs up to the spot where the flagpole is to be set. The flagpole is a tall (perhaps 35') white wooden pole, very traditional. The truck stops, and my father appears. With him are a familiar farm worker (who goes by the moniker Chalky), and two men I don’t know. The pole is worked upright by means I don’t know, bright white against a saturated blue sky. I have no idea why this memory is so vivid; there’s no hint of any emotional context that would account for it.

Sputnik: I remember my father taking me outside in the early evening to see Sputnik. This would have been in October, 1957, not long after my fifth birthday. We walked out into the field toward the highway from our house, and looked to the west in the twilight. Somehow (I presume via a newspaper) my father knew just where to look in the sky. Right on time, we spotted the bright little dot moving across the sky. But the most vivid memory I have of this is of being excited, and looking up at my father’s face — and seeing fear (or something I interpreted as fear) and concern painted there. That was the first time I had ever seen such a thing, and it was profoundly shocking to me. My father was very quiet; he picked me up and carried me back inside, hugging me tightly all the way back.

Cigarettes: My mother smoked until 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General issued the first official report detailing the hazards of smoking. Before that, she would often stop the car at local stores and send me inside to buy her a pack or two of cigarettes. I can still remember the packages, the raw smell of the tobacco, and her eagerness to get the packs from me when I returned. Oddly, I have no memory at all of her either actually smoking, or of any ashtrays around the house.

Injury: My brother (a year younger than I) and I were out in a field, digging a “foxhole”. I had a shovel; my brother had a garden rake (the kind with short, solid steel teeth). For some reason my brother decided to swing the rake over his head — and instead of digging into the ground, it dug into my head. The result was (a) much pain, (b) a flap of skin detached from the top of my head, and (c) a whole lotta blood. I ran into the house, where my mother took one look at me, shrieked, had me hold some kind of a rag on my head, and threw me in the car for the 20 minute ride to Dr. Garwood’s office in Crosswicks. I remember Dr. Garwood taking a very quick look at me, and then spending some time with my mother to calm her down. I think my mom thought I was a dead kid walking. I don’t recall getting stitches in that wound, but I think I must have. I do recall the resulting bandages, and my mother being torn between hugging me and wanting to punish me severely for whatever stupid thing I’d done to acquire this injury.

Electrical Experiments: Gertrude Ames, a sweet and wonderful woman whom I still remember with great fondness, would often babysit us when both of our parents had to be away. On one such occasion, when I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, Gertrude was working in the kitchen of our house, and I was there with her. For some reason I decided it would be fun to unfold a paperclip and insert the two ends of it into an electrical socket — with my bare hands. All I remember is a bright flash, a popping sound, smoke, an awful smell — and my right hand being quite badly burned. It hurt, and I was terrified. Gertrude was perhaps 15 feet away; she was there in a flash, picked me up, figured out in seconds that I was fine except for the burn, and hugged me tight until I stopped being so scared. Then she put me down and commenced a very stern lecture on the general stupidity of little boys, especially this one — and I could see that she was very scared, herself. The remains of the paperclip were still sticking out of the electrical socket, and she dampened a dishtowel and used that to bat at the paperclip until it fell out. Then she started crying, took me into our livingroom, put some ointment on my burns, and called my mother. I got another lecture when my mom got home <smile>. The most vivid parts of this memory are of Gertrude’s face and the various intense emotions her very open face displayed during this incident.

Reading Ah Ha: When I was quite small, my mother would sit me on her lap with a book open so we could both see it. Then she’d read out loud, occasionally following the words with her fingers (for my benefit, of course). One day she was reading from a book of fairy tales. We were on a page with a color plate of a goose, wearing a blue bonnet and carrying a basket of eggs. As she read aloud, her finger walked along the words — and I noticed that every time she said “goose” her finger pointed at a word that looked the same each time. The big ah ha! had struck — it dawned on me that those funny squiggles on the page corresponded to the words she spoke aloud. I was very excited upon this discovery, and it’s mainly that excitement that I can remember now. I know as she read, on that day and others, I started putting more and more words together with the writing, and I also remember pestering both my parents to explain road signs after that. But “goose” — that was the first word I ever “read"…

Brushing: My father would often sit in a big chair, and put a kid upon his shoulders, armed with a hairbrush. We’d sit there and brush his hair (he actually had some back then), while he’d make exaggerated moans of pleasure. I loved doing this.

Illness: My parents have no memory of this, and are skeptical that it actually happened. My memory is of being in the bedroom that I shared with my brother Scott, on a hot summer day. I was so small that getting into bed was a challenge. Scott and I were both in bed, sick. The most vivid memory is of the nature of the illness: we vomited, and the vomit was full of corn kernels.

Culvert: One of the fields on our farm, not far from my grandparents' home, had a drain with a culvert that led about 150' from within the field to near the creek that ran through our farm. This culvert was made from large terra cotta pipes, and until I was about 8 I could fit through these pipes. One day, on one of my earlier ventures into this pipe, I got stuck right in the middle — in the stretch where it was completely dark. And I was totally by myself; for whatever reason I had decided to make this particular journey on my own. The most vivid memory here, of course, is the fear — when I discovered I could neither move backward or forward, I went straight to totally terrified, out of my gourd. I don’t know how long that lasted — probably just seconds — but it’s still one of the most purely scary things that’s ever happened to me. After I got done being terrified, I discovered that my belt loop had gotten snagged on a root sticking through a joint in the pipes — once I worked that out, I had no further problems. But I never went back into that culvert alone again.

Fossil: My uncle Donald (my father’s brother), who lived on the farm with us, was sort of an amateur scientist; he was interested in a wide variety of things. Amongst those interests were fossils, and our farm, it turns out, was a rich source of a wide variety of fossils. But on the particular day of my memory, I didn’t know any of that. I saw my uncle — a generally dour and unapproachable guy whom we kids were a little frightened of — walking in a freshly tilled field, carefully watching the ground and occasionally picking something up. I saw him put something in his pocket, and I got curious — so I gathered up my courage and walked over to see him. To my surprise, he was eager to share this with the little kid (me), and he patiently explained what fossils were, and how you might recognize them. We then started searching together, and he found a few right away that were very mysterious to me — they were sponges, whose fossils don’t look much different than any other rock to the uninitiated. A little further on, though, he found a very different kind of fossil — some kind of sea worm — that had a sharply delineated shell that I could clearly make out. My uncle said this particular fossil looked like it might be better if we split the rock, so I followed him back to his house, and together we cleaned the rock, set it up on an anvil, and he used a chisel and small sledge to crack it. The split rock revealed about four inches of an intricately detailed, twisted sea worm shell…and I was hooked on fossils. He and I spent a lot of time together on fossils in the following years; eventually (just before I left home after joining the Navy) I worked with him using a microscope (which I have now inherited) to examine and classify the fossils we found. That first experience, though, remains amongst my vivid early memories — I think because of two things, roughly in equal measure: the discovery that Uncle Donald had some redeeming value, and the sheer adventure of “discovering” that worm fossil inside a rock from our own field.

I’m sure that I have some other early memories rattling around in my brain, but those are all the specific ones that occur to me now…