Age and Memory

My earliest memory goes back to the age of 3 or 4. I remember sitting on the small, white hexagonal tile floor of my parents' bathroom, under the square pedestal sink, watching my father shave.

I remember my first day at school. First grade. It was raining and I had a little briefcase with a strap over my shoulder. I also had a little red spelling book ( or something like it ) and the teacher told me to leave it in my desk. I didn't though, because my mother had told me to bring it home.

I was a good kid!

Before I was in the first grade, I went to nursery school. I remember this too.

I was 2 1/2. We were moving into a new house. We went to see the progress of the place. There was a workman laying linoleum in the kitchen. My father had me up on his shoulders. The man had cut out a little design in the linoleum, and he gave it to me.

I don't remember my first day at nursery school. I do remember hiding other kids shoes and when an award was announced, I'd be the first to find the shoes and thus...get the reward.

I was a con-artist at an early age.

This may seem strange, but I remember the layout of the house we lived in when I was a baby. I explained it to my Dad once and he said I was right. After that, I remember playing in nursery school, and going to London for the first time when I was 4...I've been told I have an exellent memory...

and like you, Visitor, one of my clearest ones is sitting on the edge of the sink, watching my Dad shave.

Lorna

I can remember my mother holding me the day WWII ended. This would have been before my second birthday.

1947 and I was 4 years and a bit. We had a very bad winter in the UK, a lot of snow and ice. My mother had to get the trollybus to go to work. She worked as an upholstress at a large departmental store. There was a nursery there where mothers could leave the children who were still below schoolage. I remember as we waited for the Trollybus, there 3 or 4 of them at angles across the road, blocking the way, having failed to get any grip on the icebound road. Oh what a cold miserable day.

I beat all of you! I remember the house where I was born. c.i.

However, all the rest of you beat me after that short period, because I remember absolutely nothing after that! c.i.

You ALL absolutely amaze me!
Such memories, and so young an age.
I am really very interested in this topic,
I wonder why it is that some of you
have memories from the 1st or 2nd
year of life - while others remember
nothing prior to kindergarten.
Why do you suppose this is?

I remember heaps of little things from when I was 3 onward, but my memory only becomes clear from when I was 12 or so, and that's only about 6 years ago! I'm quite good with picking up technical knowledge quickly, but with things I don't use a lot it doesn't take that long to forget.

In addition to what I have mentioned before, I have snippets of memories before I was 4. There are a number of baby pictures that I have when I was about two. There is one where I was wearing a dress, and lounging on some kind of a stone bench. I can remember scraping my knee on the stone when I tried to adjust myself for the picture.

I also have a vague memory of looking out a window by standing on a rolled up carpet. My mother told me that the carpet was rolled because we were moving to a house. I was about 2 then.

Well, my first memory is when I was three and my sister was born.

This is, beciase I always like(d) to tell stories about that all - and this is, I believe, why that still is "stored" in my memory.

"Out of the incalculable number of impressions which meet an individual, he chooses to remember only those which he feels, however darkly, to have a bearing on his situation . . .", - the present determines the past, Adler says.

I don't know, it all fades in and out!

Seriously, I do remember an incident when I was two or three, walking along with my mother and a baby carriage, a huge truck approached and I somehow fell right under the front wheels where he had stopped, just in time.

Now, I don't remember what I had for dinner last night, but I remember that!

Misti26- And it doesn't get any better.

I don't know which was first, but I remember being in the car when we went to see Superman. The movie came out in '78, so I was two years old. I also remember waking up from a nightmare in my crib...the Cookie Monster was eating my hand.

Soon after that I had my first kill....

I remember being 12 to 18 months old - and the perspective suits that, because everything is huge and sort of distorted - and becoming hysterical with fear because the baby-sitter (read HUGE strange face and hands!) was trying to change my nappy. I didn't remember who she was - just the hugeness and the terrifying strangeness. My sister completed the task.

I also have a very definite memory of a royal visit when I was 18 months old - with my sister and I wearing pink plastic raincoats because of the rain - and expecting a picture from a fairy story - not the plain woman standing in the back of a car. Tears, I believe - couldn't talk enough to explain them - but I remember the terrible disappointment.

Well, I remember that visit as well, dlowan - from Fox news reel in the cinema, however. :wink: (It was about that time, grandfather took me to the movie - although I wasn't six, as I had to be!)