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Day Two: Earliest Memories

There are a couple. The one that I think is the very very earliest is from nursery school, and it's really just a picture of an object more than anything else. Is it weird that my first memory is mostly of an object that has no consequence in my life? Hm. Anyway. It was a green plastic inchworm with wheels that you could ride. It had a brown saddle on the middle part, the top of its inching body. Everyone coveted the inchworm, and I can see it absolutely perfectly, frozen in my mind. I don't remember riding it, or even the feeling of wanting to ride it -- just the feeling of looking at it, on the cement patio in the back of the church, in front of two glass sliding doors. Can see it like it's in front of me now.

My first real memory was when I was a little older than that, I think, probably about 4. I was in a shoe store -- Irving Shoes in Prk. City Mall, to be specific -- with my mom, and she was trying on shoes, and I got bored and decided to go to the toy store next door. So I did. By myself. I went to the back where the books were (some things never change, I guess) and sat down on the blue carpeted floor and started reading. And my mom found me eventually, but not before she called security and all that good stuff. But that's not part of my memory, because I wasn't there -- I just remember going in and then getting spanked afterward, which I think only happened two times total in my entire childhood and, in retrospect, was entirely justified. I remember looking at the yellow case of Smurfs on the checkout counter while I was getting dragged out of the store, and not really understanding what I had done wrong. Presumably I understood post-spanking.

And then there's another random one, which I really can't place age-wise, but it involved sitting in the black fuzzy recliner with my dad and Lambie, who was really one of a series of identical stuffed lambs that I loved to their early deaths. I would freak out when Lambie would get lost or forgotten, and I wouldn't stop until he was found or retrieved. He was awesome. No one messed with Lambie.