EARLIEST MEMORIES AND WHAT THEY MEAN

When the late Vincent Price introduces the “Mystery” Channel movie “Sleeping Murder” based on the thriller by Agatha Christie, he explains that the author’s earliest childhood memory is that of her third birthday party. An unexpected guest joins the celebration, a huge spider hovering over the tea table adorned with flowers and cake. Price says Christie’s fiction is like this, evil popping up among pleasant surroundings. Christie also showed an emphasis in houses in her stories, and Price says the one in this film is much like the house little Agatha grew up in. I always delight in hearing Price describe these characteristics of Christie’s writing for they are also prominent in most of my writings, not that I compare myself with her or with any other writer. I do not even consider her a good writer, but she proves herself an excellent plotter. We can easily forget the stories, except those we see on film repeatedly, which make excellent entertainment. However, earliest childhood memories have become such a special interest of mine, I want to know everyone’s first memory and tell what I have learned about the phenomenon.

After years of its standing on my bookshelf, unread, I finally got around to the volume called Unlocking the Secrets of Your Childhood Memories by Dr. Kevin Leman and Randy Carlson, published in 1989. The authors are psychologists and if there is any field fiction writers should be knowledgeable in, it is psychology. We need to know why our characters act as they do.

Leman and Carlson maintain—and they have proved so to me—that the earliest memories of a person’s life, and especially the accompanying emotion, dominate the rest of that person’s life. Here is a hypothetical example of such a dominating emotion that may possibly prevail a lifetime. That is, if law enforcement does not apprehend the one with the memory who is repeating that memory. However, a psychologist such as Leman or Carlson may become first responders.

This man, Tim let us say, is twenty-eight years old, married, and has a three-year-old son named Joey. Tim has begun to beat Joey and gradually more harshly as time goes by. Then he hears Dr. Leman on a talk show explaining that men beat their children for their fathers beat them when they were little. Tim recalls his own father’s beating him from an early age, as Joey at his age now. However, he turns off the set and delays doing anything about his problem. In fact, he may not call it a problem. Most of us probably have not met any real case as serious as Tim’s but occasionally we hear of such situations in the news, usually when the police get into the picture. I will leave such stories for the television and concentrate on some actual ones.

As I research this subject on a small scale, I explain that the memory must be one that the person shares with no one else; it must be his own. I usually start by asking what the memory was and then ask the person’s age when he experienced it. Although I did not ask this particular person but only read about her memory, the late famed artist Georgia O’Keeffe claimed a memory dating back to age two. She remembered bright colors on her coverlet. Perhaps that amounted to emotion that guided her life for she certainly painted her oversize flower masterpieces in brilliant colors.

If you can believe a child remembers something she saw at age two, you can believe another child can remember something that happened at twenty months, another at eighteen months, then one year, even six months, younger—really? Unbelievably, someone has written he remembers being born. When you understand his possibly high I.Q., you may believe that has something to do with it. Some experts say I. Q. has nothing to do with it, for he has not developed one yet. Could he not have been learning during those prior nine months? This subject says he saw the big light overhead and he felt the pain of actually being born. I read this from Ray Bradbury who was not writing science fiction at the time. You can find this information on the Internet.

Age three seems to be a popular time for waking up to memory; however, many children’s first memory occurs when they start first grade, an event that must be traumatic for them. Leman and Carlson tell about a girl who admitted she remembered nothing before her senior prom. Such a memory lack must indicate she suffered trauma of the greatest severity.

Sometimes a person fakes a younger age for his first memory apparently to practice one-upmanship. The key to that is the lack of emotion. If someone regales us with a funny or scary tale and then shows no emotion and the telling is like a recitation, I do not believe him. Not only should emotion figure in the telling, but also some hesitation in at least the first telling.

A female, aged a young sixty-four years of age, told this story. She was three years old when she saw her mother leaving the house and she wondered if her mother would return. She did, but not soon, I gather. Eventually I asked what emotional effect that had upon her. She thought a minute and then said, “It left me with an insecurity that has always been with me.” Perhaps because of that, she has had four marriages and divorces, and several affairs. She may be seeking security and never finding it.

Another woman had a more positive memory, she remembers sitting on her grandfather’s lap and smelling peppermints. She seems today a happy, well-adjusted personality with her life right on track to wherever she is going.

One amused herself when she was possibly not yet three, by lifting the eye patches the doctor had placed over her eyes and looking at cartoons. She is a fun-loving person today.

One man amused his audience with his earliest memory of his watching a worker at a building site who checked the electric power with a short cord and witnessed a light bulb turn on. As the man hurried away to the next checkpoint, the little boy, age three, picked up a nail and stuck it into the wall socket, to see if it would turn on a light bulb. He found out, all right, got a good shock, and grew up with reasonable fear of electricity. He did not choose to become an electrical engineer but opted for civil engineering.

Another man offered to tell his earliest memory, but I did not expect much, for it was obvious he did not understand what a single event just for him consisted of. While shrugging his shoulders, he told only about playing with his friends and being happy without demonstrating any emotion or any example of fun at play. I wonder what sort of bedtime story he heard at age three. Even a Bible story could resound with a sky of angels as they flew about rescuing the tiny child from danger as he went to sleep. But I suppose that sort of thing takes imagination.

One man refused to reveal his earliest memory, which he did remember. Of course, many others probably would not want to tell their first memory. They may relate their second or third memory. Of course, that does not define what we are talking about here.

I expect to meet many more first memories, but I would enjoy more detail like the one I am about to relate now but if details are not there, one should not fabricate them. Those fabrications could go into fiction; one must remember truth is stranger and stronger than fiction. I have not heard a memory with such details, perhaps because I have not plumbed the memories of another writer. Around the age of twelve, I recognized my earliest memory at age three as the day I became a writer, not that I began writing at three, but I began watching life at three with discriminating attention. On several occasions, as a young college girl working at a department store, I could not explain why I knew something, such as detecting shoplifters before they stole the merchandise. I became more valuable as a “detective” rather than a salesperson. Later I knew a student in my class was cheating on a test without my watching the class. When he returned for his first holiday from college, he asked how I knew he cheated. All I could say was, “The bells in my head rang.” I believe such knowledge resulted from studying life from an early age. This still goes on.

Occasionally a memory can occur in episodes, even days apart. Such was mine. It was a time when mothers stayed home and, among many other duties, ironed every garment the family wore, especially starched dresses for my big sister and me, and seven or more white starched shirts a week for Father. In addition, babies popped out about one every two years.

As the memory begins, I was aware of several details: I must have been sitting in a highchair, not eating, but perhaps it kept me in harness so that Mother could iron and not have to keep up with me as I played over the house. I thought of the highchair because my head was at the same level as my little sister Ruby Lee’s head, as she stood in her crib. The three of us formed somewhat of a triangle, though I did not know what a triangle was. Mother moved the ironing board close to the crib. The highchair was the inverted base of the triangle. I seemed to do absolutely nothing except observe. The walls had light wallpaper with dark woodwork (I later gave all happy rooms in my writing white woodwork). I remember being utterly still as I watched the baby’s face. She wore two round red spots on her cheeks, redder than the 17th century Pierrette’s famous red spots as she hangs in a large needlepoint over my bed today. I wondered why the spots were so red but I did not know Pierrette at that age. However, I sensed a definite sadness in the room and did not know why.

The second episode appeared possibly only a couple of days later. A man, who must have been Father, lifted me up so that I could see into the tiny casket in our living room. I saw the white box and its soft interior but I did not see a baby in it. Ruby Lee was there, of course, as all those visitors attested. I looked all around the casket, as if I did not want to see the baby there. Perhaps I did not welcome my first look at death, for I sensed somehow that Ruby Lee would not be with us anymore.

How did that earliest memory affect my life? In music, I am likely to prefer the minor key to the major; my pleasure reading is more likely on the sober side, a murder mystery rather than a comedy; but other reading is mainly inspiring biography. Perhaps the loss of a baby sister helped me much later understand the deaths of two of my own children. I cry for the suffering of another. I have sat before television and cried for a tragedy shown there, and have cried for a whole nation in a moment’s time. If I do not shed tears because of my wording in my own writing, I expect what I write will not touch the reader. On the other hand, I believe I experience a deeper happiness than others do for the ability to go a deeper depth in sorrow. The more one experiences, the more one can enjoy, yet the more he can suffer. I have never known what it really means to be lonely, though two other persons make a crowd for me, but I can handle hundreds at a time from a speaker’s platform. That is not personal. First, not last, of major importance, I have my religious faith to which all else is connected.

Perhaps many people have manifold blessings from their early memories, but I claim what may be a distinction: an unusual observation of humankind, beginning at age three. Agatha Christie had a spider crashing her third birthday party; I met death that brought insights with an ever-widening base. Although I have had my share of travel, a successful career, and great pride and happiness in family—with Isaac Asimov I can say—I have not needed to go anywhere for I was already there.

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