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Your Memory,How good is it?

I recall being on a train with my family and my grandmother. I can recall looking out the window and seeing water and old pilings, like from and old pier or bridge. My mother told me had taken a trip on a train when I was 18 months old. I can remember waling down the aisle and my grandmother sleeping in her seat.
 
BigElCat said:
My earliest memory is from when I was about 20 months old.

At the age of 18 months, I contracted spinal meningitis. The doctors told my parents I had a 50% chance of dying, and a 50% of being paralyzed if I survived.

They gave me "an experimental vaccine" via a series of spinal taps. I don't remember any of this, but was told about it later on.

When I was 20 months old, I was able to start walking using one of those old fashion, portable, baby walkers. The kind with a 'lawn chair frame', canvas seat, and it would fold flat to be placed in a car. Any how, I was in this walker, in a house that had a strip of wood on the floor. This strip of wood was some kind of transition in floor covering as one would enter the bathroom from a hallway.

The walker wheels hit that strip of wood, I was pitch forward and hit my face on the bathroom tile floor. The walker snapped shut like a mouse trap, right where they had given me those spinal taps. The pain was intense, and that bathroom imprinted in my memory. It was all white, and very brightly lit. The toilet was on the right, wall-mounted sink on the left.

Things, in general, went down hill from here.

I'm going to write my autobiography on PoliticalChat.org, as soon as I get time. I don't think any one is going to believe me, though. Oh well.
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I had spinal meningitis at 18 months as well. I was pretty much given up for dead, was in a coma for three or four days, doctors told my folks if I managed to come out of the coma I would be a vegetable. Had my last rites and had the Holy Water bath from my grandmother. Doctors said it was a miracle that I survived.
My memory isn’t very good but I do remember bits and pieces of being four and five. I also have questioned memory in general as life has shown me people can remember things that never happened. The mind is not only fragile but also easily manipulated.
 
I remember a lot of when I was 3. Years later, siblings couldnt believe it that my descriptions were accurate. I was 4 when I started Kindergarten. I was K-12 allus the youngest on my grade.

I have allus had a hard time remembering names, tho, go figure, , , ,
 
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I must have been around 2 yr old. My dad was standing on the front porch one night. Looking up. He told me he was looking for a saddle light. I knew what a saddle was. Roy Rodgers had one on Trigger. And I knew what a light was.:D Vanguard...

Vanguard.jpg
 
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We lived in the same 2-family house where i was born until I was 3 1/2 or so....the back yard backed up to railroad property, with train tracks slightly elevated, maybe a hundred feet from the back of the house. My bedroom was in the back, and I had a toybox under the window, which I used to stand up on so I could watch the trains go by.
This was pretty much my first recollection of anything....
 
I saw Eisenhower's funeral train in 1969. I was four going on five years old.

Can't really remember the train itself anymore. But I remember talking quite a bit about it with my parents.

Belview, Illinois maybe. Some town in Illinois.

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Ha ! I can remember it. The picture doesn't do it justice. It was gleaming silver and blue. Blue. Somebody can fact check me on that. Haven't seen a color photo.
 
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My first (and third) cousin, Richard, was born on 07/20/1952, and I remember being at his first birthday party. I was three years old, and that is my earliest official memory. If you're wondering about the first and third thing, his father and my mother were brother and sister, and his mother and my father were cousins. No inbreeding was involved.
 
I remember a few things from early childhood. When I was 2-1/2, my family moved from Green Bay to a new house in suburban Milwaukee. I remember the yard that was a field of mud before Dad put the lawn in, the gravel driveway that didn't get blacktopped until I was 6 or 7, and the big excavation across the front yard when the city sewer came through. I remember when my brother was born (I was 4-1/2) and being jealous at first that the new baby needed so much of Mom's time and attention. I remember coming home from a family day trip around age 5 to find that the family dog had puked all over the family room, and I remember Dad taking the dog to the vet and coming home without him. The vet diagnosed the dog with distemper, which was a death sentence in those days, and Dad had the dog euthanized. We never had another pet dog. :-(

I also remember that there was always music in the house when I was young, most of it playing on my mom's AM radio in the kitchen, and I remember a Sunday morning classical music show (on AM radio!) called "Invitation to Beauty" that was my first exposure to classical music.
 
I remember a ton of stuff from age 4.

A Tootsie Pop Drop lodged in my throat while I was swinging on our swing set. I could not breath at all. I ran to the front door, banged on it. Mom hit me fairly hard three times between my shoulder blades (the only time she ever hit me in our lives). I still couldn't breath, so she ran to a car (I think it was the '62 Fairlane Wagon). She threw me in through the driver's door and proceeded to drive toward the Doctor's office which about 5 blocks away. She started to run a stop sign but another car was coming through. She jammed on the brakes, I flew into the steel dash, and I could see the other car pass right in front us. The impact on the dashboard dislodged the tootsie pop drop, and I started wailing. I remember her telling the doctor that I was bright blue in color, he had let us in immediately. The doctor calmed us down, and assured us everything was okay. I remember that I wasn't scared of dying, because I had not heard about death at the time.

Later that year, our first dog was named Fluffy. Don't remember it's gender, but it got away and was run over in front of Hinkel's Candy Store about 5 blocks from our house (in a different direction from the Doctor's office). How cool was that, a store dedicated to candy ? Fluffy died; I remember Dad telling me that he would die someday, and I would die someday.

That was in Carlyle, Illinois.

He explained death again when Former President Eisenhower's funeral train went by, but we had to travel to another town to see it.
 
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Jeffery said:
I can remember way back. My mom was extremely modest, she wouldn't have ever spoken about even slightly risque stuff. Late in her life, we were talking about old memories and I told her I remembered being in my crib and where it was located (I was right) and that I remember her opening her closet door to block the door opening to the room (parent's bedroom didn't have a door at that time, but the adjacent closet did). I could tell that this shook her up, she said she did that to block the door when nursing me. And there is zero chance my mom ever mentioned that, she knew she hadn't ever mentioned it, but I remembered.

I remember a lot before I started school. I remember flying in dad's TriPacer that he sold when I was 3 - even remembered the seat upholstery pattern and how he spun a crank that looked like a car window crank on the ceiling right after take off (elevator trim, seats were red with a plaid insert). I remember being in the back seat with my mom and being terrified when he did a bank turn. I remember going to the airport and the hangar more than the flying, I think it scared me so much I just tuned it out.

I remember wanting to watch TV and the TV was showing a funeral with horses and wagons and mom explaining that the President was dead and who that was. That had to be JFK, and I would have been 2 1/2 YO then.

Lots more memories of their house before dad remodeled it, and he did that over a couple of year period and finished before I started school - both kids had their own bedroom now instead of sharing a room that became the enlarged living room when that wall came out.
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I also have memory of events way back. I remember fragment of scenes crawling on the floor. A particular one was by the front door and looking out. I remember being carried when going places. I have real good memories on events from 2 on.
 
It was the Fairlane (post 37).

Mom wouldn't drive the other car, a late 50s Dodge, because she couldn't get the push button transmission into park.

She had taken me, my sister, and a neighbor girl to a drive-in food place. A&W ? Something with a car port awning. She got out to get some condiments, and the car rolled away with us kids in it. We crossed the street, and wound up in a ditch. That was about two weeks before the tootsie pop drop thing.

My parents argued and fought all the time. Dad was pissed that mom couldn't push the buttons in the Dodge. A couple of times, my sister ran away when Mom would go to sleep. She'd pack some snacks for us, and off we'd go. She was 6 years old, I was 4.
 
I remember laying on a blanket in my parents little apartment and looking out the windows. I would have been 10 months old. When I mentioned this to my mom, she had me draw the apartment insides. I DID!
 
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