Art by Fritz Seegers

I have only two distinct real-life memories of my father, (he died when I was four), although I don’t remember his death. In the first, we had gone to Cuba to visit his family. I remember crawling onto his lap to look out the window of the plane at a vast field of palm trees below. He had the starboard window seat. On the trip back I remember getting off the plane wearing a full set of cowboy clothes my aunts and uncles had bought me in Havana.

My only other memory of him is the night I drank the kerosene. I was driving with my mother and father, in the back seat, and whining I wanted a Coke. There was a case of empty Coke bottles on the floorboards and I pulled one out to mime taking a drink of cool, refreshing soda. It was half full of kerosene instead, (probably used for cleaning purposes) and I got a full hit.

I remember intense pain, of being unable to breath, and I remember getting my stomach pumped at La Clinica de Trelles in Ybor City. I recall the ER staff pinning me down while a rubber hose was shoved down my throat, the walls were tile, painted a sickly institutional green.

That’s it, that all I have of my father. I know what he looks like, but only from photographs.

I used to run a lot when I was younger, even competing in the occasional 10k race. But I had trouble with shin splints and haven’t run in years. But I dream about running all the time.

But my best dream was the one where I run into John Lennon. I am walking, on a cold winter day, down a Manhattan sidewalk. Lennon is walking straight towards me, staring at the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, long hair bouncing with each stride, a huge fur coat open in the front and almost at his ankles. We almost collide, but at the last moment we both stop, a foot apart, staring into each other’s eyes. He was wearing those little round wire frame glasses.

All I could think to do was stick out my right hand and say; “How do you do, Mr Lennon. I have admired your work very much.”

He took my hand, shook it, and replied, in that wonderful Liverpool accent; “My pleasure. Thank you very much. Can I buy you a beer?”

Hemingway’s Old Man dreamt of the lions he saw as a young sailor in Africa. I sometimes dream of my old Pelican sailboat.

The science of memory is fascinating- how it is formed, how it is distorted, how it can impact a person’s life….

I once met a person that claimed he had no memories of his childhood before age 6- I was shocked, and incredulous- then other people we were with made similar claims- for some the cutoff age was 4…

Of course I recognized that memories of early childhood become more sparse the further back you go, and that at some point they cease to be available for recall, but to remember nothing before age 4 or 6 seemed bizarre to me-

I started looking into ‘childhood amnesia’ and found that it is the norm…

I have numerous memories that date back before I could talk, I have a vivid memory of my great grandfather and his house – he died when I was around 1 and my memory would have had to have been a bit earlier than that.

There is another memory I have that would have to be from the age of 7 months, but unlike the one of my great grandfather it lacks the details to prove it is a real memory…

My pre-verbal memories are very different from later ones… they are like snapshots where the surrounding space and time is compressed into a single memory…

The memory of my great grandfather for instance:

I am beside the old blue car with the white top my parents had when I was that age- I know this but in my memory I was not looking at the car, I am in a light-blue coat. I am staring at a puddle, road oil is forming a rainbow pattern on its surface, my parents are talking to my great grandfather on his porch. The carport by his trailer has a roof made of green translucent corrugated plastic that casts a green hue on the cars parked under it… there is a special garden behind his trailer. As part of the same snapshot my great grandfather is holding me up to look at the door frame of a closet door near his kitchen, his very old hand is pointing out a winged bug (termite, I think) crawling on the door frame.

There is no sequence of events in the memory- no ‘first this happened, then this happened next’ its all just one snapshot.

The ‘memory’ that I think is even earlier has only enough detail to pinpoint when it must have been if it were real.

I was in a backpack carrier in a mountainous area on a rocky dirt trail- the carrier had been set down on the trail and a woman with short blonde hair is kneeling down talking at me… the memory has the same ‘snapshot’ quality as the one of my great-grandfather. I am facing the uphill direction of the trail, there are sparse evergreen trees around me, the land slopes steeply down to my right- I ‘remember’ these details even though in my memory I am only able to see the woman and the sky behind her…

IF that memory is legitimate, it would have had to have been on my first trip to Colorado as an infant at around 7 months old. I have countless memories of events that occurred when I was two or three… some as vivid and detailed as if they were last week… there are other memories I have that have the same snapshot qualities, but lack the details needed to place them at a particular time- A memory of waking up in my crib and screaming in terror over a daddy longlegs walking towards my face… my parents running in to respond. Brief little snapshots like that…

In discussions with my family it seems that anomalously early memories runs in in my mother’s side of the family.