31 December 2004

Memories

T.S. asked for my earliest memory.

Memory is a tricky thing. Yesterday I was able to find the way from the Harvard Square T stop to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, someplace I've been only once. But my memory frequently fails me, and what memories I have of anything more than a year ago are, I'm sure, not true memories but fossils, preserved in the other parts of my mind where they leave an impression.

A true memory captures sensory experiences: sights, sounds, smells. Most of my memories consist largely of words, the narrative I made for them at the time or shortly afterwards, thinking about them. Fossils.

My earliest memories include:

  • Sitting at the kitchen table in the house in Stone Mountain, being reprimanded for pointing. This is my earliest memory. (My parents occasionally pointed at me; it meant, “you'd better behave.”)
  • Sobbing in my room, having been admonished by my mother for failing even to have started making my bed. I had gotten sidetracked. I was composing a really stinging rebuke for her which I planned to deliver at the earliest opportunity; needless to say, I never did.
  • Riding MARTA (Atlanta's subway), reading a Discover magazine, trying to figure out the brainteaser on the last page. It had to do with Hercules and a hydra.
  • Riding MARTA again, trying to explain to my father a proof of A = πr2 that I had discovered in my third-grade math textbook. (More on this later.)
  • Being tricked by Aunt Jane. She was asking me math questions: what was it called when you divided something into three parts? Thirds. Six parts? Sixths. Five parts? Fifths. Two parts? I said twoths or maybe even seconds. The correct answer was halves. I felt a little dumb.
  • In first grade, correcting my teacher. She was under the misapprehension that anything with rectangular faces was a cube. I thought it had to have square faces to qualify as a cube. I tried to be as polite as possible but I knew I had made her feel a little awkward, besides which everyone stared at me. It was sort of embarrassing.
  • Horsing around with E.G. and J.G., my closest childhood friends, and accidentally biting E.G. a little too hard. I was pretending to be Pac Man. It was very embarrassing.

In short, my childhood appears to have consisted entirely of math problems and humiliation. This resembles my present existence, of course, in no way whatsoever.

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