First memory: My first memory is bizarrely intricate. It's of candles being made in empty milk cartons in our kitchen in Key West. I remember the color and pattern of the linoleum floor. I remember wicks placed in half-gallon milk cartons, filled with off-white wax. Secured by an "X" of maybe toothpicks. Over newspaper. I remember a big dried bumpy starfish, salmon-colored, sitting on the floor. I remember dark sand (likely for the starfish to be cast in wax as a candle). I remember the layout of the kitchen, from my vantage-point (not what was behind me)... A full wall of small-paned french windows above the counter, and the way the light was angled through them. Vertical. Some open. A similarly paned french door to the left, leading outside, and a door to the right leading in from another room. I don't remember anything else at all about that house, or time period. Not a beach, not a street, not a house, not a room, not people, not food, not music, nothing. Just that candle-making day. And I don't remember faces or people from it. It could have been my mom, or it could have been a baby sitter.
My mom's told me that she doesn't remember that day, but remembers that they would make candles sometimes, including casting various things in sand as candles, and says that my description of the kitchen is completely accurate (she remembers the basic color, but not the pattern of the linoleum). I drew the kitchen for her and she said it was dead-on. She said that the way I described the light coming through the windows was the way it shone in the afternoons. There are/were no photos of any of this, and no one told me about any of it. It's not a trained memory.
I don't remember anything else at all until at least a year after that... Different house, different state, about a year's age difference. Just that one strange, extremely detailed and visual memory.
Best childhood memory: Music. Recognizing music. The Beatles. I remember Maggie May. Besides the candle-making memory, music is my first memory. That was the period when my memory kicked-in. Playing, running around, all of that.
Hearing about Bob Welsh dying made me really sad, because some of those old songs are among some of my first clear memories. I can hear them.
Worst childhood memory: My parents let me have gerbils as pets. I found them dead, because I hadn't fed them. They had starved to death. Because I neglected them. It was my fault. It's still a really, really awful thing for me to think back on, trite as it might sound.
