Car from Childhood

[njsteve]

Experts say that the first memory children have is tied to the first acquistion of language - in other words if you don't have a method of classifying and storing the information in your brain, you wont have a way to retrieve it either.

I would disagree with that premise as my first car memory was when I was 6 months old (yes, that's right). I remember being held in the baby sitter's arms, opening my eyes, looking up, and seeing her "ample bosom" and then hearing a large crashing noise. It was my dad driving our white, 1958 Oldsmobile station wagon loaded with lumber sticking out every open window and being chased by a gaggle of neighborhood kids. It looked like a scene from Moby Dick with a fleet of whaling boats following the harpooned white whale.

This was the day he was going to build the gaint A-framed tree house that would stand for 20+ years in our backyard in Orange, Connecticut.

My parents could never understand how I could recall that car at such a young age but after some research it turned out that they only had that car for one summer in 1963 and sold it shortly thereafter. There was no way I could have known about it without seeing it firsthand.

(They also thought I was autistic because I wouldn't talk to anyone til I was about 4 or 5 years old, but I could name any car that drove by from age 1, onward.)

So basically my first memories are of big breasted women and cars. Some things never change.