Earliest memory

This semester, I'm auditing a graduate-level course on autobiographical memory. A lot of the studies that we're reading as part of the class ask their participants to describe and date their earliest memories, and then use these data to draw conclusions about infantile amnesia and identity formation and suchlike.

There's a lot to dislike about these studies. But when they're not activating my critical-researcher training, they're making me think about how I would respond if I were asked about my earliest memory. This isn't such an easy question to answer. A lot of what we think of as our personal memories are actually not. Instead, they're stories that we've heard so much that we've internalized them, or pictures of us at events that we don't actually remember but feel like we do because the pictures are so familiar. Case in point: There's a famous (well, in the family at least) picture of me when I'm about two years old, sitting in the middle of a mountain stream, laughing my head off. It's a wonderful picture, and it's one of these pictures that tends to get dragged out family gatherings, graduations, etc., along with the story about it: My parents were hiking around Tanglewood on a vacation, and I was so excited about this stream that I toddled over to it and plopped myself down as if there was no place in the world that I would rather be. And probably, at that moment, there wasn't. It's a great picture, and a great story, and something that clearly happened to me. But I don't actually remember doing it. I just remember the story.

Once you eliminate all of the events like that, the things that you know happened but that don't really jog any first-person reminiscence, it's difficult to come up with something that could legitimately qualify as an earliest memory. The best candidate that I've managed to unearth is a brief moment of the first time that I fed my little brother solid food. It's nothing more than a fragment, just a brief sensory impression of the event, but I know that it's real and really mine. I can see our old kitchen, the burnt-orange ovens, the blue walls, and my brother Eliot sitting in his baby swing (or maybe it was a highchair?) with his chubby cheeks all puffed out like a hamster. I have the baby spoon in my hand with some tan sludge on it (mashed bananas? pureed carrots? applesauce?), and my mother has her hand over mine to steady it. I bring the spoon up to Eliot's mouth and try to slide it in, but mostly he just ends up with with tan sludge dripping down his chin.

And that's it. Nothing special, just a completely mundane family moment that for some reason has lodged itself in my consciousness. I don't even remember feeling much about it, aside from maybe some general annoyance that Eliot wasn't cooperating as I was trying to feed him. I also don't remember how old I was, although I can extrapolate: Eliot is three years younger than I am, and if he was at the point of eating solid food, I must have been about four years old.

I kinda like this memory for those reasons --- it encapsulates basically all the canonical characteristics of people's earliest memories. They tend to date from around the age of four, they're mundane events, and they don't have very much detail. I suppose that makes me about average, which normally I would sneer at, but in this case it makes me feel comfortable. Like everything has been going right. Except, of course, that I was left holding a messy spoonful of banana goo.