gee, I hope this doesn't become a GTKYN...
I have a lot of these. My mind has always tended to archive obscure information in exceedingly vivid detail. I have photographic memories of the first few years of my life. Prepare to be amazed at the detail in which I recall things:
My childhood was pretty messed up. The earliest memory I have is my parents fighting. My older brother and I were giggling, jumping on the sofa of our small one-floor house, which sat on a noisy street. The lights were off, except for in my parents' room, dimmly lit. My loving mother shouted "queer!" to my father, and my older brother looked at me oddly, asking if I knew what a queer was. I didn't. I don't think he did either.
We didn't seem to have too many possessions. We had a really, really old television, even for that time. It was very small, black and white, let off way too much radiation and so I didn't watch too much TV until we moved into a bigger house, and got a bigger television when I was four. I remember my dad buying me a few toys, though. He looked about as excited about them as I did; he was glad to make his son happy. I remember him giving me this action figure-ish thing, and I think a fire engine. He took the fire engine back, though. Maybe it was a money thing. He didn't tell me or my brother why, and I can understand that. When I was a little older I felt guilty. Guilty that he bought me stuff. Realizing that shit costs money, or something like that.
I remember going to nursery school. I sure do. I remember walking all cheery through its halls with a smile, my hand in my mother's. I looked up at my mom. She said some things to me, the sort of silly things that a mother might say to her two-year-old child. It was my birthday that day. She asked me "how old I was that day". I jokingly said, "thirty-five", so she laughed and pretended to believe me. Then she asked how old I really was, and I recall saying "two". So I guess I was two years old then.
I have more memories of nursery school. I remember talking to some kids named Alex and William. I remember some sort of canned food drive they had there. I put some peanut butter in the bin. I remember sitting alone in the grass of the playground, observing yellow flowers. I remember waiting for my mom to pick me up. She was late that day. I was panicked at that; I almost cried. I remember hating the activity they had for Thanksgiving. It was some sort of coloring book with pilgrims and India--err, "Native Americans". I felt it to be really boring. I remember the "teacher", if you would call her that, she was explaining evaporation to us all. I even remember one day when I peed my pants in nursery school. Heh, it feels funny to actually write that. "I peed my pants". I did. And they didn't like that. After some ammount of waiting they got me a spare, thank God.
I remember my first day of kindergarten. I cried. Because I was away from my mother. How cute. I remember everyone was staring at me. I was ashamed of myself. Here's this "Big Leet Kindergartener", and he's crying for his mother. I remember my Halloween costume that year. I remember this fifth grade girl who was doing some volunteer stuff helping us kindergarteners, she commented on it. She lived near me; she was at my bus stop, lived at the street corner. I remember being introduced to arithmetic in kindergarten. We were given addition and subtraction problems on a sheet, and told to do as much as we could. I remember thinking something along the lines of "Subtraction too? Dude, this is hard.." I remember doing more arithmetic in first grade. Subtraction. I was so bored of it. I saw it as trivial, easy. I knew how to do it; I didn't see why I had to, because it was wasting my time. So I stopped halfway through. My teacher made me stay in at lunch to finish.
I remember one time at lunch in first grade, some kid invited me to eat lunch over at "his table". Then some guy said, "no, he's weird." So the other says, "nah, he's cool." I didn't quite fit in, there, then, anywhere, any time. I remember this kid in kindergarten, he would ask me for my lunch every day. "If you give me yours today I'll give you two on Monday". I always said no, because I wasn't a stupid little boy. I never took him seriously. And he didn't beat me up or anything when I said no. He just kept asking. Oh well.
Later on in elementry school, I was a little hellraiser. I was a troublemaker, and I said a lot of gross things. My older brother started explaining a lot of sexual things, which was... not good. By age seven I knew more about that whole area than any seven-year-old should. I was really interested in it because I found it so gross. You know that whole thing, to a young boy, gross is cool. This grew until age nine or so. I remember girls would shout my name in disgust. I liked the negative attention. By fifth grade I had outgrown that, though.
I remember a lot more. It's all really freaky, my
memory that is. I'm just
writing this because I started thinking of it, particularly the first couple years, felt like
expressing something. Maybe someone here on
e2 will find it
interesting. More likely it's a kilobyte or two of
nonsense. :)