I remember a fair amount of fairly odd stuff. Like the rust stains on the underside of my high chair-it often stood in as my spaceship. What the underside of the long gone plastic side table feels like on your feet. What it is like to sleep in the laundry basket with the cats. That clear blue rubber keychain I lost in the seatbelt thingie of the Avis rental car when we went to San Francisco. I was probably 5 or 6 then (though oddly I don't remember much of the trip itself. Oyster crackers in tomato soup, spiderman cartoons and the mermaid lamps in my aunt's bathroom. Pretty much it.) I remember when my brother's umbilical stump fell off (even my mother doesn't remember that!) I'm sure there are instances it is faulty, but... I can't even call it a highlight reel. I can tell you where my holly hobby sleeping bag's zipper always stuck.

OK, back to work.

Ooh. I just remembered something from when I was two or three and have not thought about since I was a kid....

I had this toy that made a mooing sound when you flipped it over. It was one of my favorite toys. My mom or dad told me it had a cow's voice-box in it, and I took that literally. I found the idea disturbing (but not enough to make me not like the toy).

I read somewhere that every time you remember something, the memories can change. Memory is weird, and not as trustworthy as most people think.

You tell everybody about Sammy! Everybody who'll listen! "Remember Sammy Jankis?" "Remember Sammy Jankis?" Great story. Gets better every time you tell it.

Toilet training ending is the earliest memory I can place on a timeline that has no assistance from other people's stories or photographs.

Inception-related bwah.

I remember my dad and his friend taking my toy where you put the different shaped blocks into a ball and timing themselves putting all the blocks into it.

My father is a child.

When I was about five, I imagined memory to be like a record. To remember something was like a needle of a record player moving through the groove of the record, except when you remember something, the needle partially rewrites the memory. So if you remember something wrong, that error will get reproduced and strengthened over time.

That radiolab is my main source of info on memory, Daisy. Partially because the mutability of memory freaks me out too much for me to want to really look into it further. Brains are weird.

Partially because the mutability of memory freaks me out too much for me to want to really look into it further.

I can see that, except I like reading about flawed and mutable memory and other things that tell us we're not as smart as we think. I'm weird, I guess.

The earliest memory I can remember...or think I remember is walking or being carried from the parking lot to our apartment in Northampton at night. I would have been three or four, I think? I'm not sure why I have...or think I have a memory of that. I remember things from Pittsburgh, mostly trivia questions from the Gifted and Talented Program I went to once or twice a week. I learned how strong spider's webs were. I also sat too close to the TV watching Dennis the Menace. And maybe there was sassafras in our backyard. Or what I thought was sassafras. Also, we played in the snow at recess. Just little things like that, from first and second grade.

I remember waking up on the sofa, sick, the day after my third birthday. Even then, I had no memories of any events before then. I mean I knew how to talk, I knew who my family was, but I had no memories of anything that happened. It was like I just popped into existence on that day.