I wrote this post you are reading now because I was commenting on a post by John Scalzi, a very good science fiction writer who also maintains the “Whatever“, a blog since before it was cool to blog.
In one of his posts, he gave 10 childhood nuggets, and the comments all went some way towards what are your earliest memories. Reading all these comments made me recollect what I still could.
This is what I wrote there :
My earliest memories are when I was somewhere around two years old : sitting on my little red plastic tractor and rolling down the neighbours driveway, again and again and again. I think my dad was mowing the lawn.
Also playing with something (a toy windup robot ?) on a (glass?) table with my dad sitting in the background reading his newspaper. That’s a precious memory for me, as my parents separated not long after and I never saw him again in real life. I just have this sense of this calming presence of his in a chair.
Oh and one other, although of this one I’m not too sure if I constructed it from hearing about it from my mother : being in the shower with him, having these long legs next to me, and reaching up and yanking on his apparatus and asking what it was for.
There are a few more memories since then that I can remember, of riding in the car to the airport, then sitting on his lap in front of the big steering wheel of our Citroen car, his arms guiding my arms. Never a face, but always a sense of being.
Lots of my posts here are non-specific or about technical things, but I figured that if I could post it there, I could post it here as well, for posterity. I imagine my sons reading this or other stuff later on perhaps. I find it becomes important for me that my sons get a feeling on how I became what I am now.
My dad died in Australia of a heart attack when I was 18. I had just sent him a letter that I was coming over to visit him. He never got it.
And damn straight I’m carrying some emotional baggage with me because of that. But that’s for me to carry.