Some days I have nothing to write about, but I still need to write. For example now, we just came back from lunch and I had an entire rack of pork ribs and a large salad, and I'm falling asleep. I'd rather use this time to write than to pretend to work. Usually the over-eating dullness disappears after an hour or so (the innate dullness, never).
Lately I've been thinking: if I am not creating new memories to cherish, I should at least cherish old ones. There was a time when I didn't write and of which there is no registration, and I think every now and then I will revisit an old memory in order to preserve it.
Somebody once asked me "what is your first memory", but I think this is impossible to estimate. First of all, the order of your memories quickly falls out of place, even as an adult. You might remember one vacation coming after another when in reality they are in reverse, or you may think that yesterday you used x clothes but it was really the day before. What you usually retrieve from your memory when someone asks a question like this is a salient early memory.
So that is what I will do: I will describe a salient early memory.
I was about 4 or 5 years old and was out playing in the snow with my sister, who is two years younger than me. We had a toboggan and we slid down a slope. The slope was "encased" by a fence, and to get back home we had to climb up the slope. My sister was too young to walk it up, and me too weak to push her on the sled or carry her. I started crying because we were stuck at the bottom of the slope and I didn't want to abandon my sister there.
Many years later, flipping through an old photo album, I found a picture almost describing this memory. I was in full snow gear, crying, holding a rope that was tied to a sled where my sister was sitting. I thought "no way, it's impossible that someone took a photo of us, I must have seen the picture as a kid and confabulated the story behind it".
Since then, I sometimes ask people what is their earliest memory. They say X or Y. I inevitably ask: is there a photo of this memory? and (much) more often than not they say yes. Recently I stumbled upon research that supports this theory, even as adults we make up stories around old photos.
I'd say one of the early salient (and true) memories was this:
My mother sent me to school alone on a snowy day. I must have been five years old, school was absurdly close though as a child it felt far away. On my way there I found a cat. The cat approached me and circled around my legs and then positioned itself in front of me. Without a warning it jumped to my face. I felt its claws get stuck on the hood of my jacket, I fell backwards and the cat went off running. I went back home crying and told my mother.
My mother said the cat was probably hungry. She gave me a hot dog to feed the cat, but I wanted her to come with me because I was afraid. She said it was OK, a cat wouldn't harm me, especially if I was carrying food for it. I went back outside terrified with the hotdog in my hand, but the cat didn't reappear.
I would have recurring nightmares of the cat jumping to my face for years perhaps, but I don't recall these as especially terrifying, it's more like it replaced the dream where you fall and wake up startled. It didn't cause me to dislike or be afraid of cats (as far as I know).
Post-lunch stupor has dispelled, and I'm done writing my memory. Back to work.