Monday Open Thread - About Fuzzy Memories, Those Misty Watercolor Memories

What's your earliest memory? Roughly how old were you? Did your parents tell you what your first words were? I moved to the US at the age of four so my memories are clearly divided into Before the US and After. The earliest memory I have is probably from two years of age.

Pullman and Arquette from Lost Highway, David Lynch, 1997

Probably. In no particular order, these things happened or were witnessed between 1972-1974 and one may be my earliest memory:

• Mom brings home a puppy, my sister names it, and he chases us around the house. A few months later he's gone.
• I see a sleeping black cat on the beach. Dirty thing was probably drowned by the owner, says my dad.
• An older girl reaches over a wall I'm too small to see over. She grabs a live fish. She throws it to the ground and stomps on it.
• Some older kids are throwing crabapples at a workhorse standing in his own filth.
• Cow patties. We have cows on the farm, but I've never seen them.
• I'm holding my uncle's handgun in one hand and a grenade in the other.* Probably not loaded or live... ?
• I'm alone in the living room with an open bottle of liquor. I try to pick it up and drop it, spilling it everywhere.
• I'm looking down at a quickly flowing stream my grandmother is holding me over by my ankles, threatening to drown me if I don't eat the food she just made.** I'll pound you headfirst into it, she says.

Maybe my first few years were dysfunctional and awful, but good things must have happened as well. I just don't remember them at all. I was also a hyperactive child with an overactive imagination so maybe none of this is true, but none of it is intentionally untrue. No one in my family remembers any of these things except for the dog incident, and no one will tell me what happened. That was fifty years ago. I think I can take the bad news.

* Look at me. Like an Asian mini Che Guevara. There's a midrash  about baby Moses choosing between a piece of gold and a burning coal. An angel guides his hand to the coal because had he chosen the gold, pharaoh would have had him killed. Moses burns his hand and puts it in his mouth to cool but ends up burning his mouth. He gave himself a speech impediment, my wife says it was a lisp. Anyway this is used to explain a certain part of the Talmud. Pointless story, yes, but I was reminded of it. I am not Moses. Thanks for reading the footnotes!

**It was an awful smelling soup with fish bits in it, including the head floating around and staring back at me. I reject your fish soups. When grandma died in the mid 90s, I told my mom I was sorry she died, but inside my feelings were a bit mixed. 

How did Monday go for you? Is it too hot where you are? Do you like eating food? Did you vote for your favorite reptiloid yet? Do you know what love is, and would you want someone to show you? That corpse you planted in the garden last year, has it begun to sprout?