Contributions Needed (p.s-only if you don't have Infantile Amnesia)
Memory flaps like gossamer curtains, thoughts of good old days gently caressing the languid dreamer, reclining on a la-z-boy. Reading the first line, please don't jump into the conclusion that this post is about my favorite activity – daydreaming. It is not, infact daydreaming requires further honing of skills because you need to go a step further in to the realm of unreality or fantasy. This post is firmly rooted in reality, but we deal in antiques here – events fulfilled over the time past otherwise called memories. Even the prickly unpleasant spikes of retained incidents are blunted as the old makes way for the new.

This thing called memory is indeed a great tool – equally useful for elephants and humans. One of the nightmarish prospects about the future, if I make it that far in to the future is the likelihood of losing memory due to senility. It is not a matter of not being able to quote the Bible or the Constitution or the Gita, but forgetting how to clean up yourself after taking a dump. Geez...that's going be god-awful, hope I don't make it that far.

The other day we were talking about our earliest memories. We, as in a group 25-35 year olds. Most people's earliest memories were from around the age 2 or 3. As usual, Freud had proffered an opinion on this condition he termed as infantile amnesia. One tends to forget more things about one's distant past as s/he grows older. A friend's earliest memory was from around the time when she was a year or so. She and her twin sister had been moved to the new nursery after co-sleeping with her Mom for the first year of her life. She recalls crawling out of her crib and making her way through the hallway towards her mother's bedroom. What she vividly recalls about that midnight crawl is a brilliant yellow moon shining through the window at the end of the hallway.

My earliest memory is being held parallel above the ground, at about 3 feet, projectile vomiting into a vertical stream of tap(faucet) water. Well, it is not glamorous as first memories ought to be, I suspect I was dealt a raw deal there (let's wait till we hear from you, right?) I can still see the texture of the roughly finished cement floor, water splashing on it from the tap and the sky at an odd angle. I was being held in a football hold by my nanny so that I could throw up at ease in to the running water. This was in the washing/cleaning area outside kitchen, I was wearing a coffee colored frock, which used to be one of my favorites (I don't remember my other dresses.). I must have been around a year and a half, because we moved from that house before I turned two.

At this point I will dispense a weighty suggestion about life in general - live each day as you'd like to remember it, if you happen to remember it. We are making memories as we breathe. Now, don't let anyone talk down to you about multi-tasking.

I wonder what all moving images will my son's memory retain. Of course he'll be aided by thousands of home movies his parents (please forgive them, they are first timers who tend to go overboard) had made. I've my fingers crossed that his earliest memory will be about the time he saw his first snowfall or the first time he saw the ocean and not about the time he saw his mother bite off her toe nails as he watched his first contortionist act.

If you care to share, what is your earliest memory of yourself?