Fantastic.
I have very little to say here. Except that childhood memories seem to be largely beyond my reach tonight, so I am pointedly giving up on my futile attempts to retrieve them. Instead I would like to talk about a more recent but notable memory that consumes approximately two months of my life: my experience studying in London last spring. There's supposed to be a picture accompanying this, but Dreamweaver doesn't recognize the file. (Addendum: It worked. Please disregard the following.) But picture me crouched next to the Palace Court W2 street sign down the road from the only authentically historic Victorian townhouse I'll ever live in. And the only house I can ever claim to have shared with the ghost of a famous person--Ernest Shackleton, who lived there after returning from his Antarctic expedition in 1917-ish. We never found his treasure, though we think it might still be hidden under the stairs.
A Memory, Trivial.
For the sake of acknowledging the assignment to some extent, I will now share my earliest memory of London: flying low into Heathrow Airport, looking down on the streets, and realizing with an ecstatic rush that the cars were actually driving on the left side. This was quickly followed by a trip into the city on the Heathrow Express, during which I gaped out the windows at warehouses and graffiti and old tyres, thrilled because the graffiti was somehow aesthetically superior to American simply by virtue of its Britishness.
Memories are Weird, First or Otherwise.
Lewis Carroll, one of the foremost experts on the intricacies of memory (or perhaps the artificial construction thereof), wrote in Through the Looking Glass, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." Indeed, Lewis. Funny thing is, first memories--or any memories, really--rarely are mere backwards glances. They're largely if not almost entirely constructed by imposing our present state on past situations.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another highly credible expert, according to a highly reliable source, wrote,"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones" (Wikipedia). I don't know how to make that a block quote.
My Friends.