Hi, my name is Mel, I'm from the exotic Pocatello, Idaho and I'm tall enough that Japanese tourists love to get their picture taken with me whenever I go to Hawaii or Yosemite. I'm graduating from BYU in April with a BA in English and will hopefully be heading to graduate school to study writing. I have a huge list of life goals that includes gems such as skydiving and learning a foreign language; the latter I've already accomplished.
My earliest memory is in the middle of a swimming, doing a sort of floatswim action, suspended by my inflatable armbands (swim wings?). Despite the fact that I don't remember seeing my mother, I felt distinctly that she was there, even if she seemed quite far away, but not as distant as the drain wiggling below me. There isn't any sound to this memory, just a distinct smell of chlorine, and the sunlight that seemed so bright that it bleached the air.
I don't know why early memories are so incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if I've just assembled a memory from looking through photo albums in my grandmother's basement so many times. Maybe that's why there's no sound; only sight and touch, and the vague sense of my mother hovering far enough away that I felt independent. I was swimming.
Entire books have been written about first memories. Some clinicians hold first memories as a key element of a personality.
"The first memory will show the individual's fundamental view of life; his first satisfactry crystallization of his attitude. It offers us an opportunity to see at one glance what he has taken as hte starting oint of his development. I would never investigate a personality without asking for the first memory." (Alder , 1931)