I have a first memory. I was somewhere around four years old – we had just moved into a house on Sunset Terrace, in the town of Scotts Valley. It was a split-level backyard, where the house was pushed up against a hill, so the yard was higher than our home, and the house was protected by a retaining wall. the yard above held bits of crab grass and was surrounded by bottlebrush along the fence line. Below was a small patch of grass, like turf. I remember when we put in the strip of grass, it came in these meter-wide, Hostess HoHo-like rolls that my father placed on the earth, then rolled out over the patch of grass. It solidified our house as a suburban dwelling, although without any urban center near to subordinate us. It was in this grass that Ian and I would pee instead of using the bathroom (which was usually under construction), and where Ian was stung by a litany of bees. Something about him just drove those bees wild. Me, on the other hand, I escaped without any stings. I assume that it was due my brother’s bright blonde bowl cut and penchant for neon colors. It was the eighties, after all.
Yet my first memory came before all this. It was when I can only assume we had first moved to the house. It is more a fragment than anything else. what I do remember is walking in the dirt, my head down as I stepped on the patches in the upper yard. My picture of it is faded like an 8mm film, the colors washed out over the years. As I walked in that backyard with the little scrubby bits of grass under my feet, I remember saying to myself, “This is the first memory I am going to have in this body.” That is all.
I found myself wondering for many years what happened to me before that memory. What was I doing? Was it my first memory, or was it my first moment? I have been back to those other houses I lived in before that house on Sunset Terrace, but they are blank to me. They look like normal houses, just another tract home on some street in some town. So what does this mean? Was I without memories up until that point? Was I an alien who beamed into my body at three years old? I asked my mom once if she noticed any serious changes in me after we moved to Sunset Terrace. “You were just fine,” she told me. Not exactly informative.
Yet it still comes back to me, this memory. Where was it from? Perhaps it was a dream that I mistook for a memory. Perhaps it was something that was fragmented, and the sentence is taken out of context. Maybe I was wearing a X-men costume, and I was really trying to say, “This is the first memory I am going to have in this body…suit.” Yet any interpretation seems far from complete. The memory is strong, and I have a clear sense of newness, as if my vision, the experience of walking, these were all novel to me.
This memory has stayed with me as a way to distinguish myself. I always liked the idea that my life started at a different point than others. As time went on, I kept the memory close to me, like a secret that helped me identify myself as an individual. It was not a revelatory memory, but a defining one.
Yet memories are kind of like stories, they change over time. We like to think that memories are frozen in our minds and that we can return to them with the purest of intentions. And through memory work, madeleines, or Professor X, we can access a database of our past experiences. But the truth is, the memory is not the event. Memory is something created, and can and will be changed. In a study by Northwestern University, researchers asked people to return day after day and locate a certain spot on a map. Each time they came back, the test subjects would mark closer to the place they had marked the day before, not the original location. As time went on, their memories moved the spot further and further away, changing the location altogether. Our memories, therefore, are a confluence of new and old information.
Humans have minds of great capacity, and it is nice to think that because they are so complex, we have access to some sort of objectivity. But the truth is the opposite. Our minds do not record events, they interpret them. Then, when we recall these events, they can be changed, adjusted, molded. In fact, every time we access a memory, we change it slightly. The result is that our most precious memories, our most traumatic, our most defining, are perhaps our most altered.
Memories are not here to serve the past. They are here to help us understand the present. As such, a memory is as much about ourselves today than about the event that occurred. Therefore my memory of walking in the grass may have occurred in any constellation. Or, perhaps, the event never even happened in the first place. Maybe it is nothing more than a fragment of a fragment, constructed to become a kind of false provenance, like saying America was “discovered”. Memories are influenced by ourselves today, but are not controlled by them. They stand in a triad with the event and the person, neither ever really having full influence over the memory. I do not know what my first moment in my body was. I do not remember my babyhood, nor living in Capitola and Los Gatos. What I do remember is walking in that crab grass, my head down, creating/reinforcing the first memory I have in this body.
Bodies of Water 