Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
What is your earliest memory? Odds are it is sometime between when you were three and five years old.
Mine date back to 1959, Louisiana, just before I turned three. They’re faded images in my mind and strangely, mostly in black and white. The most prominent is waiting on the front step of my parents’ home outside Lake Charles Air Force base for my dad to get home.
Dad rode a little scooter to work. I don’t remember the model, the make, the horsepower, or much else about it. It was red.
I’d run out to the street each afternoon. He’d scoop me up with one hand and take a few laps around the yard as my mom and our landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn, who were like grandparents to me, watched from their front porch a feet away.
One of those black-and-white images came from our final days in Louisiana, as Hurricane Debra hit the Texas/Louisiana coast in July 1959.
I remember the sideways rain, the howling wind, and the water rising up to the level of the front step, but mostly I have an image of a gigantic (in my childhood mind anyway) black snake swimming in the tidal surge.
In later years, mom and dad verified there was a big snake in the front yard, but there were also fish, turtles, tons of frogs, and a couple of alligators washed inland. I don’t remember those.
The flight to Puerto Rico came on a commercial airliner with three tail fins and a walkway that looked to me like it went to the stars.
It was a C-121 Constellation, a large four-engine propeller aircraft used for military transport and civilian air travel. It was the last big propeller-driven plane of the 1950s and early 60s to be replaced by the 707.
I checked a few minutes ago, the doorway of a Constellation is high, eight to 10 feet from the tarmac to the bottom of the door. I guess you have to be three years old to think that was a stairway to the stars.
I wonder what the earliest memory for our grandchildren will be. The three oldest, Jayne, Norah, and Morgan, all remember my mom, “Grandma Jan,” and, thanks to photographs, old videos, and the ubiquitous images on their parents and grandparents’ cell phones, their memories will be augmented.
Little Matthew, who just turned a year old recently, won’t have any memories of his great-grandparents. Only images and explanations since mom held him many times before she passed last April.
Only Jayne has photos with my dad. She was a year old when he passed in 2018. Such is the stuff of memory.
As you grow older, your memory improves, or at least it gets selective. Some images pop out, as clear as the moment they happened, while others don’t come up at all, even when prompted by someone else who shared them.
My wife has the amazing ability to remember not only people’s names, but their children’s names, their children’s birthdays, and minute details of their lives. I often lean over and ask her quietly who these people are. Nope, I didn’t get that gift.
On the other extreme, I can remember routines, sequences, and coding on devices and operating systems that went offline three decades ago. Just don’t ask me the name of the person who wrote the software or designed the device.
When discussing the idea for this column with Sue, I asked her what year her oldest memory was. Like me, she was almost three years old, and her family was visiting relatives in Oklahoma City.
Jayne, Morgan, Norah, and Matthew won’t have that problem. They have thousands, more like tens of thousands of photos and videos taken from the moment they were born until the present. Almost every day, they have a photograph or video taken of them.
As I research the history of Fremont County, the lack of images is astounding. People didn’t have the technology in the 1880s and beyond, aside from prison mug shots or maybe a dark, grainy, poorly printed newspaper photo.
That was true for most people until after World War II.
The advent of cheap cameras, inexpensive film, and even color processing at a reasonable price changed all that, and memories became substantiated in photo albums stored away in mom and grandma’s cabinets across the country.
Athletes today get the same treatment. In shooting games, I’m cognizant of how many photos I’ve run of a certain boy or girl in each successive week. In basketball, with just five to eight players who see much more action on each team, it’s easy to shoot the same kids, week after week.
I’ve had parents in the past who counted the column inches and the size of photographs of their kids in relation to the amount of coverage other kids from other schools got. I have a memorable email saved from a mom who was angry that a future Division I basketball player was getting a few more column inches each week than her daughter. Oh well.
I had a single photo taken of me while playing high school football. I’d just tackled Mo Cady of Dubois and was standing over him when the reporter from the Lander Journal snapped the picture.
I found it a few years ago on a whim while researching a story in the microfilm collection at the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne. I was 17, sure I could remember it.
In contrast, kids today will see themselves on websites hundreds of times before they graduate.
We live in a visual era.
Visual memories are one thing; auditory and olfactory are quite another.
Have you ever sniffed an aroma that suddenly takes you back to a time and place far away from today? How about a song or the sound of the wind? Those are powerful memory triggers as well.
For now, I don’t recall the sound of the howling winds of Hurricane Debra. My farthest recollection of the wind came in a spent hurricane that hit Blytheville, Arkansas, when I was in first grade. It had lowered to a tropical storm, but the winds were still 60 miles per hour, and the rain was so heavy that when I stepped off the school bus that afternoon, the water went almost up to my knees.
The American flag flew outside Mrs. White’s first-grade classroom. We could see it easily from everywhere in the room. We watched as the near hurricane-force winds bent the flagpole into a banana shape before ripping the flag away.
It flew like a grocery sack across a hayfield, spinning red and white with flashes of blue and then it disappeared.
I was six. I can still hear the sound of clanging clasps on the flagpole in that wind.
What is your deepest memory? No looking at your phone for an answer.