'...memories are films about ghosts'

A dear friend and I were on the phone one afternoon last week. He called with no particular agenda but to catch up. Very quickly, we were laughing the way we always do when we connect. Gasping for air. Unable to speak. Challenging the other with the next comment that will send the other over the edge of hysterics. For two hours, I fluttered my hand in front of my face the way I do when I laugh like that, begged him to stop, and then taunted him with my clever bonsmots in hopes I'd bait him.

I quite love this friendship. I knew as soon as I met him more than 20 years ago that if I never had any other friends for the rest of my life, I'd be ok as long as I didn't lose his friendship. As though he knew at that moment what I was thinking during the pause I took to lift myself upright from a laughing jag and settle myself back onto my couch, he asked if I could remember the first time we met.

"Like it happened an hour ago," I replied. "You were walking down the dorm hall, gangly. All legs and arms. And that hair. God. That odd slant it had to it. And a color I have never seen anywhere before or since. I knew that if we became friends, I had to convince you to do something about that hair, and to quit wearing your sweatshirts inside out."

We then dissected a number of our mutual memories. His disastrous roommate adventures. How we both returned to campus after a weekend at home sporting the same awful heads of curly, bleached blond hair. How we'd burst into another roommate's room while she was in class and disgust ourselves by reading her journal. The way we were effortlessly able to pass him off as a girl. The brief stint when we lived together after college and we fell into this silly, platonic husband and wife routine.

"I remember so little of my childhood, but I remember this kind of stuff," he said. When he did, I realized that I have very few memories that I can pull up from my childhood. I've been working so hard at creating memories for my sons that I hope they remember (and I assume it's working, to some degree, because my oldest is forever saying to me "Mom, you remember that one time when we did that thing with those people and then we went over there and we got to do that other thing? When can we do that again?"), but I honestly can't recall much of my own childhood before the age of 11 or 12.

I have no reason to doubt my parents when they choose to tell the delightful story of how I stood at the back steps of our family home and screamed, cried and vomited (that's when they get the most delighted in the story telling) the night they left for the hospital to bring me home a baby sister. I was 2 1/2 years old. I didn't, apparently, need the competition.

Just as I don't remember the time I had my parents to myself, I don't remember them bringing my sister home, nor do I remember much of what it was like having her in the house as a baby. I do remember when she got a little older and I must have been four or five, and we'd race through our house to get to my bedroom - of which the only thing I can remember is the pink shag carpeting and the very same twin bed frame that my youngest son sleeps in today.

In the same house, at probably five or six years of age, I remember sitting at the window of my parent's bedroom and watching the cars come and go from the house across the street. I do remember my mom shooing me away when she'd find me watching the place, and how I ignored her one night when I found myself fascinated watching a pair of feet bobbing around as they dangled out the driver's side window of a car parked on the street in front of the place. Clearly, in retrospect, there were things going on in that car I knew nothing about then. Years later, when I brought it up to my mom when talk turned to my family's first home, she very clearly informed me that "drug dealers" lived across the street from us then and the neighbors were constantly calling the police.

I have vague recollections of that time period of playing outside, the car my father drove. But very little else before that or really up until the point I hit the age of 11 or 12. That seems insane to me that I can't remember what it was like to be younger than a preteen. Even when I look at pictures from that time, very few memories are spurred by the images (aside from the fact that we were apparently poor or my mom simply didn't like to shop because she made almost all our clothes - including, sigh, our underwear - until I couldn't bear dressing identically to my sister any longer). Part of me worries, because of this, that my own kids won't remember much of their childhood and the things I've done to help them along in it. Or worse, they'll just remember the times when I kind of checked out and couldn't do much for them and they'll manifest that into something worse than it was at the time.

So my question is what is the earliest memory you have? What today prompts that memory for you? Do you think it's a real event from your life or one you've created because it seems good and you don't seem that worried that it bears a striking similarity to something that happened on "The Brady Bunch" or some other sitcom? Because honestly, I was born in Hawaii and I seem to recall this legend of a cursed tiki statue...