flickerfade.org

so what happened that year? we’ll find out after some drinking brings it back to the surface.

the big thing i remember was my birthday party. i remember the ugly red checkered tablecloth (possibly an incorrect memory). i remember my dad wore a vest. i remember the cake.

i started attending preschool at norman christian academy, despite the fact that we are not christian. (i think this place still exists.) i remember they kept sending me to the 4 and 5 year old classes. i didn’t really understand why at the time. in preschool, do you make friends? i ask this because i don’t remember anyone from preschool at all.

i might not remember anyone because we flipped across town not too much later. anyway at preschool we had all these weird plays. i think there are pictures of me dressed up as a muffin and with a (fake) pie on my head, some play about bakers or something. i vaguely remember game days where we could win toys. i didn’t win much. actually back then i didn’t really have toys. or did i? i think we were kinda broke at the time. i get the feeling my kids will live a similar life, unless i quickly figure out the secret of not being broke.

i wonder if my memories of later years will be more robust. it’s hard to remember things, especially since i sort of interrupted this project for a couple of years.

i never had the terrible twos, according to my parents. i was always quiet.

i was also reading at this point. it all goes downhill from here.

there was this girl who lived at our apartment complex that i always hung out with, too. i rode my big bird tricycle around the place with her. it made a really loud clicking noise. knowing my parents, they got it at some garage sale somewhere. years later i would visit that apartment complex. it still had the brown siding, fading away after all those years. not the best place to live i suppose, but good enough for a poor graduate student and his family. i guess anyplace is good enough if you’re happy.

we really did work our way up in the world, didn’t we? it’s up to me now.

what happened at age 1? well somewhere around here i think my dad started? ended? graduate school at the university of oklahoma. i should know by now what class he graduated in, but our family is like that, we never talk about serious things at times. (it’s a problem i’ve only just discovered this summer.)

we moved out to oklahoma from california by driving. a long drive, in a brown ford mustang (the old car broke down in a parking lot back in los angeles).

now i’m not sure when this next particular memory happened. i think it was age 1, because i was still in a carseat. possibly, i remember splashes of what happened, it doesn’t feel like such an implanted memory. i remember a brown denny’s, a brown carseat with a fat brown cushion that came down from above my head. (why all brown? the car’s already brown too.) i remember a clover-leaf exit to get to the denny’s. we didn’t make it to denny’s in time, though, before i threw up all over the car. hey, i wasn’t done yet! just for good measure, i wet my diaper.

cleanup must have been fun for my parents, but i don’t remember it myself, actually. maybe the fact that everything is brown is a tipoff that this is another one of those manufactured memories? real or not, how many people would tell the world about that kind of memory?

skip ahead 16 years. it’s september 11 today. i almost forgot.