I preached a sermon about remembering recently, and that got me going. I started thinking about my own memories.
In Adlerian psychology, there is a whole system that has been developed to evaluate what are called Early Recollections. These are our earliest memories, and because we have so many memories to choose from, those that we select serve as a kind of projective test, like a Rorschach test. I won’t do an analysis of my first memory (though some of my peers might once they read this), but it was the start of a theme that has surfaced frequently in my life.
My earliest memory occurred when I was a toddler. I don’t know how old I was, but I was still sleeping in a crib, so I was probably two. I climbed out of the crib for the first time and padded my way into the kitchen where my Dad was sitting at a table drinking coffee, and Mom was standing. I think she was making breakfast. Mom turned and saw me and said, “What are you doing out here?” The look on her face was surprised and happy and proud, all at once. I don’t remember much else about that except the feeling that I had. I was proud of my new accomplishment, and also had a warm feeling that I had given my parents a happy surprise. Those feelings were linked.
For the rest of my life I have a sense that I was trying to recreate that feeling, to surprise them again and again.
I always felt a kind of satisfaction when I was able to surprise them. As their oldest child I think I surprised them by learning to read at an early age, and it felt to me as though if I tried hard enough, I could both succeed in life and keep surprising them, so I pushed myself. The memories that come to me quickest are those that are related to this line of thinking — my own reading group in the first grade, getting praise from my teachers, doing well in sports.
Maybe my favorite memory from sports was from the sixth grade. For the previous two years, I had tried out for Little League baseball and had not made the team. It was heartbreaking, especially because I loved baseball. Well, things change quickly when you are a boy, and I grew (about 5 inches in one year), and my coordination improved. I made a team and played well enough to be selected as an all-star. During the all-star game, I came up to bat against the best pitcher in the league. He was a fastballer that scared a lot of players, including me. The bases were loaded with two outs. The game was tied. He threw a pitch and I hit the ball a mile. It went over the head of the left fielder. I ran around the bases and I could hear my mother screaming. It should have been a home run, but I was slow, and I got thrown out at the plate. It didn’t matter to me — my three-run triple gave me that same complex feeling that I had when I was two. And in my mind I had proved something to those teams that had cut me.
After a while I did well enough in school that I think my successes became expected as normal, and so surprises were harder to come by. There were some prizes along the way that were different enough to be minor thrills, but it was not until I got accepted into a college that was unthinkable for normal people like us that I felt that same sense of accomplishment that I knew from when I was two years old. At about the same time I gave a speech to my graduating class, and I had that feeling again.
After that I moved headlong into the real world, and it became harder to surprise my parents, partly because they were less aware of the things I was doing, and partly because the competition was so much more intense, and the objectives were less well-defined. Another way of saying this is that I was growing up, and the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction that I felt as a two year old was not as important anymore. Instead, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to achieve as an individual, and how to feel satisfied with myself in a way that would feel as good, but different.
Of course life brings its disappointments and complications. I look back and think of some very sad times — my grandparents’ deaths, a family member who died by suicide, college friends who have died, jobs that didn’t work out, relationship struggles. More recently I think of the shock of my parents dying and the horrible scourge of COVID. But all these things — the good and the bad — have made me who I am. I’ve learned some valuable lessons and I’ve still got some things to figure out.
I think it’s valuable to pull these memories up from the gray fog of the past from time to time, partly to recapture the lessons learned, but also to give thanks. There have been an awful lot of people involved in my life, and I know I haven’t thanked them often enough. The spiritual part of me also wants to thank God. We didn’t have to exist, but we do. I’m grateful for that.
