If the earliest memory one can imagine, if that memory, their earliest one, is their cornerstone. The building block on which the person that they will eventually blossom into and become. The cornerstone.
It was proposed to me that this comes from the earliest memory you can recall. This earliest memory, despite it being from so long ago, is the thing that first began to shape your future. A first memory, an oldest memory, is your brain holding onto, the inciting incident, of who you were eventually destined to become. A bit of gun powder left over after the canon went off. Interesting, isn’t it? For me, well, I maintain that my earliest memory is 9/11.
I have an honest image of it. Sitting on the floor, playing with my “Little People”, not small servants that my parents paid for me to treat as objects. We had no servant money and even if we did— I highly doubt my parents would ever want to have servants. Even if we did, I certainly would not have been allowed to have treated them like objects. No, Little People are small plastic-y toys of firefighters, police men, and farmers. I had a whole red barnyard play set for them to exist in. It was sick.
I can see myself lying on the ground, using the full force of my child’s imagination to play with grand, and imaginative scenarios. Like pretending that a cop, might live in a barn, and that he would wake up early and harvest grain. Such childlike bliss to imagine a cop doing anything but eating donuts. My dad lay on the ground next to me, we had cartoons on the TV, and he was watching me play— occasionally joining in to make animals sounds, adding to the “Old McDonald” lifestyle of it all.
Suddenly, the TV went black, shifting from Sesame Street to some talking head, sans David Byrne, and then they started showing a big building in New York— turn to an even bigger pile of rubble.
My father got… cold, hot, cold, hot…cold— he freaked out. This was the first time I ever remember someone, let alone the New York slab of Italian beef that is/was my father, let alone anyone being in such a scared state, like he was. A state of being where for me, description fails. It was a drop into something beyond terrified.
I think this is where my life began. As my country was temporarily brought to, we certainly did not kneel, but we did reel from the punch. The direct murder of thousands by some virgins in a death cult.
It was there, in the familial space of my childhood living room. As I lay on a builder grade carpet floor, with my father's arm around me, that I felt his muscles tense. An anthropological reaction, knowing my mother was nowhere near the attack on screen, but not knowing where the next attack might be.
With this, with all of this— still my base of this memory resolves around thoughts of how absolutely shit that CRT TV was. It was huge! Some matte blue gray joint. How years later I would be fucking around with it, climbing up on it for some reason, and how doing this it would make it fall on top of me. How I had to call for dad’s help in pushing it off of my chest. Little does mom know, that this was all part of a covert plan of mine, something that I hatched in secret. 9/11 was not an inside job, but when mom later heard the giant monster TV landed on me— she immediately went out and got us a flat screen, so much thinner, so much lighter, and wall mounted— so there was no way it was falling on her sweet baby angel. Ahem, Mission Accomplished. Just it was for George Bush when he said those words, this story is the same for me— an absolute lie.
I was born December 13th, 2000. On September 11th, I was barely nine months old. I couldn’t possibly remember any of this. Sheer imagination or from my father telling me this story, of where he was, how it was with me as a baby— him retelling it to and around me for my entire life, it has become a cornerstone memory, regardless of why it so vividly exists in my head.
Cornerstone memory because it is the beginning of what would go on to “shape,” to “become” my life.
What is my life? If you’ll allow an old cowboy the pleasure of quoting myself, I use this one anytime I'm talking to a millennial, to prove my cool credentials to them. I'll hit them with: “Kids these days are just so dumb. Tik this, and Tok that. They don’t know what that pre 9/11 world was like!”
Nine times out of ten, they just start walking away, or stare blankly into my bright blue, pre-9/11 eyes.
The cornerstone of what I am, what I'm all about, is the principle of laughing for the sake of living. Making shit up— for the love of the bit!
It’s is essential, when happiness is concerned at least, because if we don’t do that— well leave our hearts out hanging, like some fucking chads.
See—I at least know pre-9/11 things!