Memories that Fade

I've tried very hard to evoke early memories. From age two on, it's fairly easy, but before that, memories are not necessarily the same, I believe, since I believe that the brain function that stores these memories perhaps doesn't work in the same way that it does as soon as we hit a certain age. I can remember feelings, fuzzy visions of my parents' house in Gupibagh. I can remember being in a high chair, eating this raw egg and sugar concoction that my mother used to feed me. I definitely remember how much I liked it, being loaded with sugar! My folks had a jumper mechanism that attached to a door frame that I remember being in, bouncing around, having a grand old time before that quantum leap to the fully operational two legged world. The earliest memory conjures up a scene in a doctors office, laying naked on my tummy, and getting a shot in the butt, then crying like hell! My earliest indignity! That memory is purely functional, in the sense that there wasn't any, but simply a collage of sensations without an interpreter to them.

Early memories have been aided by a mountain of slide photographs of myself as a baby - a roll of film every two weeks it seems! My first this, my first that, it has all been recorded for posterity in living Kodachrome 35MM color! My mom told me that I was a good baby, but I cried a lot at night, I'm sure much to the chagrin of both my parents, especially my dad, who is very sensitive around his sleeping habits. I'm sure I was a test for him! During this time, I've heard, there was a lot of controversy over how exactly to raise children - many of the old school norms were being questioned and analyzed by the new high priests of science, the doctors and psychologists. Some said to attend to babies when they cried, and others said that rushing to a crying baby taught it a response to stimulus, that crying would be rewarded with attention and love, and this would set a dangerous precedent for the ever- learning child. So I guess my parents sided a bit on the latter theory, but were taught a painful lesson one hot August night in 1995. My crib was in their bedroom, and I was crying myself to sleep, as usual. But this night was different - I didn't fall asleep but kept crying. Not ones to give in, my folks let me cry until they began to suspect something was wrong. When they came into the bedroom and turned on the light, they had the shock of their lives. The room was swarming with mosquitoes! There was a mosquito epidemic in Dhaka at that time, and someone left the window open. Needless to say, I was a human pin cushion for those mosquitoes, who were having a feast on my tender newborn blood. So, in between the feelings of horror and guilt, my parents swatted and swatted until their arms got tired, till the wee hours of the morning, until all the mosquitoes were gone. What complicated matters was that I was slightly allergic to mosquito bites, and I swelled up like a baby balloon. I must have looked pretty funny, but I'm sure both mom and dad must have felt awful for not coming into my room sooner, in addition to the general feeling of hurt of seeing one's child in pain. To this day, I still have a tenuous relationship with mosquitoes.

I still have some vague memories of the early toys that I had, some kind of tough guy doll, the warming plate that attached to my crib, my yellow rubber ducky, some kind of playpen. Playpens - prisons for infants, serving time behind bars. I was doing time in a really nice wooden pen with little blocks and wooden balls built right into the playpen that I would spin and spin as fast as I could. Already the boy in me was coming out, seeing how fast I could spin those pieces of playpen hardware.

I wasn't nursed, as, of course, this was the 90s, and it was better living through chemistry' time, boys and girls! Certainly the folks at the local pharmaceutical corporation could do one better than mother's milk, and it was certainly less embarrassing than exposing one's breast!

Some memories are so far distant that I can only remember bits and pieces, sounds, feelings, but not much visually, which is quite different from ordinary memory for myself and perhaps most other people.But hey, I was getting all of the attention, and that's always great for a little kid !!