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My Precursor Memories

In 1996, my family moved to Bogota, Colombia from New York City - it is the first or earliest recollection of where my person began, the person whose consciousness was born that day. That is my first memory, but I will write about it later. In this post I want to talk about my memories before my first full memory, which I call my precursor memories - I call them these because they are hardly memories, little more than snapshots imprinted into my mind and only really being able to recall them when there is a physical stimulus that takes me back to that place. These memories have no chronology, I don’t know which came before which, because none of them had taken place before I had become self aware.

My first precursor memory is of me in front of my apartment building on Broadway in Elmhurst, Queens in New York City. It’s very simple. It’s late in the afternoon, and I know it because when I go there now and the sun is in the same position as it was that day, it is in the west towards Manhattan. I hear the Mr. Softee ice cream truck tune, and I for it. I can remember the presence of my mother and her friend Maru, who also lived in the building. I’m not sure if I get the ice cream. But I remember the joy I felt at listening to the tune. 

On a different day, I remember my mother taking me to a sort of daycare facility somewhere in a neighborhood with lots of houses. It’s rainy outside and the facility is underground, as if in a home’s basement. Must have been a family run operation or something. I remember there was a girl. I was teased for liking the girl and playing with her, and my parents said she was my girlfriend. 

I remember being inside Queens Center Mall with my mother, possibly also with my grandmother, who was visiting us at the time for the birth of my sister. She had already been born, I know because I can recall my mother walking around with a stroller. I remember being at the top floor and looking down the spiral that led to the ground floor in the center of Queens Center. I remember the smell of perfume, many women’s perfumes. 

On another day I can also remember my uncle William, and walking with him into a Walgreens. I can’t remember much else about him before leaving to Colombia. 

I suppose my last memory before my real memory began is the biggest and most detailed one. I remember my mother waking my sister and I in the morning, but I remember questioning how it could be morning if it was still night outside? My sister is crying in her crib. My mother has a towel wrapped around her hear like a turban. She says we’re going to go see my dad. 

Later, I remember being somewhere big and at the time it struck me as really far away, but I do remember knowing it was in Brooklyn. I remember that well, we had to go to Brooklyn and that’s why it was such a big deal. I remember getting to Brooklyn and how big everything was, and there was an viaduct but I remember thinking it was a bridge. I can almost recall leaving someone in the car waiting for us underneath the viaduct while we went to “Brooklyn” which I thought was the name of the building where we were going. 

I remember this being the first time I saw so many black people in one place. The policemen and women were black, and made us take everything off and then put our hands in some device thing. My mother told me just to do as they say and it would be over soon. 

Next thing I know, I remember being in a large hall with lots of people, lots and lots of people of many colors and races, some dressed funny but many dressed in what seemed to be pajamas. I remember being with my father, but I can’t remember what he looked like as the man then was so much younger than the man whose face pops up in my mind now. I remember my mom and my father doing most of the talking and my dad at some point said that another man in pajamas was a very, very bad man and everyone was afraid of him. He pointed at him with his mouth, pursing his lips but I remember pointing directly at the man and his family, who looked back severely and my mother and father reprimanding me for being so rude, and was told that pointing was rude. I the loudness and overall, the overwhelming smell of popcorn. I remember vending machines, and popcorn. I can’t remember anything else except my father telling me that he couldn’t leave “Brooklyn” because that’s where he worked and lived and that all those men wearing the pajamas and him lived with him also because they were all working on a special project and he would have to keep living there for sometime more. That’s the last recollection I have of my life before this life I am living now began. My roommate popped some popcorn tonight and it all came rushing back.

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A Pool of Memories

We’ll keep names out of this for now, as I would like to remain as anonymous as possible with this, but let me tell you what this blog will be about. 

I was born in 1992, so currently I am 25 years of age. 25. Wow. I’m letting that sink in for a second as I often do when I find that I cannot believe I have lived so long and so much of my life already. I have a friend who likes to call it “the quarter century club” or maybe that’s just what people call being this age. As if we all got to live 100 years. yeah right. as if most of us didn’t die much, much, much earlier than that. It’s really more of the 33% of the way through club, if you want to get a little more realistic. And that’s optimistic. So, assuming that my optimism pays off and that I live up to the ripe old age of 75, that would mean that presently I have lived a third of my life. Hm, I’m not sure if I should be pleased with what I have lived so far, or if I really ought to make my life richer...

You know, for the quarter of a lifetime that I have been living on this planet, sometimes it seems as though there are too many repetitive days, not enough new memories. And other days it seems like there are far too many memories, my brain unable to capture every single last detail of each and everyone of them, and thus turning the memory of the event into little more than a nostalgic feeling for a fleeting sensation which, in the moments lived might have seemed infinite, eternal, but now as I try and recall those feelings more specifically and what caused them, it’s as if the tape is in my hands but it leaves me as I try to look into the tiny frames of the film that is my life. 

This is why I am starting this blog. What is a person but a collection of memories? Even our persona, this walking, breathing human being which people know and recognize everyday and which knows things about itself operates purely out of memory. Everything we know about ourselves, where we’re from, what we’re like, our height and weight, and eye color and handwriting, every little thing we know about ourselves, we know, because we remember. So, in order to prevent my memories to keep escaping me and from becoming mere static in the ever growing pool of memories that is my brain, I want to share with you, and with myself as I try to recollect in detail the events which I will write about, bits and pieces of my life, some significant, others just because, so that in the event that my life turns out to be just another series of mistakes and fizzled dreams with no impact whatsoever on the rest of my brethren, at the very least there will be a record, a piece of evidence, proof, that I too existed, that I too lived, that I too felt and that I too was here when everything happened during the years that I was alive. Welcome.