I can recall the phone number we had when I was 9 years old before we moved from Indiana. But I bet a lot of folks here can remember that early-imprinted stuff. I can recall a bunch of phone numbers for places I used to buy from in the mid 70s. But those are quantifiable things. There are memories of events that I'm not certain are 100% accurate, but have no way of proving one way or the other.
My long term memory is pretty good. I can recall many details fairly well of a lot of things; the layout, colors, furniture, appliances, etc. of my home I grew up in including my grandparents and aunts and uncles homes. I can remember being as young as 2 years old and what I wore. I can bring up the smells in my mind of many things from my child hood also. My grandpa was the same way until the day he died. My short term memory isn’t worth a damn!
I think I already told about my earliest memories as an infant. Bubble baths were something that stayed etched in my mind for ever, the different colored bubbles just mystified me. My earliest memory was being dressed on the dinning room table. My sand box out in the front yard, I was not walking at the time but I clearly remember all the different colored plastic cups I had to play with. It was the smell of petroleum on the cups because they were new and fresh and in the early days of plastic lots of oil was used in production. Now if I could just remember names of so many people I knew over 75 years. I try to track a few people by looking at the orbits but don't seem to be having any luck with 80 percent . It took me 3 years to finally find my best friend and it was a son of one of my pilots who found him for me in the Houston National Cemetery, no orbit no death information and that was in 2015, he was one month older than myself to the day. The way I figure it his older sister Thelma must have died before him because surely she would have put something in the paper knowing all of us were quite a large group of kids when growing up. My fondest memory of my friend was his little plastic squeeze coin purse, I'm sure most of us have seen them back in the fifties and sixties. The were shaped like an egg but flat and had a slot running the length of the little coin carrier. His Mother would put his 50 cent allowance in the little coin purse every week. By the end of the first day he was out of money since we all lived at the Drug Store fountain. He would throw that little coin purse on the floor and tell his Mother you never give me any damned money !!! Heh, had I ever done that I would have been sleeping outside in the doghouse for sure plus a few willow tree whelps on my back side. Then there was never any chance of that happening because I never received an allowance. I had full use of the lawn mower and made a killing just cutting grass and picking up pop bottles which were literally Pennies from Heaven. I never needed an allowance. It was great to have lived in the 50s, it was a different world then and a better one here at home.
I’d say not good overall. Some special moments stick but also some seemingly insignificant things stick for some reason. Many others, which my wife has to tell me about, it’s like they never happened. Childhood? Forget it. Thinking about it, I prefer to day dream, or imagine things happening, rather than reflect on memories. My imaginings are just as vivid, usually more so, than my memories.
Sometimes my daughter brings up some incident from the past and I have no recollection of it whatsoever. It kind of makes me nervous when that happens, like what's happening to my brain??? But I can still remember my address and phone number from when I grew up in '50s. So, I guess I'm okay. Just don't ask me what I did last week or what I had for dinner 2 days ago.
It is normal to not remember things once we get older. There are times when I try to remember a name that I know well but it takes a while then all of a sudden it comes. My sister has little to no remembrance of our childhood and it shows how each of us are so different. It's like having a conversation with a total stranger when I mention or talk about something that I know she was involved or a part of so many decades ago. Now my Brother had a sharp mind and good memory. He's gone now but I remember him as a youngster and always messing around with things he shouldn't be doing, like for one poking a giant yellow jacket nest on the front porch with a broom heh He never did it again !!! In Oklahoma City the two of us had the neighborhood paper route and it was early morning and late news two times a day. We would get up before school at 5am each morning and go out and bring the papers from the corner back across the street to our porch and fold and sack them. I loved to tease my Brother and he would go to bed early every night, so I would wait until he was sound asleep and then wake him up and tell him to go get the papers. He would get up and dress and go outside to the corner and there weren't any papers. You could hear him all over the neighborhood crying and hollering out at me. I loved to tie his shoe strings together when he was napping. I miss the phone calls now that he's gone but we always were close. Here is my Mother and my Brother when he was very young 1954.
I can remember a few bad things that happened to me while living with an Aunt and her adopted daughter. I was in grade school and had just entered 8th grade when I was rescued by distant cousins that became my legal guardians. I can see an actor in an old tv series that I remember from other tv shows. I've noticed a number of young actors on Gunsmoke that were later in major tv shows/movies. Like, the other day I seen Jack Lord on Gunsmoke and later he was the star of Hawaii Five-O.
Jack Lord was Stony Burke in a series with Warren Oats, long before Warren's role in Stripes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055705/
I can name celebrities, phone numbers all that stuff, but things that my girls claim happened when they wer young is fuzzy if remember at all.Two of them in 50 their 50's
The thing about memory is that so much of what we remember is not correct. We sometimes talk about our memories when at a family gathering. The way I remember some events can be totally different from the way my brothers and sisters remember them. All of us can't be right.
We rewatched the tv series “Justified” again recently. I could not believe how badly I remembered a critical scene in the show. The male character who I remembered being shot and dying, didn’t even get shot at all by the person I clearly remember shooting him while a female got killed instead in a physical altercation. I can’t believe how my mind rewrote that. I clearly remembered the guy being shot while sitting at the table in his RV, even remember him slumping forward over the table.
Ha! Not likely. We’re not teetotalers but one beer each, once a week (Friday night beer and pizza) is about the extent of our drinking.