My Earliest Memory

My Earliest Memory
An Autobiographical Fragment

        I sometimes tell people that my earliest memory is of guilt. This is an exaggeration. But permissible poetic license, I think, in view of how often threads of guilt and regret have found their way into the fabric of my life. But in fact, the guilt memory comes a bit later. My earliest certain memory is of running into a spider web.
        I believe I would have been four years old. My mother is carrying me up the stairs of a large house in St. Elmo, a residential district at the bottom of Lookout Mountain. The house belongs to her parents. It is, or soon will be, where we live, we being my mother, my father, myself and my two older sisters. The house was divided into apartments. I can’t recall how many. My family will occupy one of these, but whether we already do at the time of my encounter with the spider web or whether we are visiting my grandparents, I do not know.
        My memory is this. My mother is carrying me up the porch stairs. Suddenly, I find that a sticky, strange substance is adhering to my face. I object to this. I think I cry. I know I claw at the strands, trying to remove them from my face and hands. My mother laughs. She says something. One can imagine the words. “It’s only a spider web. It won’t hurt you.”
        One wonders how memory works. I see this scene from a third person’s perspective, as people are said to do when close to death. My memory’s eye is not my own. I also do not see the scene in motion, only a series of still pictures. I can feel the child’s discomfort and fear. Or can I? When one stores a memory, are the emotions stored in some form as well? Or is there simply a notation in the distant reaches of my brain which says, Fear and discomfort felt at this point?
        The scene is not very graphically displayed in my mind’s eye. It is a constant frustration to me that I have a poor visual memory. I don’t see my mother’s clothes or my own. I don’t see clouds or a bright blue sky. Am I wearing shoes? Is the front door open? All these questions remain unanswered. I only remember the basic facts of the incident.
        This is my earliest sure memory. I believe I have others from when we lived in Alton Park, a malodorous, industrial area a mile or so from St. Elmo. But these are faint--mere cobwebs in the corners, snatches of sound, faint remnants of smells, shadowy figures on grey backgrounds. It is only when I plow into the spider web that memory truly begins.
        What would a biographer do with this memory? The spider web, after all, is an evocative image. Does this first memory predict my future? Did I spend my life fussing and fretting about small annoyances, thus missing something bigger? Did I live a circumscribed life because I imagined myself bound, only to learn now that the imagined tethers could not really have held me had I only laughed them off? There is a rich promise of metaphor here, but aren’t there times when a memory is just a memory?