First Memory

My first memory is of the day my little sister was born, or, more accurately, it is of the teddy bear I got the day my sister was born. I climbed into the hospital bed next to my mommy (which is probably illegal nowadays), and she pretended to deliver MY baby, a bright yellow teddy bear. It was a gaudy thing from Big Lots (then called Odd Lots) with glittering fur and a black vest and jaunty top hat covered in itchy sequins. I loved him immediately and named him Peaches. For years to come, Peaches would be my favorite stuffed animal and would celebrate his birthday on my sister's. Once, I even explained to her that she was the bear's aunt, but, being four years old at the time, she didn't understand how she could have a nephew the same age as herself.

A Little Girl, Year Zero

Before I post, I apologize for not updating since my first post. I know no one is reading this yet, but someday someone might, and I apologize to them for how stupid and lazy it must make me look. My goal now is to write a story a day until I run out of stories. Whether or not I keep that "promise" is yet to be determined.


A Little Girl, Year Zero

I was born on an unremarkable day in June. Six years later, I would flip anxiously through the pages of a library book called The Year You Were Born: A Day-By-Day Record of 1986 only to find that the day of my birth was marked only by Michael Jackson's acquiring a pet giraffe.

My mother named me after the one-hit wonder that recorded "Walking on Sunshine" and added two middle names to make it too long to fit on a driver's license. The doctor had told my parents to expect a boy, so my grandparents planned for a hermaphrodite, knowing that the doctors are very often wrong about those sorts of things. My mother was constantly counting her chickens before they hatched, and she and her friends all knew that the baby would be a boy. To compensate, she dressed me in baby-sized overalls, flannel, and even miniature work boots, complete with rubber soles and took pictures of me with my cousin Kyle, just a few months younger, to prove that I was "one of the boys".

An Author's Foreword

This is an autobiography, a memoir, a place for me to collect the stories of my recent past into something I can share with my friends and, most importantly, myself.

Sometimes we need to put our memories out into the world before we can come to terms with them. Sometimes we need the recognition of others just to believe that our memories actually happened. Sometimes we write down our memories with a more selfish goal, to force our memories to become the others' memories. That, I believe, is the goal of any memoirist, good or painfully awful.

So I bring to you my memories, as I remember them. Those of you who might remember them differently are welcome to bring what you know to the stories in the form of comments.

James Thurber once wrote his own autobiography before he had lived long enough, by the old masters' standards, to have accomplished something worth writing about. His reasoning, however comically put, is understandable - we should write about the moments we remember truthfully now, before they are overshadowed by the telling and retelling of accomplishments. These are stories of things I did and, more importantly, things that were done around me that I merely observed. Life might, and probably will, bring me fortunes and sorrows far better or worse than anything here, but before the great happens, I need to record the simple.