first_memory ovenbird My first clear memory formed at the age of two. My mother was pregnant with my brother and my parents needed my crib for the baby. I remember my dad and his brother moving a new bed into my room. They made multiple trips through the living room carrying the frame while I sat on the couch. Later they were framed by the open bedroom door as they assembled the pieces. The memory is vivid. My first awareness of the world came at the moment my infancy vanished. I was no longer the baby. This new child would be the baby. I wasn’t happy about it and I made that known. I didn’t want a brother. I wanted to be an only child. I didn’t know then that love is infinite. I assumed there would be less love to go around. But I did like the new bed. It was a captain’s bed, with built-in drawers underneath and two cubbies. (I put my stuffed animals in those cubbies, I made a nest for my first cat in one of those cubbies and she slept there as she was dying.) The drawers meant that the mattress was high off the ground and I had to jump to get into it. That was fun, but falling out of bed was not fun. It was a long way down. It’s strange that I remember the bed instead of other things. I don’t remember crashing on the keys of my Baba’s upright piano singing my new brother’s name over and over the day that he was born (though my older cousin likes to tell me how obnoxious I was). I don’t remember the day my brother came home (it was Christmas and I had to wait to open my presents but I have no memory of this). I don’t remember holding him (though I remember my resentment). I don’t remember anything else about being two, but I remember that bed and the moment the rails were taken off my world and I was free to fall into the spindly arms of fate. 251113 ... raze for so_long i wished for a memory of my mother and father together. just one. so i could know what it was to be alive in a world in which they thought, however briefly, that they might love each other. but my first memories were made after they separated, when i wasn't yet three years old. and the chronology is fuzzy. i don't know which snapshot is the true beginning of a still-growing tapestry of what time hasn't yet taken from me. now i think that's as it should be. in my favourite picture of my parents, they stand in jackson park on their wedding day, together but apart. he stares into the camera. something like a small smile playing at the margins of his mouth. her eyes are on him. her features smeared by soft focus. she's a spectral figure haunting the hub of a shared life that wasn't built to last. maybe that image shows me everything i could have hoped to see about the people who made me. 251113 ... ancasa.reyn i was four years old my two older brothers and i sat in the living room i in my dad's recliner they on the floor at the base of the chair in another room out of out view but not sound our father was beating our mother for reasons i will never know after dad died i recounted it for my brothers and asked if they had the same memory neither did i brought it up in front of mom she neither affirmed nor denied it happened but it happened 251117 what's it to you? who go blather from