My earliest memories

 

These are the two earliest memories I have. One is with my mother, the other with my father. Both of them died relatively young. My mother passed away at 52 while my father only made it to 36. These articles are a result of working on my personal journaling with the Edison and wordsmith decks to make the blog more personal and learn more about myself.

 

 

The earliest memory that I still have with my mother is from my childhood home in Hagenstr.7 in Nordhorn. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the third or second floor. You came into the hallway from the staircase. The hallway would stretch approximately the same length in both directions. 

 

To the right was my bedroom at the end of the hallway. It had its windows out right into the city center. It was right across the Kaufring which was the local shopping center. That building has been renamed several times since then, but it’s still a mall. 

 

While the door to my bedroom was at the end of the corridor to the right the door to my parent's bedroom was to the end of the hallway end left. I don’t really remember more if it. 

 

When you come into our apartment door and went left there would also be two doors. The one at the end would lead to a spacious bathroom. At the end of the corridor and right was the living room. I remember that we had very lavish furniture, a big television, and a balcony at the end of that living room. My father also had a slot machine on the wall which friends would play with when they were over. My mother disagreed, he said it was my piggy bank. I never saw any make ey from that.

 

 Some day I was told that my mom and dad made 10000 Deutsche Mark between them a month which equates to about 5000 Euros. But that was back in the eighties and nineties where you would get more for your money. Inflation and all of that. We were probably a middle class or upper-middle-class depending on the most en vogue deck definition of the term. 

 

When you walked through the living room there was a door to the left that leads into the kitchen. The kitchen was always very sunny. At least that is how I remember it. There was also a table in there where my mother would feed me. It was white and had three normal chairs in white and one high chair for me. 

 

My earliest memory is my mother feeding me in that high chair with a blue plastic spoon. On the high chair was a glass of milk which I knocked off and fell to the ground. The glass shattered and the milk was all over the place. I just remember my mother smiling at me and cleaning it up. The noise must have given me a fright. This is the first memory which is still branded into my head. Although the details get fussier with each year that passes by. 

 

 

The earliest memory with my father took place in the same apartment. There was a playground just out to the door an to the right. You had to go over a street to get there. 

 

I had all kinds of toys to play within the sand. Caterpillars, cement lorries and all the vehicles a big building site would have. They barely fit into one of the big blue IKEA bags. My poor mom and dad had to drag all of these toys to the playground because I would have a fit if one was missing. How do you run a proper building site when the equipment was missing? One time I threw myself on the ground and screamed like I was getting killed. Imagine that in the middle of the main shopping center in a 52.000 inhabitants town. Basically, I was a spoiled brat. 

 

My mom would usually take me to the playground. My father would also do it at times. I don’t exactly remember who literally did the heavy lifting on this particular day. What would happen though, is that I would have sand in my shoes and ring it back to the apartment. The shoes were taken off at the door and left there. My father would always clean them out by banging them at the outside of the balcony to get the sand out. Monkey see monkey do. One day I got on a chair, got my shoes and hang over the balcony to clean the shoes that way. One of them skipped my hand and fell down on a car parked below. Could have well been me dropping down there. My father screamed at me and gave me a slap in the face when he noticed what I was doing. I did not understand at all, as that was what he always did with the shoes. This anger and lack of providing context are with me to this day, even though I try to be better.