My Youngest Memory

At my job, among my many duties, I am the webmaster of our Intranet site, niftily branded by my predecessor as "HIP". So one of the goals of HIP is to connect people, since our firm is spread across 6 locations in 3 states. On a lark I created "Question of the Week". QOTW is a web bulletin board where anyone in the firm can post an answer to such queries as "Describe a brush with celebrity" or "Tell us about your first car". It's been a pretty big success, at least as measured by participation and the amount of chatter I hear in the hallway ("Did you see that so-and-so used to arrange funerals for famous people in Hollywood?")

This week's question is "Share your youngest memory". I wrote:

"Pain. One of my siblings dropping some sharp-edged metal object on my bare foot. Lots of blood and tears. I think I was 3."

Not Pulitzer material, but hey, I'm limited to 255 characters. Anyway, I've been thinking about this memory (I'm not sure why) and, well, I think I may have it wrong. Here goes.

I remember a bunch of us kids in the basement - the basement on the farm. At least that's what I think. I also remember a bunch of gray metal shelves (which I have no recollection of in the basement except for this particular memory). And, for some odd reason, I remember an anvil - like cartoon characters drop on the heads of other cartoon characters. "Did we ever own an anvil?" I think. That thing must have weighed 20 or 30 pounds.

For some reason my brain is telling me that someone dropped the anvil on my foot. In my brain I have this image of my foot similar to this (though not exactly this picture - I downloaded this picture from the Internet.) This picture most closely represents the image of my foot that I hold as a memory. Except in my memory my foot is covered with blood.

So here's where I think my memory - this memory - is wrong. First, this image of my bleeding foot cannot be an image of my foot. If it was my foot, it would be a top view - like this. This is the view of your own feet. My memory is a view of other people's feet.

Second, if I was about 3, I would be, according to family legend, about 20 pounds. After all, like my Mom used to love to tell me, I was only 27 pounds when I started kindergarten. If that's true, I was probably under 20 pounds at the age of 3. So if that anvil had been dropped on my foot, it would likely have broken several bones - on top of the whole bleeding thing. And it's highly likely that I would remember several weeks in a cast at the age of 3. And I don't remember ever being in a cast.

So far I must conclude that a)someone else's foot was injured and b)it definitely wasn't an anvil that landed on my foot.

What really happened? I now think that I there are a bunch of disjointed memories that my mind has forged into a single coherent memory. Except it's just not possible. What probably happened is that I dropped the anvil on someone else's foot. And the pain that I associate with the memory is the pain of guilt, remorse, and punishment that I don't understand (because I'm 3).

Why did I write this post? To be honest, I didn't really piece together the part about me dropping the anvil on someone else's foot until I typed it. But now I feel better.

If anyone remembers this event, please help me out. And if it was your foot that absorbed that anvil - I'm really sorry. I'm pretty sure I didn't do it on purpose, if that makes you feel any better.