Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Is Your Earliest Memory?

This is really cool.  Randy Seaver decided he liked one of my suggestions for a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic:

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) What is your earliest memory?  How old were you, where did you live, who are the characters in your memory?

(2) Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a comment on this post with a link to your post.

Thank you to Janice Sellers for suggesting this topic.  If you have an idea for an SNGF topic, please let me know.

Part of the reason I suggested this topic is because of the very clear early memory I have.

As a child, for many years I had remembered taking a train trip from Los Angeles (really east Los Angeles County) to Las Vegas to visit my grandparents.  I remembered my mother and her sister being on the train, and clearly remembered throwing up and my mother being upset about the mess.  I didn't remember leaving Los Angeles or arriving in Las Vegas, just the part when I threw up, who was there, and where we were going.

I finally asked my mother about me throwing up on the train and whether she remembered it, and if so when it had happened.  She looked stunned and said I couldn't possibly remember that.  I added the details about us traveling to Vegas and Aunt Sam being with us.  My mother looked utterly flabbergasted.  She told me I was remembering it correctly, and that it had happened when I was only two and half years old.  She could not fathom that I remembered that trip.  I guess, in my mind, it was such a traumatic event to throw up on the train that the memory imprinted itself permanently in my brain.

At the time we were living in eastern Los Angeles County.  If I was 2 1/2, and my sister was already born, we were probably living in La Puente.  I can kind of picture the house in my mind, but I don't think we have any photographs of it.  It's the house where I remember seeing a swarm of bees when I was a little older.  Before La Puente we lived in Montebello, and after La Puente I think is when we moved to Pomona.

What I found interesting was what I didn't remember about the trip.  Apparently my brother (one year younger than I) and sister (two years younger) were also on the train with us, but I have no recollection of them being there.  In fact, now that I think about it, we were probably going to visit my grandparents so they could see the new baby.