My first memory

My first memory is of my father beating me in a baby crib. I was in a house with Victorian doors that came out of the wall and closed in the center. Laughter came from the other room. I was alone and crying. I don’t remember why. The reason doesn’t matter anyway. All babies cry. Suddenly the doors flew open. My father stood over me, shouting at me to shut up. Somehow in my hysteria, I observed my surroundings. My mother and another couple were in the front room. My father’s hand came down on me hard. I cried louder. My mother fought with him and tried to grab me, but he kept spanking me, telling me to shut up.

The doors closed and I was alone again. The wallpaper was brown with a paisley pattern. Odd as it sounds, it comforted me to stare at it. I followed the patterns up the wall.

When I was six or seven, I shared this memory with my mother while riding in the backseat of her station wagon. She circled the town square in Bowing Green, Ky., and drove down Main Street. She talked incessantly whenever she had an audience. That day she bragged on her memory and said she never forgot anything. As all boys, I wanted to impress my mother, so I shared my earliest memory with her. She turned her head around and stared at me in disbelief, then suddenly veered into a parking space in front of the Spot Cash store, where she bought my Levis jeans.

“But you were just a baby,” she said. “You weren’t but a few months old. I can’t believe you remember that.” 

She said my father only beat me that one time, and that he felt sorry for it the next day when he sobered up. The two of them divorced soon afterwards, but she still loved him. You could hear it in her voice. She even said so. “There was a time when I’d have gone to the moon and back for your daddy,” she’d say. “I still love him, but I wouldn’t have him back for love nor money.”

I never really believed her. I think if he had only halfway tried, she would’ve jumped into his arms and never looked down. 

My dad loved his whiskey. I got to know him when I was in my twenties; some of my fondest memories are those of him sharing a drink with me. He was a good-hearted drinker and a happy-go-lucky sort of guy most of his life. I never mentioned my first memory to him. We all make mistakes.