Door
Waking up before my grandma early in the morning downstairs with my sister we pushed the footstool from the living room all the way to the front door. Wedged against the door my sister stand on it and helps me up to reach the top latch of the tall front door. We managed to open the front door and left the house, off down the street.
Scrambled Eggs
My first ever memory is from 1982 when I was one year old and me and my big sister, there’s only 362 days between us, so she was also very young, probably about 2. It was a very sunny day and I remember because we were both wearing shorts, those kind of flanellette shorts that were fashionable in the 80’s and on the door step of the front door there was this concrete step, which I am sure wasn’t very big but felt very big at the time, and we both sat there with scrambled eggs on toasts. I had a light brown plate and my sister Laurie she had a pink plate, we both had scrambled eggs on toast on that, I have no idea what happened if anything happened for me to remember it so clearly but I remember the taste of the scrambled eggs the heat of the sun, the coldness of the concrete step, just sitting there and having dinner, maybe it was special because it was just her and me as well and not my parents.
Chicago
I think my earliest memory was when we were in Chicago when I was five, we’d been on a long day out in the city to visit the John Hancock Center which is the tallest building in Chicago, we got home and we were recording a message to my grand mother on a tape so that she could hear all about our exploits and we were trying to explain to her that we’d been to see this tall building and my sister who was three, was also trying to be on the tape but because she was three she didn’t have a clear idea of what it was she’d seen but she knew she wanted to talk. So we are making the tape and my mother would be asking us what we’d seen and we would start to tell her and my sister would perk out with: “I wanna talk it! I wanna talk it!” And my mother would say something along the line of:“Well you can talk then tell us what you’ve seen” and my sister said “an elephant, I saw an elephant.” She hadn’t seen an elephant so my mother said: “You didn’t see an elephant did you? What did you see?” and she said “An elephant” so my mother tried and prompt her by saying: “You saw the John …” “An elephant!” And eventually after several attempts my mother had to say on her behalf that she ‘d seen the John Hancock Center. My sister still insists to this day she saw an elephant, it’s just simply not true.