First memory

When I was little, we had a tree in our yard with a tire swing on it. Rainwater gathered at the bottom of the tire, and possibly my first memory is of pushing the tire and making a sloshing noise.  Another very early memory involves three French-Canadian boys living next door to us, called Patrick, Daniel and Rene.  Rene we called Weenie, and it's that nickname that I remember.  Both these memories go back to the time when we lived on Lansdowne Street, before we moved to West Avenue, so I wasn't yet two years old.

Many of my earliest memories come from my father's year-long sabbatical in Brighton, England, when I was about four.  I remember our crossing the Atlantic on a ship called the Arkadia.  And I remember a lot of smells from that time, like diesel fumes and coal fumes, grocery and butcher shops. (When I visited Britain years later I recognized these smells again.) And I remember reading comics at that age.

I only have vague memories about big events like Martin Luther King's assassination and Nixon's election and the moon landing.  But I do remember going down to the post office on the day of Canada's 1968 election.