I remember . . . cutting the back of my hand while running beneath the boardwalk in Atlantic City. It is the earliest memory I can recall. I  couldn’t have been any more than three or four and cannot for the life of me remember anything else I had done at that moment in time.

I fell while running in the sand and must have stuck my hand out to break the fall. There was glass from a broken soda bottle (an old Coca-Cola green glass fragment) that rested in the sand and cut right through the back of the hand.

Nothing except for intense pain and crying registers after that. Other than busting through the birth canal one month premature,  it was the first time I experienced pain. Years later, I wonder why the most painful moments in my life seem to stick out the most.

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Remembering the scars from being a kid many years later

I remember singing with a Doo Wop group for a dance show sponsored by Channel 29 when I was 17, but cannot remember for the life of me ever watching the show when the group — called the Five Jaunts — attended a party in our honor the evening the broadcast was aired.

It was one of the highlights of my life and I’ll never forget this cute little redhead from the Greater Northeast who was a “groupie” that liked me. She was attending the party in Brewerytown with other girls who swooned over us young rascals. But  I lost all memories of watching the performance and they now exist only in some black hole somewhere.

———————-

I feel lucky because the lead singer’s wife had gotten a copy of the audio of the show. She placed it on a CD and made copies for us. I played it several times for my son Nicholas and he enjoys it.

I remember when Nick was two or three and he fell down my neighbor’s concrete steps. He received a deep gash on his forehead. We never took him to a doctor and patched it up with adult-size band-aids The scar still remains and at age 25, he remembers it as if it was yesterday.

I only hope he can remember playing the guitar and singing lead with the girls and boys in a rock band when he was 15. I’m sure It was one of his highlights and that he can remember it nowadays. I wish, however,  that I could only remember where I put the pictures we took of him performing on stage.

Now that would be totally memorable.

(Thanks for the prompt from my writers’ group “Just Write.”)