Being one. I was plonked on our front doorstep while my dad crouched at the front gate just a few feet away, beckoning me with his hands so as to capture the moment of me waddling towards him on cinefilm (yes, cinefilm. This was the very beginning of the '70s and that was modern). I had short reddy-brown hair, was wearing a pink coat and tiny blue shoes. It took a while, but I triumphantly mastered reaching my father without falling over.
The earliest I remember was that I was about two or three years old when my family lived on top of a hill in either an apartment home or a duplex (see the first example photo below). It was a one-story dwelling, the front was painted white, and we received regular deliveries from a bread truck. To this day I remember the address, but I won't post it here. I believe that in my mother's concern for us ever getting lost, she taught us the address from a young age so we'd be able to tell someone where we lived. I was afraid of the hill in front of the house, thinking that I might roll down in one day and I didn't know what would happen to me if that took place. Additionally, there was no fence or other barrier between the house and the street below, so we were always admonished very strongly against ending up in front of moving cars. Actually, we'd get a beating if we did it. We moved to a different house when I was four, and we stayed there for the next ten years.
Sometimes a Hispanic neighbor lady named Mrs. Costello would babysit with us in our own home, and she'd serve us tortillas with peanut butter spread on them. My siblings and I thought tortillas were the bee's knees, so it was a real treat to us.* Mrs. Costello wore glasses and had a nice smile, she would play peek-a-boo games with me, quickly taking off her glasses and putting them back on, shaking her wavy jet-black hair as she did it. It always made me laugh.
A few doors away was a tall old three-story green house (see the second example photo below) where a woman we called Miss Sarah lived. She would also babysit with us when my mother needed someone, but we would go over to her house. She was a lot older than my mother, was probably in her late 30s or early 40s. She had daughters who may have been 10 or 15 years older than I was, and I remember being scared of her house because it was so big and tall, and because it sat on an even steeper part of the hill than our house. Climbing the stairs in front of her house was like Mt. Everest to me, and the stairs on the inside weren't much better. Miss Sarah was the classic example of an older Southern black woman, starting with her accent, her manner of speaking and her expressions.
*In retrospect, and with the knowledge gained through age and acquired edification, I now realize that my family was very poor, and most likely on welfare and food stamps. My mother was in her mid-twenties and had 4 children ages 1 to 6. Mrs. Costello watched us in our on home because my mother probably couldn't pay her a cent, and she merely poked her head in to make sure we were ok. Feeling sorry for us, she may have looked around for something to feed us but found nothing but peanut butter. Improvising, she went to her own home got the tortillas from her refrigerator.
18 months. I stayed with my aunt and uncle when my brother was born. It was the middle of January and the snowbanks were over my head. I have other early memories, but I can't be as exact about my age at the time.
Benedict Arnold 