I don’t understand the question “What is your first childhood memory?”  Is it even possible to know?

I remember being pushed in a stroller, pushing my own doll carriage as my parents and I took a walk, driving my plastic toddler tricycle–designed to look like a motorcycle-down the path to our townhouse complex’s garden.  I remember eating dinner with my parents in that garden.  (A very early memory indeed since it didn’t take long after my birth for their relationship to turn to complete shit.)  At at least one of those dinners, I know we had lamb chops with mint jelly.

I remember wearing water wings in the swimming pool.  I remember having chicken pox, which gave me fever-induced nightmares about my father.  I sort of remember my mormor (maternal grandmother), and I definitely remember her asher and wienerbrod.  (I have not been able to find an almond danish that could rival hers.)  I remember playing in my turtle-shaped sandbox and hanging out in the cardboard playhouse on the deck outside my parents’ bedroom.

I have many memories of my early childhood, but I don’t have the faintest idea which is my first.

I saw six seagulls lined up in a row staring at a group of children playing nearby.  I wish I had a camera because I swear they were waiting for those kids to spontaneously combust into a shower of bread crumbs.

Also quite cute and funny:  a solitary duck waddling around looking for food scraps.  She settled on a group of women sitting at a park bench.  They fed her until the seagulls swooped in on the action, but she hung around for several minutes, presumably hoping for some more handouts.

I can hear you.  Just in case you didn’t know, but maybe you did.  Were you fully aware of that and it’s all been some pathetic passive-aggressive attempt to get even with me?  It can’t be that you’re so stupid it never occurred to you that I can hear you, even as you can hear enough of what I say and do to come up with ways to mock me.

Here’s something I’m pretty sure you don’t know.  It could be a lot worse.  You could have MY upstairs neighbor, who has two lead feet, who loudly talks baby talk to her cats at 1 a.m. every night, who runs on a treadmill for an hour at a time, making me feel like my ceiling is going to cave in on me, who used to vacuum at 9 a.m. every Sunday morning, with whom I’ve had to battle the past two years to get her to turn her TV down at night, and who, best of all, cannot tolerate any noise from anyone else day or night.

You could even have the worst of all possible worlds:  to be sandwiched between her and YOU.

You could have come to me when I was annoying you and asked me to stop or hold off for an hour or two, but it’s already pretty well established what a dickless wonder you are, what with your refusal to answer the door when a neighbor comes by to complain about the loud slumber party you’re having at 1 a.m. on a Thursday.  You have two choices at this point:  grow some balls and ask me to be a better neighbor or suck it up and shut up.  Because, you see, if I hear you mock me, or my CAT (what a paragon of humor you are, BTW), even just one more time, I will make you understand what it’s like to have a real shitty neighbor.

-The occasionally laughing, cleaning, and walking cat-owning neighbor upstairs.

I first encountered it as a teen when I was set up on a date by a friend.  I’ll withhold the details since I’m still friends with that person.

When I arrived at our meeting place, the guy gave me this look, basically a combination of disappointment and disgust.  How dare I not meet whatever fantasy he was harboring?  And how ugly I must have been.  Clearly the guy was released from any obligation to be nice and make an effort to conceal his revulsion.

Needless to say, the date did not go well.

What kills me is that I’ve seen this look over and over throughout my adult life, most unforgivably with men I met through online dating sites.  They saw my picture, and my picture was very honest, no dim lighting or airbrushing, but apparently they heard and saw stocky brunette and somehow managed to imagine something completely different.

Fortunately, I’ve (mostly) stopped taking it personally.  At this point my reaction is simple annoyance of having to deal with it at all.  Surely now that I’m nearly 30, I can ask my peers to grow up, just a little?

Ha!  I kid.  I kid.

I will admit there was one time when I had respect for my dad’s fourth.

It happened one evening when the three of us went out for dinner and a movie.  My dad dropped us off with his assumption that Ellie and I would get a table while he parked the car.  When he returned, he was dismayed to see that we simply waited for him outside the restaurant.  Bear in mind, there was no wait at the restaurant at all, nor did he have reason to think that there would be.  It was yet another instance of Mr. Skornia getting unreasonably peeved over nothing at all.

He would not let it go.  We went into the restaurant, sat down at the table, perused our menus, all while he was bitching at Ellie for not reading his mind.  She eventually got fed up and stalked out of the restaurant.  Dad followed her to get her to come back, but no dice.  She had her purse, but not her house keys, and we were a good 25 miles from home.  She took the train back to San Jose and waited at a neighbor’s for Dad and me to return.

I had mad respect for her that day.  If only more women in my father’s life had done that sort of thing more often.  He might have learned to control his temper a little earlier in his life.