MEM-REEEEES - What Is Your Very First?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: My new book is coming out in September, and more about that (of course) much later, but in order to write it, I needed to start thinking about things I remembered as a child. Specific things. And trying to figure out how old I was when I grasped certain concepts. (It's because in MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER something happened to a character when she was an infant up to the time she was five. Now she’s 11–what would she remember?)

And it was truly fascinating, and finding the answers was a bit elusive.

Here's a photo of me with a doll. I have no memory of this, except for this photo. I do look--determined.



I remember my artist- mother painted a big giraffe on my bedroom wall, lifesize. But do I remember seeing it? Or just remember her telling me about it? I think I remember seeing it, and I must have been–3?

Of course I remember my parents, but–really? Do I? I remember my father taking me to Lake Michigan, and we saw a whole fishkill, where dead alewives were strewn across the beach. I bet I was..five. And I was so terrified. But do I remember that? Or was I told that? Ah.

How old am I here? Hmmm. No memory of this. How did my tooth get broken? No idea.



I had a music box, pink, that looked like an old-fashioned radio. I totally can visualize that. At age...3? And another music box where a delicate ballerina popped up and twirled en pointe. It played Dance of the Sugar Plum fairy, I think…but when did I realize that?

And here, I have clearly figured out..something. (Sadly, I could not come close to doing this now.)





I definitely remember reading Black Beauty. I can see myself, in the classroom, and I completely remember, when it was finished, that it crossed my mind “wait, I think this book was about more than a horse.” I had clearly discovered the concept of theme! But by then I was–10.

And I clearly remember lying in bed and worrying about tornadoes. Someone has old me that tornadoes would demolish every OTHER house, and I would try to figure out how, if the tornado would skip our house and the hit the next one, and then skip the next one, etc, how the tornado would have to go so that none of my friends’ houses were hit.

So at some point, I started to think about the welfare of others. (My friends’, at least.) This must have been a result of being traumatized by The WIzard of Oz. So I was…again, 10?

My parents were divorced when I was six. I kind of remember that. And I remember an apartment building where we lived. Kind of.

You see where I am going here. What’s your very first actual memory? NOT what someone told you, but that you actually remember? How old were you?

HALLIE EPHRON: My first memory is of lying in bed and looking out into my childhood bedroom through wooden bars. So I must have been in a crib. Which means I must have been, what, two? Three?

That’s the whole memory. Not very exciting. And I never got to ask my parents whether I really ever was in a crib in that room. 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have a very vague memory of being in my crib–I see exactly where it is in my room in the old house. The room is blue and the light is dim, curtains drawn against afternoon sun. I’m supposed to be napping but am sitting up, having conversations with my many stuffed animals. I’m guessing I was somewhere around eighteen months or two?

JENN McKINLAY: I definitely remember my brother jailbreaking me out of my crib when I was two. It’s imprinted on my mind no doubt because we got caught and that did not go well. Lots of my memories have that hazy glow of uncertainty–did it really happen the way I remember or is this something conjured by my brain?

RHYS BOWEN: Hank, I agree that it’s hard to determine what I actually remember, versus what I was told happened. I do have some clear memories. We were looking after a relative’s cat when I was three at the oldest and the cat got away and my grandmother walked around the neighborhood calling “Beauty, Beauty.”   I do remember air raids, deep in my psyche, although I was too young to actually remember details.  But most other clear events are probably what was related to me at some point.

LUCY BURDETTE:  It is very, very hard to tell what memories come from photographs and what we were told and which ones are real. But I guarantee you I can remember I had twin boyfriends in kindergarten and one of them gave me a cone of posies. I was wearing a brown checked, drop waisted dress with a white collar. I would like that dress now!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My earliest memory is being allowed to go into my parents’ bedroom to meet my new baby sister. I have a vivid sensory impression of the white wicker bassinet, the eyelet lace, and the sun coming through the bedroom’s harvest gold curtains. I would have been three years and nine months, and it’s quite a gap until my next memory.

Hank, your mention of the music box that looked like a radio reminded me of a play radio we had - I could turn the dial and see different pictures, and, if I recall correctly, it could be wound up to play music. Hadn’t thought about that in well over fifty years!

HANK: So interesting! Part of my new book centers on what a five year old might remember. Any thoughts about that? What would an 11-year-old remember about being 5? And what is your earliest memory?

Where Did Summer Go?

 RHYS BOWEN:  Clare and I are working on our next Molly Murphy book. It’s going to be set in the Catskills in a fledgling bungalow colony and we are now deep into our research. At the time we write about, 1907, there were no big resorts in the Catskills and it was just beginning to emerge as a place where Jewish families spent their summers. Jewish farmers who had settled in the area outside New York and were growing fruits and vegetables for the city took in guests for the steamy summer months where city living with the risk of disease became unbearable. Then they built primitive cottages (bungalows) for guests to rent. The bungalows had their own small kitchen (hence the name Kochalayn in Yiddish–cook for yourself).  Families came up for the whole summer. Wives and children stayed. Fathers worked during the week and came up by train at weekends. It was a perfect arrangement. Children had a carefree exposure to country living. They helped collect eggs and pick berries while their mothers played cards (and later mahjong).

Gradually hotels were built, and then resorts until the heyday of Grossingers and the magnificent resorts that attracted the comedians and crooners of the day. All of this fell into decline when plane travel made vacations abroad easier and presumably when women had to enter the workforce and thus did not have summers free. 

And why only Jewish families, may you ask? The horrible truth is that Jews were not welcome elsewhere, so they created their own summer escape.

Older people I know had similar childhoods growing up in San Francisco, where it’s foggy and cold all summer. San Francisco families had cabins on the Russian River or at Clearlake and came up for the summer, leaving the husbands to work all week. It sounded ideal, especially today when we read that most people do not take the vacation days they are owed. A week on a beach is not enough to recharge!

I remember my own summers–we lived in a rambling old house in the country with an acre of orchard. I remember building tree houses, a trapeze, playing with feral kittens in the old shed (occasionally trying to smuggle one into the house), or going off on my bike, only to return when it got dark. It seemed that summers were endless and carefree.   Now I look up and it’s September!

So Reds, do you have fond summer memories? Did your family have a cabin somewhere? Do you make the most of summer now?

JENN McKINLAY: Growing up, we always camped or traveled for weeks during the summer and then my mom bought a cottage on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and that’s where my Hooligans learned to run wild. Mom was a teacher so she made sure we milked every drop of summer freedom for what it was worth. After she bought the cottage, she  left for Canada the day after graduation and came back the day before school started. Now the Hooligans are in college and not free to take off to Canada with me, so it’ll be me and mom and my sis-in-law, which is its own kind of lovely summer break. 

LUCY BURDETTE: Oh yes I have great summer memories too. Early on, my parents rented a really tiny house at the Jersey shore. We’d all jam in there with my mother’s sisters and their kids, and my father would take the train down on weekends. Later on, the whole family group moved to Hatteras Island, and stayed in a giant Coast Guard house that fit everyone. We played lots of board games and spent hours and hours roasting in the sun. Nobody had anywhere to be or anything else to do, so we enjoyed the beach and the family! When we got a little older, we put a surfboard in my cousin's convertible and drove around acting cool and trying to attract boys. That’s where I got my famous  sex education tip: “never lie down on a blanket with a boy.“

HANK PHILLIPI RYAN: Ahhh….we didn’t have a routine summer thing.  We had ponies, so mostly we went to the local pool and listened to transistor radios, or rode along the trails and fields.  LOTS of reading. One summer, all five kids and two parents and another family of four took a tour of the west on Frontier AiIrlines–they had a deal where you could go on however many flights you wanted in three weeks for a flat rate. (CAN YOU IMAGINE??) No reservations, you just showed up and crossed your fingers.  We hopped on and off–in Denver, Colorado Springs, Jackson Hole, Helena, Sun Valley, Phoenix,  Tucson, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City Durango, on and on. It was incredible, and I think we bankrupted the airline company.

HALLIE EPHRON: My parents sent us to camp, pretty much all summer. Day camp (I loved being a junior counselor) and a month of overnight camp (in Arizona) which I also loved. 

I do not remember a single family “trip.” Not one! Though we did rent a house for a week on Malibu beach a couple of seasons running. A rambling house with hundreds of feet of sandy beach between it and the water. Spectacular. 

Tracking the house, Dick Van Dyke ended up owning it years later.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We traveled every summer. My parents loved to pile in the car and go and we covered a lot of territory over the years. There were many trips to Mexico, including terrifying drives on the old Pan American Highway to Mexico City. Lots of trips in the US, too, including one that took us from Dallas to LA to Vancouver, and back down through the Rockies. Otherwise, I ran wild in the summers, playing outside and roaming the neighborhood, swimming at the rec center pool, and hanging out at the country club pool while my parents played golf. Fun times.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My teen summers in the Finger Lakes were wonderful, in a kind of 1970's retro movie way. Crammed into a car with friends to see movies at the Lakeshore Drive- In (my friend Shaun always hid in the trunk to keep the cost down.) My bff Tracy and I would take the bus into Syracuse, which was then a thriving, successful city with glamorous department stores, cute places to eat, and a magnificent Carnegie library right next to where my boyfriend worked as a lifeguard at the YMCA. (See what I mean about a retro movie?)

My folks sailed on Lake Onondaga every weekend on The Tailwind, and we would take dad’s vacation on the same 38-foot boat, dropping mast to go through the lock system of New York’s canals and then out onto Lake Ontario.

Today, Lake Onondaga is considerably cleaner and safer, but everything else is gone - the Drive In flattened, the library renovated beyond recognition, and the city hollowed out when its major industries moved out of the US. Good thing I checked out À la recherche du temps perdu when I had the chance.

RHYS: Ah, the good old days!  Next week we're going down to San Diego where I have rented a house on the beach for a week with the whole family. I'm really looking forward to it, but a week is too short. A month would have been perfect but everyone is too busy to stay longer.

So what are your favorite childhood memories and do you still take long vacations?