How far back can you remember?

I think I remember my earliest memory.

I was standing in my crib in the dining room of our house in Orleans. I remember it seeming very spare, which would make sense - we moved into that house when I was an age where I would soon outgrow being in a crib, so we would have just moved in.

The crib was in the dining room. What I remember most about the moment, is not anything that happened, because nothing did happen in this memory. Instead I remember thinking. If I can recall it correctly, because I was not entirely thinking in words - I am standing the crib. And I am wondering who I am? What am I? Where do I come from?

I sense my own newness - I know somehow that I am something of a blank canvas that has yet to be painted. And I have just the faintest trace of a sense that I come from somewhere, something, or someone. It is not only my earliest existential moment, my first memory - it is my dawning spiritual awareness. I can feel that my soul, not that I know a word for soul... comes from something.

I have other early memories. I can vaguely recall seeing something on television about the death of Gus Grissom and the other astronauts. I remember running in the yard of my great grandmother, and climbing her porch. I remember riding the subway in Toronto with my mother.

Funny how little we hang on to who we were when we were really young. I remember most of all how much the internal "me" - the one thinking existentially in his crib - has always been a lot like how I still am. Who we are imprints on us very early, I suspect.