I’m not sure what my earliest memory is, but I do remember this:

When I was four or five — I know I was at least four because we were living in the house in Bedford, and I know I was no older than five because I couldn’t read yet — I was poking around in my parents’ bedroom. My mother had a fancy, if somewhat battered, vanity table in the French Empire style, painted cream with “gold” trim, with a big trifold mirror, and with three drawers, one under each mirror panel. There was a big drawer in the middle, and much smaller drawers on either side. I was looking for something in the left-hand drawer.

I don’t know what I was looking for, or why, or whether I had my parents’ permission to be in there at all. I might have been after one of these odd hair curlers my mother had that I thought made great toys, or maybe I was just seeing what was there. In any case, I found a picture postcard. I didn’t recognize the picture, couldn’t even figure out exactly what it was a picture of, but it seemed familiar. There were bands of bright color against a dark background, and I had the definite feeling I’d seen those colors before.

So I took the postcard to my mother and asked what it was, and why it seemed familiar. She told me that it was the lights on Niagara Falls at night, and she didn’t know for sure why it would be familiar, but that we had all visited Niagara Falls when I was two, and had seen the colored lights shining on the falls, so maybe I was remembering that.

Or not, because, you know, I was two at the time. I certainly didn’t remember anything else prior to the summer of 1958, when I turned four, but maybe, maybe the sight of Niagara Falls at night had impressed me enough that I still remembered it.

I decided that sounded good, so when asked I would sometimes say that my earliest memory was seeing Niagara Falls when I was two.

But I don’t think I really remembered it even then, and I certainly don’t really remember it now. It’s possible that what I actually remembered on that long-ago afternoon was seeing the postcard before. Or it might have been something else entirely — colored lights in the darkness might have been the big Christmas tree on the town common a block from our house, for example. It might have been a picture in a book. Or it could have been pure fantasy; maybe that feeling of familiarity had no actual basis in fact at all.

So maybe my earliest memory was seeing Niagara Falls when I was two, but does it count when the actual memory is long gone, so I only remember remembering it?

And then there’s another memory that might be my earliest. It’s from early in the summer of 1958; I don’t know exactly when.

At the beginning of that summer we were living in a peculiar house on the outskirts of Billerica, Massachusetts. We had a big yard, maybe an acre or so, so most of the neighbors weren’t all that close, but to the south our next-door neighbor was just across a gravel driveway and a strip of lawn. The family there had a little girl not too far from me in age; I don’t recall her name, but I’m pretty sure she was a year or two older than me.

We had, in my parents’ bedroom, a device called an Aircrib, but more commonly known as a Skinner baby box, that my father had built from a kit. This was a climate-controlled enclosure where a baby could sleep without being troubled by changes in temperature, loud noises, airborne infections, etc. My baby sister slept in it. It had a roller system so that soiled bedding could be pulled out from under the baby without actually taking the kid out of the crib. The roller itself was a wooden rod painted blue, maybe three feet long.

I have a very clear memory of holding that blue rod with both hands, swinging it over my head, and chasing the girl from next door, intending to whack her over the head with it as hard as I could. I remember rounding the corner of the house, chasing her across the lawn. I still remember this very clearly — the bright blue rod, the rich green grass, the girl’s dark hair bouncing as she ran.

But it never happened. Ever. Nothing remotely like it. I handled the rod once or twice, but never outdoors, probably never outside my parents’ bedroom. I never chased or hit the girl next door — heck, we were friends, more or less. As near as I can determine, I dreamed this one night in 1958, and for some reason that stuck more than anything real that happened before mid-July of that year.

So can a dream count as my earliest memory? I definitely remember it, and I can definitely, irrefutably date it to sometime between May and mid-July of 1958, but it’s something that didn’t happen anywhere but in my head.

I specify mid-July because that’s when my very first absolutely inarguable memory is from: my fourth birthday party. I remember the cake with pink icing (I had insisted on pink over my mother’s objection), and the sugar-candy candle holders, and… well, not much else, actually.

I also remember an incident from August of 1958, when we were getting ready to move to Bedford; it happened on a visit to the house we were in the process of buying. I mention it because for years my parents denied that it ever happened, which confused me.

I’m not clear on exactly why we were visiting the house. It was apparently during school hours or something, because my older siblings weren’t there; my younger sister was only seventeen months old and spent the whole visit in our mother’s arms. My parents were meeting with the women (mother and daughter) who were selling us the house and had brought their two youngest along, and it was my first look at what was going to be our new home, so I was pretty excited. We walked through the big double doors into the front hall, and I looked around, and one thing that really caught my eye was the hall light fixture. It had two pendants with glass shades, which had a brick pattern on the glass, and one light was yellow and the other was red, which I thought was very cool. I’d seen red bricks and yellow bricks, so it made sense.

So, we bought the house, we moved in, and the first thing I notice when we do is that now both front hall lights are yellow. I ask my parents what happened to the red one.

“What red one?” they say. “They’ve both always been yellow.”

I am very confused and a bit upset by this; I know one was red. I remember it clearly… just as I remember chasing the neighbor girl with that stick. Hmm.

They continue to deny there was ever a red light there, so I eventually decide my memory is playing tricks on me.

And then years later — many years later, a decade or more — my mother casually mentions in passing that she can’t imagine why the Harleys (the people who sold us the house) had put a red bulb in one of the hall lights. It had made people’s faces look weird, and she had insisted my father replace it with a white one before we moved in.

I stare at her in disbelief. “You said there was never a red light there!”

Flustered, she says she had only insisted there was never a red glass shade. Both shades were always yellow. One just looked red because it had a red bulb in it.

So my memory was not wrong that time, but I had been convinced it was.

And my point is simply that memory can’t be trusted.