My Oldest Memory

It came back to me at the age of twenty-four, but it came back as clear and as loud as a bell. I was walking at the time across the campus of Queens College in Flushing, New York City, where I was a student at the time. I was walking, and looking up into a tree that had the sun behind it. A small, strong flash of sunlight came through the leaves, and in that microsecond, in a real Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment, I experienced the memory in its entirety, and what it meant, and the full terror of its implications.

There’s a word for this in our dictionaries: satori (n.) Buddhism; sudden enlightenment; Origin Japanese, lit. “awakening.”

It was the memory of seeing a similar flash of sunlight through the leaves of another tree when I was ten or eleven months old. I had awoken from a nap in one of those big, old fashioned baby carriages, under a big tree in our back yard. Not the ubiquitous stroller kind of today, but one of those old bathtub on wheels things. I was on my back, looking up into the tree, being entertained by all of the moving, shifting green patterns, when the flash hit me. In that microsecond, long before my walk on campus, I had had another satori experience. I had realized that I was alive, and I had become fully aware of what that meant, which was that I would die, and I had been amazed, and terrified.

Have I written about this before? That much is certain, but was in on this blog? Or just in some lost notebook? I couldn’t tell you offhand. But a good story is worth telling, isn’t it? even if you’ve heard it before?