A quick jog down memory lane...and what do I find?

Last night I just couldn’t fall asleep. I was simply lying in bed with all kinds of thoughts in my head. And for some strange reason I started recalling things from my years gone by. Think about it and you’ll realize that everything we remember is in the form of a time window which is etched in our minds. We rarely remember entire events…just a few memorable moments. Moments making up some event that was in some way significant enough to alter our surroundings and our self. So much so, they’ve remained in our heads almost permanently. These memories, I feel come with the complete set. Sounds, colours, the people present and the environment...everything that you can associate with them.

And last night I had a stream of such memories continuously flowing through my head.

I remembered the time when I was an 8 year old in school and saw a girl being bitten by a dog. I can still recall the two deep teeth marks on her arm that were making her scream hysterically. A bunch of us had simply formed a semi-circle around her and were practically doing nothing but stare. I remember feeling nauseous thinking about it later and spitting out my éclairs that I was chewing on at that time.

I remembered the time of my first operation in my 4th standard to remove an infection from my leg. How the doctor managed to put me under anesthesia by asking me if I had ever blown balloons at a birthday party. My proud 'yes' was met with a smile and he promptly covered me with the anesthesia inducing mask and asked me to ‘blow a balloon’! The interesting thing is that this is the only thing that I can remember from my entire operation experience.

I remembered the time as a kid when I was coming back home from school in an auto and was riding in the front. I had fallen asleep only to fall off the moving auto, badly injuring myself in the process. I can still recall the vision of the moving road approaching me with alarming speed as I fell towards it and can distinctly remember the screeching sound of car wheels stopping behind me once I had completed my glorious fall. (Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night all sweaty and scared: P)

...and so on and so forth. You get the idea right?
So then I started wondering if I could figure out what was my oldest memory amongst all these. Which one of these was filled on the very first page?

And I think I have found an answer. I can be reasonably sure about this being my first memory because of the house that my family was living then. I have no other memory from that house and this was the house that I was brought into when I was born. I was a little startled to realize that my very first memory was that of the death of my paternal grandfather. I always had this array of thoughts in my head but never realized that this particular one was my first memory.
I was 2 years old and I can recall visions of my grandfather’s dead body lying in the living room and relatives pouring into our house to pay their last respects. He had died of a lung disease and his chest was swollen! I remember my grandmother crying on the bed and her sisters trying to console her. Again, I just can’t seem to recollect my parents being around!

The funny thing is that thinking about these memories consciously and writing about them seems to have scrambled everything up inside my head! They just dont seem all that coherent anymore!
Complex, the ways of human mind seem to be.
Unravel we must, this mystery.

I really don’t mean to freak anyone out.
I just felt like sharing.
Nothing deep.
Thats all!