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| Powell River writer and singer-songwriter Pat Buckna began his music career in Calgary in the 1970's, spent a number of years in the Arctic including a stint as a photographer-reporter for a community newspaper, and was responsible for bringing over 750 performers to the NWT pavilion at Expo '86. In 2019, he wrote and published Only Children - A Family Memoir - and runs a small recording studio on Texada Island. He lives in a small Canadian coastal community two ferries north of Vancouver, BC. |
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We all have a first memory, our earliest recollection. Mine is simple—fuzzy and indistinct—little more than a sensation of light, darkness and sound. A bright area fills the top of my image with a darker region beneath, both bisected by an indistinct diagonal edge. Soft sounds play somewhere in the background. I am safe here. I know my mother is nearby.
I have held onto this impression for as long as I remember, tried to describe it many times. A lit stairwell beneath a sloping ceiling, a piece of furniture like a chest or cupboard, could be the source of the light and the darkness. The room may be a bedroom, or a nursery; the sound, a radio, or my mother's soft singing.
I know this all happened in my first home, in a room in a long-since demolished house in Calgary, near the Bow River. We lived in this house from my birth until I was eleven months old.
I find the address—316-6th St. West—on an old envelope addressed to my father, stuffed with off-color jokes and cartoons he kept hidden from prying eyes. As far as I recall, we never visited the house again after we moved to the Birkett Manor on 17th Avenue. |
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I find the address—316-6th St. West—on an old envelope addressed to my father, stuffed with off-color jokes and cartoons he kept hidden from prying eyes |
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How can I remember anything at this early an age? Researchers say we do not form coherent memories until at least the age of 2 or 3, that early memories like mine are constructs, often pieced together from a variety of experiences. Perhaps my memory is a fabrication. I reject this explanation, believe this is the moment my consciousness first emerged, differentiated me from the world I found myself in. What's important is how secure I feel, how free from anxiety and distress.
Sometimes I wonder if a different image—or the same one—will reappear immediately before I die. Will this lasting memory, my first, return, as my last? Or will I catch a fleeting glimpse of some other place where light and darkness, sound and comfort converge?
~ Pat Buckna, author of: Only Children: A Family Memoir — available as a Kindle e-book and in paperback.
Check out Pat's mew album "Singing My Songs For You."
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