My First Memory - Bushy Sideburns and the Floating Horse

 Dear Diary, 

Today I want to take you back to my very first memory. As you can imagine my first memories are blotchy at best. But this is how I remember my oldest-oldest-one. (Yes, I know I said the word "oldest" twice. It just seemed to fit here. Okay, grammar police?!)

I figure I must have been lying on my back and a man looking down at me. Just past him, I could see a horse with a chain that seemed to be floating in the air. I don't remember any sounds or smells. Just seeing this man with bushy hair on each side of his face, with some more on top of his head. 

You know, I find it interesting that I'm using vernacular that I would use today if I were to describe a scene in my everyday life. But let's try explaining it as how I really remember it---childlike. I thought it would be fun to describe this first memory in a stick-figure-drawing. Again, blotchy at best. 

And this is what I came up with. 

Well, as you can see, there is a man, or an alien (which would explain a lot about me I guess, LOL) looking over some kind of cot down at me. My POV is looking past my feet, up to this man, and then onto the floating horse in the sky. 

For a long time I could not place the man, nor could I place the floating horse. It wasn't until many years later, the puzzle would start to fit together. 

As it turned out, my mother was married to one man when I was born but had soon separated and remarried to whom I had understood growing up to be my father. So I basically had no memory of the first man. It wasn't until I saw an old picture of man #1 in her photo album. That is when it clicked for me that this is the man in my first memory. 

(A funny note here: I had always had some kind of weird déjà vu feeling each time I saw the country singer Jerry Reed appear on TV. That was until I saw this man's picture. It turned out that he was a spitting image of Jerry Reed.) So, it wasn't an alien after all; but see how my mind picked up on the bushy side-burns and beady eyes. Funny hugh?!? 

Eventually, the mystery of the floating horse was also solved with my mom's old picture stash. Again, going thru her stacks of photo albums, I found a picture of her old Kentucky-hills-home, living room scene. And sure enough there was a bronze horse, a chain and the clock, just as my flashes had recollected. It wasn't floating in thin air, but sitting on her living room TV. I guess that was the fashion back then.

So there you have it. Both of the items in my first memory were validated. Just for fun, I have added a few pics below of what I found online that are the most similar to that brief childhood encounter. 

What is your first memory? How would you explain it to people?