I was abandoned to an orphanage when I was maybe three years old, and yet I have a fuzzy-yet-vivid memory of sitting in a shopping cart at a grocer’s when I could not have been older then 2. I can still vaguely see someone, a woman perhaps, at a wall counter off to one side. I’m conscious of my birth mother being somewhere there, but I cant see her in memory.
It’s nothing much, a clip of maybe a few seconds’ duration, and yet it’s one of the very few memories I have of childhood. Certainly the most vivid. The rest have eased into mist, but why that particular one, captured to the point where I remember the green and yellow on the walls, has stuck with me is something I probably will never know.
There are no photos from that period. No film, nothing. As I said, about a year later, I was dropped off with the nuns. The only photo I have of my birth family is, oddly enough, what looks like my grandparents’ wedding picture, shot very formally in a studio. If I ever met them (and I dont remember doing so), they certainly didnt look like the couple in that photo. Why I have that photo is just as perplexing as everything else in my family history. I can only assume that it was provided so that I’d have at least some connection to them.