Oopsy Daisy!

“One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.” ~Rita Mae Brown

Usually I think the weekly theme to be boring or uninteresting, or just something I have no desire to write about. But I like this one, and thus I write.

My earliest memory is from when I was three years old. In fact, I had just turned three, because it was sometime between my 3rd birthday (Oct. 22, 1989) and Christmas of the same year that this occured.

For my third birthday, I had recieved from my parents one of those “Oopsy Daisy” baby dolls. You know the ones–they crawl, and then oopsy daisy! they fall down and begin to flail their arms and legs and cry until you pick them up again. They made a brief comeback in the late nineties (I remember asking for one for my 13th birthday).

At any rate. My sister, Amanda, at this time, would have been 1 going on 2 years old, or just turned two (I don’t recall exactly which; her birthday’s Nov. 10, but I don’t remember the date of when this happened–not that dates meant anything to me at 3 anyway). She loved my Oopsy Daisy almost as much as I did. Problem was, she thought it was a toy she could ride, and one day, decided to sit upon it. Oopsy Daisy! Down she went… and she never came back up again. I had that doll for less than two months before my baby sister broke it. Some people think that I remember this only through being told the story to me by other people, since I was so young when it happened. But that’s not true, because I’ve never been told the story. (Why would anyone want to remind a child what her baby sister did to her favorite doll anyway? Best to let bygones be bygones and simply forget, right?) I’m always the one that relates the story to other people. I think it says something though, that my first memory is a bad one. Maybe I was doomed to unhappiness from the very start.