The First Thing I Remember

Catharina as a child, by Frans Hals.
 In her hand she holds a silver rattle
 with bells, a precious status
 symbol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For my narrative paper, I decided to write about the first thing I remember (at least, I think it's the first thing).  I could have picked a lot of other memories, but this one has stuck with me, and I thought it was about time I figured out why it has.  Here goes.
I am about 4 years old.  I am waking up on the old sofa in my grandmother's living room at her old house in Joliet.  My grandmother comes in and helps me put on my socks.  And that's it, the whole thing.  
When I started thinking about it this time, I realized I had some questions.  First of all, why was I alone?  Usually, when I stayed at Grandma's house, at least my sister Rebbie was there, too, if not one of my brothers or our oldest sister, Marie.  I'm guessing that my mother was in the hospital again (she had kidney disease), and my dad took me to Joliet because it was summer and he didn't want Marie, who is 10 years older than I am, to have to deal with all 4 younger kids.  I also guess that my brother Peter, who is the second oldest went to our other grandparents in Chicago, because he and Marie were fighting all the time.
My other questions had to do with my grandmother, and after I spent some time brainstorming about her, I realized that she is the reason I still remember this.  I haven't quite gotten to a thesis yet, but I will.

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Getting a jump on English 101--and alligators!

My class doesn't start until tomorrow, but I looked at the course page on Blackboard and got the first two assignments.  Project 1 is to set up a blog and post 30 100-word entries by the end of the term, so I'm (obviously!) tackling it first.  One of the prompts for this week asks about Project 2, which is a narrative essay about something that happened to me before I was twelve years old.

I think I've already made my decision about what experience to write about, but I can't be sure it'll work until after we talk about the assignment in class.  When I was about 6 years old my parents took us (my sister, brother, and 16-year-old aunt) on a road trip to Miami.  One of the places we went to was a sort of reptile zoo, and my aunt fainted when she saw that a foot-long chunk of an alligator's tail was lying inside the exhibit.  Ever since then, we've been giving her a hard time about it every time we see her.  I think this will work because I've never forgotten it.  All I have to do now is figure out what it means to me.

Related material
Video- Alligator fight.  It's not very exciting, but you can see that the end of the tail is a favorite target when alligators attack each other.