Remembering the Wrong Things

I have flashes of memory from living in Royal Oak: I remember taking one of those red "pencil" things that came with the magic drawing pads you could get in the toy section of the grocery store - you know what I mean; you'd draw a picture on the plastic sheet on top, and the places you pressed the "pencil" kind of stuck to the black mushy stuff on the board, then you could erase it buy pulling up the sheet. So anyway, Mom was in the kitchen doing someone's (Aunt Weiss?) hair and I took that red pencil thing and poked a hole in the bag of birdseed! Naughty, right? Well it gets worse! I then told Mom that "someone", but not me, poked a hole in the bag. Her near complete lack of response was enough to break me, and I confessed to the whole malfeasance immediately.

I also remember having cut my hair (but not the actual cutting) and denying it,
exercising with Jack LaLanne in the afternoons, swiping a fingerful of frosting from a cake, trying to figure out what color crayon would make blond hair in my coloring book, Doughnut Day and Cappy Dick, Coolidge Ave. flooding after a tornado, and digging the start of a tunnel that would allow me to get to Sheri's house by myself by going under the next-door neighbor's yard with their wiener dogs. But the earliest memories that I can definitively grab onto where you make an appearance begin in Novi when I was very nearly 5 and you almost 3.

What I want to be able to say is that you are a part of EVERY early memory there in Novi, but that would be a lie, and I don't understand why? I remember early in our lives there, you and I digging in the mud in our yard (sometime before the rolls of sod were brought in), and Santa and Mrs. Clause walked by (maybe even through the mud?) and talked to us. I remember playing on the rolls of carpet in the Living Room, getting up early on Sunday mornings to watch Kimba the White Lion and draping our afghans over us to make caves for our own Kimba toys. And I remember tracing shapes on waxed paper with icing in the kitchen. And Candy Land on Christmas morning before Mom and Dad woke up. But these are all small memories, and I want more. 

I WANT to remember us being inseparable as kids, forging our way through our new world hand in hand. I want to remember being best friends. But I don't, and I don't know why.