Kindergarten Bag

Some early memories are really deeply archived in my head. Mostly they are memories of very unimportant moments or events of my childhood. Yesterday one of those early memories flashed back to the foreground of my head.
It was early morning and we were on our short walk to the office in Berlin.
Under a tree I saw a small red leather bag. Thrown away or lost? I stopped my colleagues and shot this photo.
What’s so special about that bag? Well, it reminded me on the bag I had as a child for the Kindergarten. It hung around my neck every day and was the storage for my sandwich. OK, mine was brown and a little bit smaller but had the same structured surface.
The strange thing is that I still exactly know where I was when I got this bag. It was the summer of 1975 and I was five years old. My father inflated the little swimming pool for me. It stood under my favorite climbing apple tree beside the pile of sand I used for playing with my little Matchbox cars.
The next day was supposed to be my first day in Kindergarten and I was more than excited. A little girl called Sabine from the neighbourhood joined the Kindergarten with me and their parents bought us sandwich bags.
If I close my eyes I can see the man from Sabine’s family appearing in our garden saying that he has my brand new Kindergarten bag for me. I know exactly were he stood and were I was.
The bag still had the scent of leather and I was the proudest little boy in the whole village for the next moments.

Why is it that I can remember this relatively minor moment of my childhood in such detail on the one hand and on the other hand constantly forgetting what to buy for lunch or whom to call back?




By the way: I have no idea what happened to my Kindergarten bag. Hopefully I lost it somewhere and some stranger got reminded of his own childhood by seeing it lying under an tree.