This gets done from time to time around here (even I have started a thread about it). Can’t hurt to do it again.
When I was a wee lad, I believed:
[ul]
[li]I believed that the brand of baseball played by the Chicago Cubs was fundamentally different from every other team in baseball. Any player who came to play for the Cubs would need to learn the Cubs way. Similarly, St. Louis, Cincinnati, etc. all had their own styles of baseball unique to that franchise, and that new players would need to get to know the team’s system before they were fully integrated.[/li][li]I believed that it wasn’t a mural behind Johnny Carson; it was a window, and viewers were looking at the California coastline.[/li][li]I believed that head shops, sex shops, porn shops, etc. were all technically illegal but the police looked the other way. Whenever Mammahomie would take me in to our favorite head shop to buy incense, I was always afraid that the police would change their minds and barge in any moment and take us both to jail.[/li][/ul]
I recall thinking the soft-drink, root beer, was a type of alcoholic beverage, and was amazed to see adults let kids drink it at a birthday party (I had a different background, coming up).
Yeah, when I was four I thought the bands just hung around the station and played songs when asked to. I thought they must get bored just sitting around.
I thought there were three sexes: boy, girl and boygirl.
There was this girl named Paula in my class. I knew she was a she, but she was kind of boyish, and of course her name also cleverly tacked an “a” onto a boy’s name, so yep.
After reading Thumbellina, every morning on the walk to school I’d gather dew and rub it on my cheeks to make myself very, very small. The book said it would work. It didn’t.
I grew up in Northern California, and I thought that snow was something that only happened in far away countries, like in the Swiss Alps. I didn’t think it snowed anywhere in the U.S.
I desperately wanted to believe in magic, and even though my head kept telling me it was all fictional, I still thought if I could just find the right magic words, or magic object, I could make magical things happen.
When I was about 4 or 5, I was in the car with my father. There was one of those big enclosed electrical boxes on the side of the road (that long ago they were made of wood). I asked him what was in it, and he answered “bubble gum.” I eventually figured out that they weren’t filled with bubble gum . . . but to this day, more than 60 years later, there’s a little piece of my brain that wants to open one of them up and grab a fistful of bubble gum.
A few years later, I believed that women had one breast for each kid they had. After all, my mother had 2 breasts and 2 kids.
I believed that if you stepped on a person’s grave, they could feel it and would say “ouch.” I believed there was a person inside the traffic light pole who changed the light from red to green depending on the amount of traffic. I also couldn’t understand why there were so many roads named Frontage.
I’ve probably told this one in one of those previous threads, but…
When we’d go to the beach, I used to love playing in the waves and letting them push me around. As long as my feet could still touch sand, the waves would reliably keep me from going adrift and always push me back to the safety of the beach.
But I always felt sorry for those poor kids on the other side of the ocean, where those same waves would be pushing them out to sea! :o
Just remembered something hilarious that I saw on the net the other day that fits this topic perfectly, so I had to go look for it. Unfortunately for all of us, now an outsider is pretty much bound to win the thread…