While in a waiting line I recently spoke with a man who was of similar age, and we shared memories of childhhood “truths” which turned out to be totally wrong.
I had to share that I remember Lawence Welk from watching at my grandparents house. They had a TV before us. I remember hearing mom and dad saying that a certain singer on the Lawerence Welk show was going to have a baby. I was maybe six or seven at the time. I was always inquisitive, and asked how they knew. Thier response was because she is singing from behind the piano. I took it at face value and came to the logical conclusion that singing from behind a piano made babies. Pregnancy was not in my vocabulary yet, and I did not know that Welk had a policy of never showing a pregnant woman on TV, I am not sure if it was Welk or that TV did not allow it back then. But anyway, it was a long time before I realized that babies were not the result of singing from behind a piano.
I guess I was no better when AJ, my youngest, four at the time, asked me why days got shorter in the winter. I told him that we were so far back in the boonies (We were in Platteville, I am from Chicago) that they had to pump sunlight to us, and the cold weather slowed down the pumps. I wonder why at 20 years old he takes every thing I say with not a grain of salt, but a 40# bag of rock salt…
Anyone else have memories of what you thought you understood and took for truth, but later learned were quite different?
When I was little I asked my father why there was a faint humming coming from a utility pole, and he told me there was an air conditioner inside the pole to keep it from getting too hot in the summer.
I didn’t question this until I’d been working in industry for years and gone partway through a Physics degree, and happened to walk by a pole that was faintly humming and wondered what the air conditioner inside actually looked like.
My grandmother told my mother that “chaos” was pronounced “chassoss”. She used this pronunciation right into her adulthood.
Until I was about seven I thought that, just as color TVs could be turned into black and white, then black and white TVs could be turned color. I spent fruitless hours looking for the color button on our family TV, and was really upset to find this wasn’t the case.
I thought there was something vaguely obscene and dirty about certain pop songs, including Elvis’s “Don’t be cruel” and Mark Bolan’s “Telegram Sam”. I have no idea why I thought this.
The worst misconception, though, and I know I’ve posted this before in the past, was of the nature of hankies, tissues, and toilet paper. My reasoning went thus: when you haven’t got a hankie, you can blow your nose on a tissue. Therefore hankie = tissue. When you haven’t got toilet roll, you can wipe your butt on a tissue. Therefore toilet roll = tissue. By extrapolation, then, hankie = tissue = toilet roll.
When I was five or six we were staying on a campsite and I was scared to go all the way to the toilet block in the dark, and decided to take a dump in the bushes nearby. I knew we didn’t have toilet roll, so asked my mother for tissues. She said we didn’t have any, so I applied the above logic and asked my dad for his hankie, which he duly lent me. I went off, did my business, and returned a shit-caked hankie into his hand. I couldn’t understand why he was so pissed off.
I remember thinking that men wore black shoes and little boys wore brown shoes. So when we were getting ready for a wedding, I polished my brown dress shoes with black shoe polish. Of course it didn’t go on evenly and really looked like crap. I had to wear a pair of old, worn-out shoes (after polishing them with brown shoe polish).
I also thought that the loser in a presidential election became the vice-president, and that atheists always wore long black coats and had black hair and monobrows.
This reminds me of an advertisement for Telstra’a broadband service. A kid asks his dad why they built the Great Wall of China. Dad has a think and says, “ah, it was during the time of Emporer Nasi Goring, and it was to keep the rabbits out. There’re too many rabbits, in China.”
I figured out that when you lie, your tongue turns purple.
I wasn’t allowed sweets, you see, but my friend Deanna had a grape sucker she shared with me. Mom knew what was up (two 4 years olds squeeling with glee and running to the side of the house to whisperwhisperwhisper and then buzzing around the yard like crackheads might have been the tipoff.) Anyway, she called me in and asked, “Have you been eating sugar?” No, I lied. “Stick out your tongue!” she ordered. I did, and promptly got grounded.
When I got to my room, I went to the mirror and stuck out my tongue. I was horrified to discover that my lie had turned my tongue purple and that’s how Mom knew I was eating candy!
I ws maybe nine or ten when ‘Get Smart’ was on TV. It was the first time I ever heard the word ‘chaos’ spoken, or, for that matter, spelled. Of course, it was spelled ‘K-A-O-S’.
It was years before I learned how to pronounce ‘c-h-a-o-s’. ‘Chows’ was as close as I came.
Speaking of Get Smart, I had no idea that it hurt to have a baby until I saw the episode where it’s almost time for 99 to deliver and Max kept asking if she was having labor pains yet.
When I was a kid, my Dad worked at a place that had Industries in the name. Somehow, I associated that word with the word interest, so I figured that an industry was a place you go to see if you were interested in the kind of work they do.
On my 14th birthday, my parents took my siblings and me to a fancy Mexican restaurant where we were served Shirley Temples, and felt very grown-up. My siblings begged for more Shirley Temples for weeks until my mom learned to make them at home using a bartender’s guide, Mr. Boston’s I think. One day we took the Mr. Boston’s book down from the shelf to peruse the ingredients and laugh at the silly drink names. For years afterward, my brother was under the impression that a properly made Shirley Temple contained a quarter ounce of dry vermouth.
In Kindergarten I thought that “infinity” was an actual number, past which it was impossible to count. “All the way up to infinity”, was how high I was told numbers went.
It took me forever to realize that Washington, the place described in all the accounts of the Civil War in history class, was not, in fact, that large state in the northwest.
Also, Mr. Zito, my fourth grade social studies teacher, pointed the wrong direction and told the class that was north. It took me about a decade and a half to get that out of my head, and I still have to stop and think about it. I’m pretty sure Mr. Z made his error because our school was skewed almost exactly 45 degrees. Aerial view. For this reason I think that all elementary schools should, by law, be exactly aligned N-S-E or W…If that means no schools in downtown Denver, so be it I guess.
When I was about 3 or 4, I hand no grasp of the concept of growing up. I was a little boy, and figured I’d always been one, and would always be one. It blew my mind the first time Dad told me about something he did when he was a little boy…he had to explain the whole process, and I had to get second opinions before I was sure he wasn’t putting me on. Suddenly all the Sunday School lessons became much less confusing (Jesus was a baby, no Jesus was a man, no wait, he was a baby…what the f*&*?)
Opposite the OP, I remember having a long argument with my third grade teacher, that Japan was west of the US, even though it was plainly shown as far to the East on the Mercador projection at the front of the class. She could not grasp that the right and left edges of that map represented the same longitude. (Yes, I know it could be east if you went the long way around.)
I don’t know why and I don’t know when but at some point I developed an understanding of impregnation that was, well, weird. I thought that after you got married, you then went and sat on a park bench—and I always imagined the two people were in trench coats and under a light post—and then kissed. That was it. Nine months later, a baby. No idea where it came from, but I can still see the image in my head. Like I said. Weird.
Money was tight when I was growing up, and my mother became very creative at using some…well, unusual things in our dinners. A favorite dish she made was pupik stew, pupiks being a chicken’s belly button. In my defense, they did look a little like belly buttons.
All grown up years later, shopping at the local market, I saw a package labeled chicken hearts. How silly, I thought, they obviously mislabeled the chicken belly buttons.
When I was a kid, I thought it was so cool that the turn signals knew which way Dad was going to turn! I couldn’t see the switch on the steering column, so it seemed to me that the turn signals just came on by themselves, like they had read Dad’s mind.
My dad worked for the gas pipeline safety division of the state’s public service commission. He served on the board of one of those clearinghouse organizations that had a hotline people planning to do excavation could call to find out the location of gas lines, etc. He was all the time bringing home note pads, pocket calendars, etc. with the name of the organization on it: Miss Utility of West Virginia. (Get it? So you’d miss the utilities. Oh, that engineer humor!) Anyhoo, for the longest time, I thought it was some kind of beauty pageant.
