Household radio was no mystery to me, because we had a big ol’ 1950s radiogram which had a record player and AM valve radio in it, and was a heavy piece of furniture, and there was a cord plugged into the wall, so it was obvious that’s where the signal came from. But taxi radio bothered me greatly. Where was the cord?
I also didn’t make the connection between work and money. Dad went to work, because that’s what people did to keep society functioning, and when he wanted money, he simply went to the bank, and the nice people there gave him some.
I re-invented communism on my own when I was about 6 years old. There was lots of poverty in my hometown and only one grocery store. When I was in the grocery store with my mother one day, I got the nifty idea that the town itself could buy the store and just make everything free for whoever needed it. I figured hell, might as well do the same thing with the furniture store and others since people around there had such crappy stuff. Problems solved. I thought about that for about a week before I realized all the fatal flaws and what a stupid idea the whole thing was. Even at that young age, I could have been a valuable one kid think-tank to several nations of the world.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist. My brother was one year older than me, so of course that meant that he would die one year before I would. So I told my brother that when he died I would go out and discover his skeleton (I imagined I would find it somewhere in the desert, like all the dinosaur bones in the books), and bring it back to my museum and put it on display.
I knew that the Earth was a spheroid… and, being ever-efficient, I figured that we must be living inside of it, in stacked levels. I guess I thought the sun was just a high-wattage lightbulb.
Oh yeah! That reminds me of how I thought laugh-tracks on sitcoms were live feeds from their living rooms into my speakers–I also thought other people watching the show on TV could hear my laugh.
I had all kinds of crazy ideas. You know how I found out about the birds and the bees?
Me: Um… MOM?
Mom: Yeah?
Me: Is. Um. Is…
Mom: prodding Yeah?
Me: Is sex illegal?
It’s weird. I already understood reproduction, heard the whole story on the penis and the vagina, but I never connected the cultural phenomenon of “sex” to the biological phenomenon of “reproduction.” “Reproduction” was how you made babies… “sex” was some weird illicit activity that everyone whispered about and didn’t like to get caught doing. Therefore… illegal! Perfectly logical.
like most kids I dug a big hole in the back yard. Had my parents not intervened, I would have had the worlds only giant underground cookie vault/warehouse, hundreds of floor to ceiling shelves stacked with all the cookies that existed in the world, filed by dewey decimal system. I even had a master plan to amass a cookie fortune- all neighborhood kids could visit the vault and have any cookie for the price of 2 cookies.
I have a cousin in her 50s who still believes that. And then she explains that the dogs and cats have sex, then the cats give birth to mixed litters of puppies and kittens.
When I was about 5 or 6, I somehow got the idea that little boys wore brown shoes, but men wore black ones. So I took my brand-new brown dress shoes, and covered them with black shoe polish. They wound up looking like some weird tortoise-shell black and brown mess. Unfortunately, I did this while getting ready for a family wedding. So I had to wear my old, worn-out dress shoes.
Our family was friends with a family that owned a dairy and their daughter convinced me that chocolate milk came from the black cows. Seemed logical to me.
The first time I got the nerve to jump off a high dive at the local lake, I held my breath, held my nose closed and then slowly walked to the edge of the dive and jumped…needless to say, I was almost out of air before I even hit the water and it was somewhat unpleasant to be underwater without air. I didn’t jump off the high dive for many years after that slight miscalculation.
A neighbor boy told me that toothpaste was poisonous. He explained that toothpaste cleans your teeth, right? And what do we use to clean things? Soap, right? And if you eat soap, you die.
Made perfect sense to me. It took my grandfather, the dentist, two full weeks to talk me into using toothpaste again, and it was at least another year before I did so without my heart pounding, waiting to die.
I remember freaking out if I was still in the tub when my mom let the water down the drain. I was utterly convinced I would go down with the water and end up in the ocean somewhere.
When I was first introduced to the fact that the world was a round sphere I really, really wanted to visit Australia just to see what it would be like living with everything upside-down.
Then on the playground we’d hang inverted from the monkey-bars to see what it would be like.
I thought that English was the language that everyone thought in. So, when people were having conversations in French, for example, they were translating what they heard into English, thinking of the answer in English, then translating into French before they replied. How they could do it so rapidly was very impressive to me as a youngster.
When I was a toddler, I was afraid of getting caught outside in a thunderstorm. I wasn’t afraid of being hit by lightning or anything. The problem was… I thought the sound of thunder was made by the “heavy clouds” slamming on the ground. So being outside would be sort of like God’s game of whack-a-mole.
I had a similarly weird belief. My dad’s boss gave him a really, really old radio and turntable console thing. Like from the 30s or 40s. We never used it; it sat in the garage for a very long time. I believed you could only hear old time music on the radio.
I also believed that anyone born before 1950 experienced life in black-and-white.
I also thought it was perfectly feasible to dig to China in an afternoon or two. With a spoon.
