Oh, this was in South Carolina. The interesting thing was it wasn’t my grandmother who had been born and raised (along with generations before her) in South Carolina, it was my grandmother who had moved there from Pennsylvania in the 1950s.
I grew up with that back in Newfoundland. It seems to be changing, even among my family members who used to do it, but it was weird to use the front door when I was wee - and hardly uncommon for the front door to be entirely unusable - sealed shut with tape or paint, or without any stairs leading to it (something I still see a lot of when visiting out around the bay).
Same here in the Northern Carolina. I called all the adults at my church by their first name, no “Miss Bettie” or “Mr. Ira.” I can get away with blaming that on my mom, though–she was from New Jersey.
Same thing here. The teacher was like “yes, what?” and I had no idea what she was on about. I do not recall any other teacher throughout my school years ever saying anything about it to me or anyone else.
I once bought a nice vintage le creuset dutch oven only to have my parents blow their stack about how it was unacceptable to ever use second hand cookware because you could catch some unspecified “diseases” from cooking in them. Me pointing out that ovens are essentially autoclaves, capable of sterilizing the most serious bugs didn’t help. Me pointing out that every time we went to a restaurant or another person’s house for dinner, we were eating from other people’s cookware didn’t help. They even offered to buy me a brand new pot if I threw out the “contaminated” one and I had to explain to them I was specifically after the old models with the all metal handles that were oven safe. I think they still don’t get it to this day.
My parents also blew a fit if they ever saw me read horizontally. Apparently, your eyes become confused if you ever read lying down and it causes all sorts of eye damage. As a child, I had to read rigidly sitting upright and, now that I live by myself, I love nothing more than curling up with a good book on a couch or bed and contorting myself into all sorts of strange angles every couple of minutes.
My paternal grandfather was born in Germany and never traveled anywhere without a wurst or two in his suitcase, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. I hated sitting in the seat furthest back in the car when we traveled with the Grands because Grandpa’s suitcase always stunk of sausage. And by extension, everything he wore while on the vacation also smelled like sausage.
My maternal grandmother had a phobia about underwear. She was deathly afraid that hospital personnel would judge us harshly if we were brought in after an accident or illness with less than pristine underwear. We grandkids were inspected daily for the acceptable nature of our underwear.
My paternal grandmother insisted that children required a daily spoonful of fish oil in order to be ‘regular’. I dreaded her visits because I’d be dosed with that awful stuff daily.
I don’t know what the deal is with older people being obsessed with pooping, but my dad is preoccupied with making himself poop first thing in the morning. He insists that he is constipated if he doesn’t go as soon as he gets up, and loads up with fiber pills and laxatives to make himself have to go then. I used to try to tell him that was not good for him- that it’s not abnormal for people to not poop everyday, that if you are healthy your body will take care of it all on its own, that it is affected by how much/how little you eat…but found that it wasn’t worth wasting my time. And he complains of upset stomachs a lot. I figure it’s because of all the self medication.
My in-laws are retired, and live in northern U.S.A. during the summer, but go to Yuma, Arizona, for the winter. From Yuma, they go across the border to pharmacies in Mexico, and buy huge quantities of Amoxicillin. They take it at the slightest sign of a cold, insisting that antibiotics are effective against colds and anything to the contrary is misinformation spread by drug companies. They insist that their doctor has told them it’s good for them and to “take it every day” and to “take it like vitamins.”
I’m fairly sure they bring supplies of Amoxicilin back to their friends when they return to northern USA.
So that the generation that is anti-vaccination and is frightened of BMO food can take over?
My mother also believed that you shouldn’t go swimming for an hour after eating. But that was the common wisdom of the day. I believed it too until I learned it had no basis in fact. She believed that you should severely restrict water when dieting (which she almost always was). I still remember this: “You mean water doesn’t weigh anything?” I didn’t come up (except in retrospect) with the obvious retort that the purpose of a diet was to lose fat, not weight.
She believed that you got colds from being chilled. Not that she didn’t understand about germs, but she thought it lowered your resistance to disease. It took careful research to debunk that idea. FWIW, I conjecture that the correlation (if any) between colds and chills goes the other way. In the beginning stages of a cold you may feel a chill as your body tries to raise your temperature.
My mother firmly believed that only sleep before midnight “counts”.
Incidentally, I am that older generation.
Not exactally an old folks story, but when we were kids my sister told me that radio signals went out into space forever.
I said "You mean space aliens are listening to “Another Brick in the Wall”?
Much less Stairway to Heaven.
There are at least TWO things they are doing wrong.
One is going anywhere to get amoxicillian - I have delivered by mail.
Without prescription. In the USA.
Whenever my family went to the movies, my parents would just pile us into the car and head for the theater (this was in the 1960s). We always arrived in the middle of a movie and would have to grope around in the dark for seats. We’d then stay through the start of the next scheduled showing, and leave when we realized that we had seen some plot point or scene already.
My younger self found this bizarre and annoying, and a few times I suggested that we check the starting times in the newspaper before leaving for the movie theater. Whenever I did, my parents acted like I had lost my fucking mind. They adamantly insisted that nobody did that. My mom even claimed that, when she was growing up, the local newspaper didn’t even print starting times for movies.
Later in life, I compared notes with other people my age and learned that my parents’ moviegoing behavior was pretty typical; their generation thought nothing of wandering into movies at odd times. That’s where the expression “this is where I came in” came from, and why Alfred Hitchcock made a point of insisting that nobody would be admitted to Psycho after it started.
I had to have clean underpants on in case I ‘got run over’, I ‘got run over’ once and don’t remember the ambulance people checking my underwear. After that my parents didn’t mention the cleanliness of my underwear again.
I was told, often, that if I watched too much TV I’d get square eyes, and using teletext to read news was more expensive than watching the TV. Up until the early 80s we’d unplug the TV and phone if there was a thunderstorm, and sit in the living room in silence, looking at one another in fear, trepidation and excitement. The thought of that now makes me freaking laugh out loud.
My great aunt was convinced that because I’d got a suntan on holiday she would get skin cancer.
If I go away overnight, I have to unplug everything except the fridge freezer. I went away in September for 10 days, came back and the opened half pint of milk was still perfectly drinkable, which was unexpected as I usually throw all perishables away if I’m going to be gone for more than a few days.
They do… we get radio signals (radiation in that particular part of the spectrum) from every star our radiotelescopes can “see”; anybody out there pointing a radiotelescope in our direction will get ours. Being able to get Stairway to Heaven out of the whole mess of noise is unlikely, though (“noise” in the signal-to-noise ratio sense, not in the sound sense).
Milk can last a surprisingly long time if you’re careful about not touching any part of the spout or the inside of the lid. I’ve got a 1/2-gallon carton of Darigold Ultra-Pasteurized milk in my fridge right now with a May 10, 2014 “sell by” date, and it was still perfectly drinkable last time I checked, a couple weeks ago.
(That carton dated January 2013 that I found the other day, OTOH …)
My former roommate (a bit younger than my 70-year-old parents) would unplug — or turn off at the power strip — literally every electric device that wasn’t currently being used. He claimed it was because he was “sensitive” to electrical fields. I couldn’t convince him that those very same electrical fields were present in the house’s wiring, and weren’t just waiting for a powered-up appliance to attack him. He was also certain that the LED numbers on the front of the VCR were just sucking up the electricity and running up the bill. I was finally able to persuade him to stop turning off the damned Internet router, 'cause, “Hey, I was using that!”
Technically correct, in that they don’t stop at a preset distance, but after a certain point, the signals we send will be indistinguishable from noise.
And that certain point is a lot closer than people think.
Like about at most the orbit of Jupiter or Saturn, actually (for the signals from conventional TV or radio broadcasts).
Is this a typo or did she really think you getting sunburned would give her cancer?
From my mother:
You should not have a cat in the room while you are sleeping because they will steal your breath.
If someone is choking, you should feed them bread.
… Someone is not quite clear on the concept of ‘choking’.
What does she think you have to do if they’re choking on bread?