I was a little kid, and my parents plus my mom’s two sisters, and of course me as well, had gone to a carnival. We hit the Midway for the obligatory carnival junk food, then headed to the little kid rides.
I handed one of my aunts the cone of cotton candy I had been enjoying. I got on the kiddie ride, to go round and round in circles in some car or animal and I waved to everybody each time I passed them.
I got off the ride and immediately went to my aunt for the cotton candy.
It was almost gone!
Oh, I had a very loud, very angry fit!
It took a LOT of talking and explaining, and my two aunts convinced me that cotton candy, in the open air, evaporates.
I think I was an adult before I realize I had been very royally had.
When I was very young (3 or 4), there was a friend of my parents whose name was Martha. I think she was a neighbor of ours, and we saw her fairly often. She was close enough to the family that she gave me birthday cards and Christmas presents.
Due to this last bit, I was under the impression that she was a member of the family – that a “Martha” was akin to an “aunt” or a “grandmother.” I was surprised to learn that my classmates in preschool not only did not have Marthas, but had no idea what I was talking about.
The UK version is in Westminster Abbey – the grave of the Unknown Warrior.
BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY
OF A BRITISH WARRIOR
UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK
BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG
THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND
AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY
11 NOV: 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF
HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V
HIS MINISTERS OF STATE
THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES
AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION
THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY
MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT
WAR OF 1914-1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT
MAN CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF
FOR GOD
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND EMPIRE
FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD
THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD
HIS HOUSE
When I was young and we were driving at night, I noticed that some of the lights on the freeway were out. I pointed this out to my dad, who told me that I should tell president Reagan about it, as it was his job to keep them from going out.
So, I kept track of when I saw lights out, and wrote Ronald Reagan a letter asking him to get these lights fixed. I don’t remember if we ever actually sent it, I hope not.
I don’t remember this personally, but my mom told me once that when I was a tot I thought they got the baby out by reaching down her throat and pulling it out. Because it’s in her tummy, right?
I was addicted to comic books, and would even read Archie if I needed a fix. One Archie had a “Jughead’s Inventions”, or something like that. One of his inventions was a piece of carpet that attached to your shoes, so you were always walking on carpet. I knew it was dumb, but I spent way too much time trying to figure out exactly why it wouldn’t work.
I had the opposite version of this- I had an elderly great-aunt, who lived with us, who was universally known as ‘Aunty’. Even my grandpa on the other side of the family used to call her that. I think even the postman used to call her that. Her first initial was ‘A’, and that was usually what her letters were addressed to; ‘A. [Surname]’. So yeah, for some time, I thought Aunty was her actual name, and it was sheer coincidence that she was actually my aunt.
Not really a misconception, because my brother to this day remains an unabashed bullshitter, so I doubt that I really believed it. We were on a mountain road, probably going camping, when he launched into a lengthy explanation about that road sign we just passed. You see, the chief had sent Falling Rock on a difficult quest in order for him to earn the hand of the chief’s daughter – a quest so difficult that he was still out there, searching, and if we watched, we might get a glimpse of him moving through the forest. I suppose it might have been proper to instill fear by saying that he was searching for a scalp of my hair color, but that does not seem to be how my brother spun it. I wish I could remember the details.
Also, when I was in third grade, I was still being farmed out to a sitter before and after school. This person had a book on the coffee table, A Baby is Born, which was a cheap-ass way to dodge “the talk”. The way it put it, “the man and woman lie close together and his sperm passes to her”. So, of course, I pictured them lying on the sofa, and their young son just happened to be looking in his microscope, which he had perched on the couch between them, and caught sight of the passing cloud of sperm.
The book did have anatomy illustrations, so I managed to put one and one together and imagine the possibility of the schtupping, but the book seemed to imply that it was not necessary, perhaps even not a good idea.
Yeah, one day I asked my dad why we couldn’t go to the radio station to see the Beatles. He told me that there was just one guy there playing records. I think this was around first grade.
I thought that it was required for grownups to drink coffee.
I didn’t like coffee at the time*, and was a bit worried about this, because what if I still didn’t like it when I was grown up and had to drink it anyway? But then we had a visitor who, when offered coffee, politely declined it and asked for tea instead. I was very relieved to discover that it was all right for a grownup to drink tea instead of coffee; I did like tea.
* I wouldn’t have been allowed more than a sip or two of coffee anyway at that age, but I’d probably had a taste of my mother’s out of curiosity.
It would be cruel ironing if you thought you didn’t like it your whole life, and, given a sip of good coffee on your deathbed, realized you had denied yourself a lifetime of enjoyment just because your mother made terrible coffee
My mother actually made quite good coffee. By the time I’d grown up I liked it fine.
Little kids’ tastebuds often work differently than they do when those same kids are grown.
ETA: It was nevertheless good to know that grownups had a choice in the matter.
ETA twice: I did have some choice as a child in what I was going to eat; so in retrospect it seems a little odd that I thought that about the coffee. Maybe I’d been told at some point that it was something for grownups and misinterpreted.
I had science teacher who told us that if the earth stopped rotating everything would fly off. He was talking about momentum, by I took it to mean that gravity was imparted by the spinning.
When I was not yet five, my paternal grandmother came to visit from the old country. One day, we were looking at a towel. The towel had a little tag with writing on it, probably information such as what kind of cloth it was made of, whether it could be ironed, the maker’s name, etc. My grandmother (I believe it was not my maternal grandmother, who lived with us) did as if to read the tag. She then “read” out loud: “Only good children may use this towel.” I later read the tags on our towels and was bamboozled as I could find no such inscription on any one.
My mother had no qualm about teaching me about “the birds and the bees”. I actually had two books on the subject at a very low age and probably knew the basics when I was less than four years old. However, there was a detail I missed - where exactly the man puts his penis.
I think the reason was that the books I had didn’t illustrate this clearly; however, they did contain one or more illustrations of doggies doing it. Those pictures gave me the impression that the male dog was doing the female dog in the butt. Likely because of this, I developed the notion that babies were conceived through anal sex, and that the vagina served only for the birth. It may have taken until I was nine before this misconception of mine was cleared up.
