Hey, Razorette and I have conversations like this every day! She wants me to have my ears checked. I think it’s more fun this way.
When I was in the third grade, I discovered World Book Encyclopedia and fell in love with it. We didn’t have TV, and that encyclopedia was absolutely fascinating to me. A few week later, the principal of our little grade school out on the Colorado prairie announced that, if teachers thought it wouldn’t interfere with class work, he would have the World Series brought into our classrooms. I was ecstatic! What new worlds would I discover when I got my hands on Volume 1 of the World Series! Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it was just a bunch of damn baseball games.
When I was a kid (1970s) there was, in the LA area at least, a chain of stereo stores that advertised on the radio. They always said to “look for the humongous blue building.”
Until about high school, I thought that ‘humongous’ was a shade of blue.
When I was somewhere less than ten years old, my mom told me to always be careful zipping my pants. She related a story (probably urban legend) about a boy who got his penis caught in the zipper and they had to cut it off.
More years later than I care to admit I realized that she meant they cut the zipper off.
Some other posters’ tales of grade school remind me of one of mine. On my first day of fourth grade, I was so excited when the teacher informed us that we’d have set times to visit the laboratory. Wow, I thought, fourth grade is going to be way better than third grade! We’re going to be doing experiments! I envisioned going to some room cluttered with smoking beakers and open flames, donning a white coat, and discovering all manner of cool shit. Now, this was science class fit for fourth graders!
Turns out she said “lavatory”. She was giving us the schedule for our freakin’ toilet breaks. Yes, in my school at that time, we had set bathroom breaks where we all lined up and marched to the bathroom. The first time I got all set to go to the laboratory, only to wind up in the john, was a crushing disappointment. Really, who the hell calls it a lavatory?
My grandmother lived with us when I was growing up, and she practically raised me. The last few years of her life, I really began to worry about her mental state. It did not help matters when she claimed that my father had told her he had a bomb in his backyard workshop.
“He said what?” I asked, unable to fathom any reason my dad might have for saying any such thing.
“He said not to go in there because he had a bomb in there! Now you know that’s not right!”
“Okay, well, I won’t go in there until I check with him.” Then, when I knew she was otherwise occupied, I went on in and got the tool I needed to do whatever it was I was going to do. Aside from worrying that Grandma was losing it, I pretty much forgot about the bomb thing for a week or so. Then, almost by chance, I happened to be in Dad’s workshop with him, probably returning the tool I had borrowed, when a bug scurried across the workbench.
“Damn it,” my dad said. “I just bug-bombed in here a couple of weeks ago, and they’re already back.”
One day my boss said that in the south when she was a kid they used to put peanuts in their Dr. Peppers. That was wierd enough to me but one of my cow-orkers thought she said…penis? in your Dr. Pepper? Hmm.
When I was very young, I must have overheard somewhere that my maternal grandmother, who died some years before I was born, had died of a heart-attack. This was at a time when there was a show, Combat, on TV, which showed men in uniforms and hard helmets. I thought my grandmother must have been killed during WWII, which at that time was still referred to as “the war.”
Fast forward ten years. By this time, I have long known what heart-attacks are. But I still have the unexamined but vague idea that my grandmother had died in the war. I happen to refer to this to my mom, who goes “Huh?” since my grandmother actually died in 1950 in her bed in Schenectady, NY. To this day, the mention of this grandmother evokes mental images of grim soldiers in trenches, and I’m 52!
When I was a kid, I was with mom and we stopped by a nursing home for her to make a quick visit to a family friend who wasn’t doing well. She went to the receptionist and asked for the lady, and the receptionist said, “I’m sorry, she expired last night.”
I blurted out, “People expire?! Like license plates?! Do you go to jail if you expire?” Mom then explained to me what the receptionist had meant. However, for the longest time, I had this mental image of people with license plates on them, signifying when they’d expire.
A few years ago, I was in a coworker’s office doing some work. She was reading the paper while I worked on her computer, and my back was to her. While still reading the paper, she asks me, “Do you like abortions?”
Now, while she and I got along well, and we had spoke often, I felt that was not the sort of question to ask at work. Without really even thinking, I spun in the chair to face her, then deadpanned, “I like… Roast beef sandwiches, chocolate cake, and abortions. Absolutely love them.”
She gave me a weird look and said, “What the hell?!”
I repeated my comment and she asked why I would say that. I then asked, “Well, why would you ask if I like abortions?”
She starts laughing and said, “Not abortions, the Porschens*.” Roast beef sandwiches and chocolate cake are now the stock answer any time she asks me a question.
*The Porschens are a local family who appear in the paper semi-regularly because of various community activities and what-not. She happened to be reading an article about them at the time.
I had something similar. When I was a kid my family went to some amusement park with a giant ferris wheel. Inside the car, there was a sign that said something along the lines of “Persons dropping items from the ferris wheel will be prosecuted by ejection from the park.” I FREAKED.
My dad was always losing coins out of his pants pocket when he sat down, and I imagined a penny falling from our car, only to have us be met at the bottom by park officials who would cart him off to be executed by lethal injection. I still get a little shaky when I think about it.
Sorry for the tangent, but this reminds me of my grandpa, who I clearly remember dancing around on a someone’s front lawn who had a Keep Off the Grass sign. (Kind of jerkish now that I think about it.) I was a very little kid and somehow had a fear of the law instilled in me and almost fell out imagining him getting arrested and me being left there on the sidewalk not knowing what to do.