When I was in kindergarten, a teacher from my school quit her job when she got married. I remember being told she had to leave because she “got a crush on someone” (by another student), and I assumed she had actually been crushed and was too small to teach.
On Halloween when I was maybe four, I had to travel to my aunt’s wedding so I didn’t get to trick-or-treat. I dressed up anyway and had fun asking people for candy they didn’t have. On the first leg of the flight, I went up to a flight attendant, held open my sack and said “Trick or Treat!” She apologized and said she had left all her candy at home, and now she would have to eat it and get fat. I took that literally and imagined her becoming morbidly obese and cried for the rest of the flight. I wouldn’t tell anyone why.
We had an aquarium in the kitchen with these long, thin green glass pieces on each corner. If you looked into them, it looked like there was a whole empty world that went on forever. I was determined to fit myself into that world somehow.
I thought snow was a myth until I was maybe seven.
I went through a period in which I thought I was the only person that was actually experiencing life–other people were soulless androids. As a result, I had NO regard for other people whatsoever. Fortunately, that didn’t last more than a few months.
I say Red Skeleton on purpose. It’s a funny image.
After the 1984 election, I didn’t understand the concept of electoral votes, and basically thought my family were the only people in the nation who voted for Mondale.
I thought that the more numbers a house had in it’s address, the fancier it was.
Before I became interested in girls, I thought marriage was an absurd concept. Why would a man and a woman want to live together?!
I am STILL convinced that jokes are written by some sort of surfer guru on the beach in California. He’s surrounded by disciples who just go forth and repeat the jokes that he tells. I figure that this must be true, as one of my friends came up with the same idea before we had met.
I also thought it was excellent when I saw Bert on Sesame Street writing a fan letter to Mr. Rogers.
I also believed that when you died and went to heaven, you wore a brown monk robe.
Once, I was riding my Big Wheel in front of my house, and heard a ‘beep’. I looked around for what could have made the beep, and the only thing I saw was one of those little green beetles. Since it looked like it was made of metal, I assumed that a) this beetle is a robot, and b) it made the beep. I must have spent a good 10 minutes trying to convince this little robot bug to beep again.
I used to picture Satan as Megatron, and, when Jesus went to Hell, he turned into Optimus Prime. I think my theology is pretty damned cool.
I had a little zip-up sweatshirt. I wanted it zipped up only part-way, just like Mr. Rogers.
I, too, was confused about Red Skelton and Red Skull.
Like many parents, mine always told me when I grew up, I’d go to college and get married.
So I pictured “college” as a huge lot where you’d go to pick a wife.
Heh- if only it were that simple…
I never thought I’d see this thread more than once.
I, too, grew up around green `infinity glass.’ I loved looking into it. By then, I was too old to think I could get inside, but I had an active enough imagination to wonder what would happen if I did. I still do.
I spent my early childhood in a house that had a fairly large, old, ornate mirror hanging up high enough so I couldn’t see into it directly. I thought that if I could somehow enter that mirror, I would go to my preschool. (Pretty lame, when you think about it. Why wouldn’t I magic myself away to someplace cool?)
I also remember thinking I would, eventually, grow up to be so tall I’d be afraid to look down when standing.
My theology wasn’t as cool as RawkStah’s, but I did have one heretical belief before I turned atheist (:D): I thought that upon death, the person’s soul would split into a purely good part and a purely evil part. The purely good part would enter heaven, and the purely evil part would either enter hell or be disposed of. I thought that everyone would split, but maybe only an atom of some people would be good and the rest evil, and vice-versa. Kind of an anti-Calvinism.
Oh, shit yeah. That really became problematic when I would pick a toy–even more so when it was something like an animal. Along a similar line of reasoning, I used to like to do things an even number of times so that nothing would be left without a partner.
I remember when I thought that the word “senate” stood for something crude. I suppose I mistook it for “sewer.”
I also was afraid of taking a different path from my parents, pets, etc. For example, if I was walking next to my mom and she went to the left of a lamppost while I went to the right, I thought we’d get separated into separate universes as though the lamp was part of a gateway. I’d go to a place where everything was replaced by impostors and my mom would be left wondering what happened to me.
My dad tried to explain electricity to me when I was 4. I thought that electrons were a substance like a liquid that you could put into a jar or something like that. Sometime thereafter at preschool they had this play construction site. I claimed to have a receptacle filled with electrons that would provide the house we were building with power.
Figurative language was lost on me somewhat as well. When I was 4, my sister was still a baby so I often heard someone say that she was so cute that they could “eat her up.” I was ready to viciously jump to my infant sister’s defense.
I remember that the preschool I went to caught on fire one night (everyone was gone so no injuries). We were out for a week or so while they fixed it back up as it wasn’t a bad fire. Anyway there were some new toys when we returned and I always thought that somehow the fire produced them.
My grandmother used to tell her dog to “get in yonder” and he would run under the couch. Yonder was always under the couch for me and my cousins. I remember my grandma trying to find a deck of cards we had been playing with and we kept telling her they were in yonder but she never caught on even after we went and got them for her.
I thought the alphabet went “H I J K in the middle P” because P was pretty much in the middle of the alphabet.
I thought that I had daylights in me along with my stomach, lungs and other organs. My cousin was always going to knock the daylights out of me. Please, no offense meant at all but she told me that black people already had the daylights knocked out of them. It made sense to me and I always wondered what I would look like as a black person because it was just a matter of time before she hit be hard enough to knock 'em out.
I thought inanimate objects had feelings too. I think that’s pretty common though. And I would talk to them.
Oh, totally. I had to say goodnight to every single one of the “stuffies” (stuffed animals), and then I’d think of other things to say goodnight to, and I would always wrap up with “Good night, everything in the universe ever.” I guess there were subatomic particles that were going to get REALLY worked up if I didn’t remember to include them.
I lived with a bunch of invisible animals - they weren’t really friends, but I had stories about them. Ralphie was a dog that lived on Dog Beach. Paddy was a tap-dancing squirrel. And there was a (odorless) skunk that lived in my dresser: if I just opened the drawers fast enough, I could see him, but he always moved to another drawer through the gap in the back. It’s probably just as well that I never tried to take out all of the drawers and trap him.
I also would become frightened when alone in the basement that I was unknowingly acting out some sequence of events that would open a portal or unleash monsters. So I would make my behavior hugely random and irrational, so that whoever set up this boobytrap couldn’t have predicted it. I still do this when I start to get deja vu. “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever spilled my coffee in a ritzy pink office building before, but I sure as hell know that I’ve never dropped my bag and spun around three times before picking it up!”
Oh, and monsters were afraid of orange, so if you had something orange on/with you, you would be okay. (God bless those Lincoln Log roof beams.) That’s weird… I don’t own a single orange item of clothing or decor these days. Crap.
I used to think that eggs were naturally hard boiled. (Somehow I missed the transition Mum made between the container, the pot of boiling water, and fridge door. )
On a more serious note, up until probably 5 or 6, I used to think there was a difference between being killed and being dead.
Killed was like dead, but you came back to life.
Dead was dead forever.
I think it was from watching people get shot on telly. (westerns and all that.)
I used to think that all the rocks in the world were made at some factory, and people went around and just dumped the rocks whereever they were needed.
I used to think that since the North Pole was so cold, the South Pole must be really super hot since (from the northern hemisphere) the farther south you go the warmer it gets.
I used to think that if you pulled the tape out of a video cassette and held it up to a light you could see the individual frames from the recording, just like movie film. I never had access to such tapes when I thought this, so I never had a chance to find out for myself.
I used to think anyone who worked in a bank had to be really rich since they handled money all the time. I also used to think that writing a check was like making instant money. Every time my mom said something was too expensive I’d ask her why she couldn’t just write a check. She tried to explain to me how she had to keep real, actual money in an account at the bank to cover the checks she wrote, but at six years old I did not understand how any of this worked.
Whenever I saw my mom use a pay phone I noticed the coin slot was labeled “5-10-25” (back when a local pay phone call was 25¢), I asked her why she always put a quarter in when she could just use a nickel or a dime instead.
Whenever it thundered I thought the sky was cracking apart and pieces of the sky would come tumbling down. Whenever there was lightning I thought it was God waving a giant match or a sparkler through the sky.
My mom had a heart attack when I was eight (it’s okay, she just turned 78 yesterday). Before she was ill, I don’t really remember vegetables as being a big thing in our house–I know we ate them, but Mom didn’t make a big deal out of them–I only remember having to stay at the table once to finish my food, and Mom gave up before I did. Anyway, after she got sick, my grandparents and aunts were always bring her fresh veggies from their gardens, and she was always eating veggies. So I figured that sick people ate vegetables, and I didn’t want to be sick, so I didn’t eat vegtables. Took me until my 20’s to move beyond potatos, raw carrots and the very occasional fresh-picked peas.
And where some kids had a monster living under their beds, I had a tiger that slept between my bed and my sister’s. After the lights were out, I could only get out of my bed by crawling over the footboard.
I had this belief that for every person, there is one, and only one, perfect match. Your soul-mate, so to speak, and you could only fall in love with them. But what if that person lived on the other side of the world and you never met? I figured that was why so many grownups didn´t have partners.
I was really worried for years mine might be living somewhere in the Amazonas region in the jungle (why there, I don´t know, it just seemed the most inaccessible place for me, I guess) and I would never meet him and thus never find love.
Now that I think about it - maybe I was right?
Dammit, I really have to travel to the Amazonas region soon.
Despite the fact that I knew technically how to make a baby and how babies come out of the mother I did the following. When I was 3 I had a 1 year old sister and my Mom got pregnant again so she told me that she was going to have a new baby. I was apparantly quite relieved and asked her “When do we take the old one back?” since my sister was quite the cryer.
Perhaps the wierdest thing for me was I saw (hehehe, I went palindromatic there) no different between me and adults and lived the early years of my life thusly doing many things not I should not have done. Oh well, too late now.
Red Skeleton was of course a great gag in one of those early … was it an MGM cartoon? Who Dunnit? I think it was called. Great reinforcement for any misconceptions you might have.
I thought that women menstruated out of the same “hole” they urinated from…so I was always troubled by my vague understanding of tampons, because I thought it would be horrible not to be able to pee.
I also thought boys menstruated, because I saw a print ad for diapers that had different “absorption spots” for boys and girls…and somehow assumed they were for adults. (I was actually preoccupied with the idea of menstruation for years as a child, b/c my mother got horrible cramps, where she’d lie in bed all day, and I knew that eventually I would be stricken with a similar “disorder.” I was deathly afraid of the whole thing.)
My brother told me when I was four or five that I was only a girl for a little while, and that I would eventually grow a “pee pee.” I cried with horror. (Never doing the math that my mother, and millions of women everywhere, “made it” to adulthood as women.)
I also played imaginary games when we traveled that basically involved going into the hotel room closet, which always had sliding doors, and imagining that it was like a Quantum Leap elevator, and that when I stepped out of the closet “elevator” I would be a stranger…but no one would know but me. My “mother” and “father” would assume I was their daughter, but really I was a stranger in a strange land. I was always proud of the way I handled myself; no one ever suspected. (Looking back, I wonder what they thought I was doing, always going in and out of the hotel closets.)
And up until about 12 years old, I seriously believed that clowns were evil, and would attack you the moment you shut your eyes…reaching out to grab you…and the moment you opened your eyes, they’d snap their horrendously long arms back and sit there, grinning vacantly, knowing. (This must’ve been because I saw Poltergeist, or whatever that movie was, at an impressionable age.)
I have always had a viciously active imagination. Of course, this helps immensely in things like writing good essays and coming up with ideas for parties etc., but when you are 7 years old and have just read several old issues of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not comics, it just causes suffering. I was afraid for weeks to take my dirty clothes down to the laundry room because the door was at the end of the downstairs hallway and I was positive that I would be mauled by unspeakable things from the Dungeon Dimensions if I ventured down there alone.
Also, when I was 5, I was playing in the park when an Irish setter showed up sans owner. He was a really friendly dog, and my friend and I had a great time petting him and throwing sticks for him to fetch. Of course, Irish setters being only slightly less saliva-productive than mastiffs and the like, this pooch quickly covered us both in dog drool. When we went to wash it off, my friend’s older brother told us that dogs that drool have rabies and now we had it too. He went on to describe, in lurid detail, how we would slowly go crazy, start growling and biting everyone, and eventually die. Had us in tears. Even though my mother explained to me that drooling dog !=rabid dog, I still held on to the thought for about a year.
I also had problems with the concept of cousins and second cousins. Since in Finnish, second cousin is “pikkuserkku” (little cousin), I could not fathom why I had “little cousins” older than me. Therefore, all relatives older than me were cousins and all relatives younger than me were second cousins.
I was at “nursery school” (what they used to call daycare) when I was four. As we sat down to lunch, a little girl next to me asked, “Do you know Jesus?” I told her I’d never heard of the guy. She got a horrified look and said, “You’re going to go down!” Scared the hell out of me. Later that night I thought my bed would tip me over into a firey pit where I would be burned and crushed by rocks.
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