I remember being in the back of our statioin wagon with my sister one night. we were coming home and the moon was full. The moon was following us. The moon was following me. It was following me because I was special. I must have been special; the moon always followed me. It didn’t follow anyone else or I would have seen it. I was crushed to find out it didn’t. I wasn’t really special.
I though that people who spoke different languages laughed differently, coughed differently, sneezed, cried and screamed differently than we do in America. I thought that the animals in different countries had different vocalizations, like german shepherd dogs barked in german, and french poodles barked in french. I remember someone telling me about a China hog (a breed) and wondering what it sounded like, oinking in chinese.
I wondered why I could open my mouth and see it in the mirror, but my shadow didn’t open his mouth. I thought I should see light through him when I opened my mouth.
I was well into my teens before I realized that people didn’t vacation in NASA. Every time I heard someone talk about their Bahama cruise, I was surprised they never mentioned rocket ships, and I didn’t ask about it because I thought maybe THEY didn’t know.
I thought Castro might be Santa Claus and said so. I have a clear memory of my horrified mother looking around our front yard to see if anyone heard me and advising me to never ever let anyone hear me venture that hypothesis again.
I went to Sunday School at a Pentecostal church when I was very young. My parents were Catholic, but they didn’t attend church so they let me go on the church bus that came around my neighborhood every Sunday. When I heard you had to be born again to go to heaven, I thought that literally meant you were born again. I thought I’d come back and be born to a different mother. I remember trying to explain that to a friend in elementary school.
I believed that if you sat on the toilet too long, a rat would come up from the sewer and bite you on the butt.
As a kid between the ages of about 5 and 8, whenever I took a bath, I imagined burglars (striped shirts, stocking caps and masks) chipping away at the other side of the tile wall. I knew it was only a matter of time before they broke through and saw me naked.
In preschool/nursery school, I thought that Santa Claus sat on the roof of the building and spied on the kids through the sun roof to make sure they were behaving. Every time we left school, I’d try to catch a glipse of him on the building.
The picture of the woman/girl on the Vermont Maid syrup bottle is a picture of my mother when she was younger. I swear it is. Well, at least I used to. The fact that the girl in the picture had fair skin and reddish hair, whereas my mother was Italian, with olive skin and jet black hair, never bothered me a bit. It was my mother.
I was on a tv show once when I was about 4. It was the Rex Trailer show and he was a singing cowboy and they would show cartoons in between doing stuff with the kids in the audience. They taped the show and when I saw it on tv, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I could be in the tv and standing in my den at the same time.
I believed with all my heart that my stuffed animals were real, but they couldn’t let me know it or they would turn fake. One day, I thought I’d be really clever and trick one of them into proving my theory. I took a piece of bologna and stuck it in the mouth of my big poodle, Bluebell, who happened to have her tongue sticking out all of the time (at least while I was looking). I closed the door to my room and waited for an eternity (or at least three minutes) and when I opened the door…
It was still there. But I knew it didn’t really mean anything other than she had figured out my trick. Then I felt bad for trying to trick her. I’ve apparently not gotten over the guilt yet. Maybe I do need therapy. Does anyone have a couch I can lie down on? Could we do this with puppets?
Apparently I was a very sound sleeper when I was young, because I was convinced that a moment or two after my head hit the pillow it instantly became morning. I thought the approximately 10 hours between my bedtime and the time I woke up “story” was just another one of those things that parents tell little kids to get them to go to bed. There was only one thing wrong with my theory–I couldn’t figure out how the milkmen and paperboys completed their routes in the moment or two that I thought nighttime lasted.
Also, I thought that the refigerator light was always on, even when the door was closed.
I used to believe the television made things disapear. When I was about four I looked after the kindergarten mouse for some length of time. Basically I played with it til the poor thing expired, and then, when it stopped moving, I hid it on top of the tv. When I came back it had gone. And thus, if you leave things alone on the tv, they vanish.
I was at an overnight camp, and one girl told me that the “Rock Man” (evil counterpart of the Sand Man, I guess) would come at night and kidnap children sleeping outside. Then he would turn you into those people selling flowers on street corners.
Someone also told me that you stepped on a potato bug, it would grow 50 feet long.