3rd grade, community soccer team practice. Coach tells us we’re not allowed to touch the ball with our hands. Fine. Then Coach tells us to practice dribbling the ball.
I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to bounce the ball with my foot.
***Star Wars was released when I was seven. I wondered what it was like, filming all that stuff out in space.
***My local news station had a graphic about the SALT talks. The missiles they depicted looked like fancy salt shakers. I thought the idea was to salt the earth of countries we were at war with, so they couldn’t grow any crops.
***My cousin had leukemia and died when I was four. When I was six, I got rubella, and was terrified to go to the doctor. I thought that if you went to the doctor for anything more important than a shot, you would go from there to the hospital and die there.
***My grandma brought out a loaf of Arnold’s Jewish Rye bread once when I was visiting. We’re not Jewish, and I thought it was illegal for non-Jews to buy such a thing. She and my mom confirmed this, until they saw I was too afraid to have any toast, or for that matter, to eat anything.
***I thought I would go to hell if I said a swear, so I started out saying, “I take it back God.” Then I simplified it to “I take back all the swears I said today.” Then I said, “I take back all the swears I’ll ever say,” and got on with my life. I also thought that if you gave someone the finger, you could negate it by sticking your finger down immediately afterwards. That way you were flipping off Satan, and God would forgive you.
***I thought milk was cow pee.
***I thought that babies were always born eight months after a marriage, and never under any other circumstances.
***I thought Peanuts was actually Charles Schulz’ autobiography. I wondered why he wasn’t in a wheelchair after having missed the football so many times.
I used to think that if, when I got older, I wanted a passport, I’d have to write directly to the prime minister (Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan) and ask for one.
At that time I was living in the north of Scotland. I thought that if I wanted to visit my uncle in the south of England I’d just have to go up to a policeman in London and ask where Bob lived (nb this is a reflection on my stupidity, not the remoteness of where I lived; my town had 6000 inhabitants).
Until I was about 7 I thought that the national sports teams for Scotland, England etc comprised of the same people for all sports. So I thought that Joe Jordan and Kenny Dalglish played in the Scottish rugby team as well as the football team. I think I heard something about the Scottish basketball team around that time and made the same bizarre assumption (Dennis Law on a basketball court anyone?)
I believed California was at the end of a street (I grew up in an Illinois suburb of St.Louis)we drove past a lot as a child. The reason for this was, one day I asked my mother where California was and she pointed west…as we past that street. So I naturally assumed that it was at the end of that street. When I walked down that street on the first day of third grade I found out the awful truth.
I also thought you pee’d in a girl to get her pregnant and probably still believed that when my age was in double digits.
Dead0man
We actually tell out children (8, 3.5, 2.5) that the music is a signal that they’ve run out of ice-cream. One day they will grow to hate us.
D
When I was young and heard about the “gorilla fighting” in Vietnam, I actually thought we were fighting actual gorillas. When I heard we weren’t, I thought we were fighting like gorillas.
I don’t know when I found out it was spelled “guerilla” and had nothing to do with King Kong.
I thought the same thing. I vaguely knew that there was some activity involving a jungle, so it made perfect sense.
Wow. Neat to know I’m not alone with “libs”, the whole world being black and white until sometime in the 50’s,
male dogs and female cats, and married women waking up spontaneously pregnant!
I believed that there really were Leprechauns on St Patricks
Day. I wonder what my teachers thought of me on that holiday, paying no attention, head under the desk scanning the floor all day. Never did see one, but I though it was because they are pretty swift, clever critters, and I didnt have a sharp enough look-out to spot them.
My grandmother used to watch Guiding Light, and it really influenced the ideas I formed about male/female relationships. I thought all men cheated, all women are hysterical, and that love was WAY too much turmoil. I remember informing my mother that when I got a boyfriend, I was just going to be nice to him, and he was going to be nice to me, and we were going to just bypass all this crazy
dramatic crap.
My dad travelled a lot, and my Mom used to show me planes in the sky, calling them “big silver birds.” I thought my Dad was on EVERY big silver bird that flew over, and that of course he could see me waving at him. At the time, we were living in Florida near Cape Canaveral, and I also assumed that everyone everywhere could see/hear rockets and such taking off outside their house.
Finally, and this is a disappointment I’ve never gotten over, I thought Cinderella’s castle at Disney World was a REAL castle. I knew Cinderella was just a character, but I thought the entire castle would be fully decorated and furnished in imagined fairyland princess castle manner, and that we could tour it. I still cant believe that all you can really do is walk through an arch underneath it. What a gyp…
I used to be deathly terrified (and in fact, am still a little wary) of staircases lacking risers (the vertical part connecting one step to another) because I felt that the gaps would “suck me in”. For the longest time, I also thought that the Land of Make-Believe (Mr. Rogers) was actually the Land of Maple Leaf. If you recall the logo for the show, it had a leaf, and there were lots of trees, so “Maple Leaf” made perfect sense to me.
We had some kind of tree in our backyard with bark that fell off easily—when I was younger and got upset because the bark fell on me, my mother made things worse by telling me it was “just bark”–I thought she meant bark like how a dog barks, and I was scared of dogs! Dunno if I thought dogs were going to fall out of the tree next or what.
I had a friend in preschool who was convinced (and tried to convince me) that the thicker, whitish crystals in the middle of an ice cube were actually RICE. My little brother wouldn’t eat jam because he associated it with a traffic jam, so he was convinced there were miniscule cars in there & he didn’t want to eat them!
When I was about nine or ten, some camp counselors instilled in us the idea that one shouldn’t lean against the plentiful pine trees in our area—because if you got the sap on your skin, you would begin to turn into a tree from the inside out. (I realize now they were probably trying to keep us from getting the messy sap on our clothes.) Of course, during my time at camp, I got mosquito bites which I scratched open, and the yellowish scab that formed looked so much like pine sap that I spent a terrified couple of weeks convinced that I was turning into a tree!
At the end of Pink Floyd’s “Another brick in the wall” where they say:
“If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding, how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”
For a very long time my dirty little mind thought that they were saying:
“If you don’t beat your meat, you can’t have any pssy, how can you have any pssy if you don’t beat your meat?”
I couldn’t figure out how they could play it on the radio and luckily I didn’t listen.
I wonder if any of you remember the Ah Ha! experience that accompanied the revelation of your false beliefs? The earliest ones that I can remember are being astounded by the fact that people make music and that ice cream melts.
Wow, this is bringing back stuff I’d completely forgotten.
I also had the thing with trees making the wind blow.
I also had a vision of what God looked like, but it wasn’t FDR or a bunch of grapes. When I was real young (late '70’s) Denny’s Restaurants had these characters associated with their kid’s menu. And sometimes the menu had little cardboard pieces to punch out that you could stick together to make the characters. And one of the characters was a squarish robot. And THAT was what God looked like. 
I thought that butts had a little trap door to let the poop out or hold it in.
I had a recurring dream about a Winnie-the-pooh themed restaurant with giant stuffed talking pooh characters, and when I woke up, I thought it was a real place and begged to go. (had a similar situation with a really cool Atari game that didn’t exist).
I thought that MABYE, but I couldn’t be sure, just maybe, I was a highly sophisticated robot, and was being watched on TV, a la the Truman Show. (they stole my idea, except for the robot part. )
I thought that if I slept facing the wall, 2 alien doctors would appear on the other side of the bed and start operating on my. (one of which looked like the Cantina band members from Star Wars, one looked like a human pirate)
AND… the last one I’ll share with you I’ll blame Charles Schultz for. I had a Charlie Brown 'Cyclopedia that had a Peanut’s strip in it where Lucy told someone that snow actually comes from the ground, but the wind blows it around so it LOOKS like it’s coming from the sky. I believed it. Thanks, Charles Schultz.
Ron
Wow, this is bringing back stuff I’d completely forgotten.
I also had the thing with trees making the wind blow.
I also had a vision of what God looked like, but it wasn’t FDR or a bunch of grapes. When I was real young (late '70’s) Denny’s Restaurants had these characters associated with their kid’s menu. And sometimes the menu had little cardboard pieces to punch out that you could stick together to make the characters. And one of the characters was a squarish robot. And THAT was what God looked like.
I thought that butts had a little trap door to let the poop out or hold it in.
I had a recurring dream about a Winnie-the-pooh themed restaurant with giant stuffed talking pooh characters, and when I woke up, I thought it was a real place and begged to go. (had a similar situation with a really cool Atari game that didn’t exist).
I thought that MABYE, but I couldn’t be sure, just maybe, I was a highly sophisticated robot, and was being watched on TV, a la the Truman Show. (they stole my idea, except for the robot part. )
I thought that if I slept facing the wall, 2 alien doctors would appear on the other side of the bed and start operating on my. (one of which looked like the Cantina band members from Star Wars, one looked like a human pirate)
AND… the last one I’ll share with you I’ll blame Charles Schultz for. I had a Charlie Brown 'Cyclopedia that had a Peanut’s strip in it where Lucy told someone that snow actually comes from the ground, but the wind blows it around so it LOOKS like it’s coming from the sky. I believed it. Thanks, Charles Schultz.
Ron
Actually, to some extent, it was his autobiography. As a child, Charles Schultz was very unpopular. He had trouble in school and his cartoons were rejected by Disney. From Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul:
“So Sparky decided to write his own autobiography in cartoons. He described his childhood self–a little boy loser and underachiever. The cartoon character would soon become famous worldwide. For Sparky, the boy who had such lack of success in school and whose work was rejected again and again, was Charles Schultz.”
Did anyone else believe their stomach had compartments for different food and if food got into the wrong one, you got a stomachache? That’s where my lifelong habbit of eating meals one food at a time started.