My older brother told me that “Cottage Cheese” was harvested from the eve-trough of summer cottages in the fall. Lumpy white cheese, scraped out of the dirty rain-gutters, and full of bird-poop. I wouldn’t touch it for years.
I was raised Catholic, and when I was really young, I thought I saw flames playing about the mouths of people who received Communion. It was a reddish-gold light that flickered around their lips.
I didn’t think this was too odd. After all, at that age, you can believe in Magic. Plus, I knew–being well educated at CCD (that’s Sunday School for Catholics)–that flames were associated with the Holy Spirit, the story of Pentecost, and so on.
After a couple weeks, it occurred to me to ask my father about it.
“Dad,” I said, “does it hurt to go to Communion?”
“Why on Earth would you think that?”
“You know. The flames. Around your mouth.”
I wish I could remember his reaction more clearly–maybe my folks thought they had some kind of visionary saint on their hands–but I remember he told me to point it out to him the following Sunday.
So I did. “Aha!” said my father.
Seems there’s this altar implement called the paten. It’s a shiny brass dish on a handle. The altar boy holds it under peoples’ chins as they receive Communion so that no crumbs of the consecrated Host fall to the ground. And what I was seeing was the overhead light reflected off its golden surface onto peoples’ mouths.
Who knows, that might have been my first step on the path to skepticism . . .
I believed the Land of the Lost existed. Literally.
My father told me that eating bits of eggshells, or touching certain exposed pipes and wires in our basement, would kill me. I believed this for an embarassingly long time.
Oh Hoops that is a great story! I’m Catholic too. I always thought getting Communion gave people a headache, since they knelt with their head in their hands (to pray) afterward. I also thought the bells at the Consecration were to wake people up! (Ok people, when I was like 2!)
I’d forgotten a lot of these silly things until reading through the thread. I’m guilty of “libs” too, for lbs. and did actually speak it aloud once. How embarrassing!
On the order of “windchill factor” – I always thought they had these big steak dinners at the White House. Why didn’t they ever have anything else, I wondered. Chicken? Fish? Roast beef, even? Nope, here in the U-S-of-A, only T-Bones for the visiting dignitaries!
Also I think I was warped by The Flintstones. I remember my at one time my father mentioned a particular female client frequently at the dinner table (he was a lawyer; I think it was some big estate thing for a relative of hers). I asked one day if Mommy was jealous of Albernice (what a name!). They both just hooted at me. But in the Flintstones everyone is always jealous. Remember Wilma going out on Fred?? Hoo boy.
*When I was 4 years old I was convinced a person could learn to fly! My brother helped convince me:rolleyes:. I vividly remember jumping off a chair and flapping my arms as hard as I could. I’d spend hours (yes, hours) on a saturday “practicing”.
*When I started to read, I had a hard time with abbreviations and acronyms. I’d see UWM (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) and I’d try to figure out what an “UWM” was.
*Neither I, nor my siblings ever believed in Santa, but we did believe in Amoe. Amoe was an old barber who had a shop on the next block. He died at almost 100. His ghost lived in our basement, hence my fear to go down there until I was almost 11 years old.
*“Negros” (that’s what African Americans were called then) were black because they never washed, and it was all dirt. (Please don’t get pissed. I grew up in an all white town in the sixties. My Uncle actual told me this:rolleyes: )
*The “hippies” were going to put drugs in the water supply and make us all adicts. (thank my Dad for that one). If I was in a store with my parents and I saw some guy with long hair at the water fountain, i was sure he was putting drugs into it.
*If you pray to God hard enough, he’ll do things for you. When a kid named Byron suddenly got sick and died I freaked out because he was one of the kids I asked God to get off my back.
I used to think that all of the DJs on the radio were one guy. I asked my dad how they guy was working all day and never got tired.
I misheard my teacher when he told the class what the # symbol was called. I didn’t hear “pound sign,” I heard “palensine.” Made since to me, since I already knew about the ampersand, which is also sort of a weird name. I felt very proud to know this little bit of trivia for several years… before I eventually realized I hadn’t heard the term a single time since.
sense. Made sense.
Well, I pretty much got it all right from the start…
::ooch!:: ::ouch!::
Quit throwing stuff at me!
OK! OK!
My older sister was a big influence on me. When we were 5 and 7, she managed to convince me that little people lived in our house in Tokyo. I was perfectly happy to believe this, as I’d seen many things in the dark by that age. Prior to moving to Japan my after-dark bedroom in Berkeley sported a population of ~6" tall Dutch folk in classic cultural costume living around the baseboards and the far corner of the opposing walls and ceiling was the place that the Big Cat (that, in retrospect, I think I borrowed from M-G-M) ruled.
The plan was that we would build them little cliff dwellings out of building blocks and they would come to roost, at night, when the parents were asleep, if only we could waylay their nemesis, the known rat on the roof.
Well, he did better recon than we did, apparently, as we never drew them out. A few years later I saw Mary Martin as Peter Pan on Broadway and I realized I was a thorough skeptic by then.
When I was very little, I thought cartoons were real people and animals with black lines drawn around them. I remember marvelling at how well trained Bugs Bunny and company must be because our pets certainly couldn’t do half the things they did!
I used to think every song on the radio was being performed right there in the studio. I wondered how the popular bands got around to so many stations so quickly.
I also used to think everyone got darker as they aged because of the cumulative amount of time they spent in the sun. (My dad was darker than me, my grandpa was darker than my dad. That was my evidence. That my mom is the whitest white person ever somehow got overlooked.) People were different colors because some people tanned better than others. I was really shocked when I was about three and I saw a black infant for the first time. I wondered how she got so dark so fast.
Back when The Golden Girls first aired, I had heard of the show, but never seen it. For some reason, I thought it was about young blond women in bikinis and was irritated when my Dad talked about what a good show it was, because he was a married man!
Someone else mentioned thinking all dogs were male and all cats were female – I had that same idea. I thought they were the same species. I thought that was why on TV they were always fighting.
I used to have little magnets with the alphabet and the numbers 1-10 on them. I figured that since I had all the letters, I had all the numbers, too. I argued with my mom that there were no numbers higher than 10.
I went to preschool in a community center. Since it wasn’t a proper school, the teachers had to accompany us into the restroom. So the boys had to go with us into the ladies’ room. One boy came out of a stall with his pants down. I did not realize boys were made differently from girls. I thought what I was seeing was the remains of his umbellical cord (which I’d never seen, either, but had heard about). Maybe if I’d mentioned this one to Mom, I would have got my eyes checked sooner.
My mother says when she was a little girl, there was exactly one black person in her town. When he died, she thought there were no more black people in the world.
After watching the show on tv, I believed if I shouted
SHAZAM I’d actually turn into Captain Marvel…but I dare not, cause how do I explain to mom that the Big grown-up
in red tights is actually her son?
BTW…Lbs. is pronounced “elbs”.
– Once, when I was about four, I found a green stick fallen from a tree in our yard. I was convinced this was celery. I took it into the house and showed my mom, and insisted that she cut it up for me so I could eat it. She tried to explain that it was part of a tree, not celery, but I didn’t believe her. I was very upset that she wouldn’t let me have the celery (preferably with Cheez Whiz.)
– I thought the little metallic candy balls that went on cupcakes (called dragees), were actually BBs, and you weren’t supposed to eat them. I tried to warn my second grade class about them, but they ate them anyway.
– I thought eating dirt would kill you. I had a friend that sucked it through a straw.
– When the trees moved, they created wind, not the other way around.
– When I was very little, I remember seeing a wedding in the middle of a drainage pond for FMC (a chemical plant). They were tiny people, about six inches tall, and it was in the middle of the pond on a little floating hut. I watched their wedding as we drove by, on the interstate.
– Someone was talking about the little phones that had characters who talked to you. I knew those were fake, but my friend had a phone in the basement that she said was the same thing. It looked like a real phone, but she promised me it was a toy. So I picked it up, and dialed a number, and some lady started talking to me. Then her dad picked up the phone and made me get off.
– The same friend told me if I ate a few bites of the dry cat food in the garage, that Jesus would love me. Her family went to church all the time, so I figured she knew what she was talking about. I think it tasted like it smelled.
– The song “Silent Night”: I thought the line was, “Holy mackerel, mother and child”
– My sister, at about age 10, thought there were three condoms involved in sex. Two for the woman’s breast, and one for the man. I suppose I didn’t help clear up her ideas about sex when I told you could get pregnant by kissing, because the sperm swam up through the mouth and into the uterus. I think I corrected her about this after too long.
There are others, but this is long enough as is.
My dad went to high school with the actor who played Captain Marvel (John Davies). He came to visit our house when I was five or six years old. I kept waiting for him to change into his tights and do something superheroic, but he never did. To this day, I am disappointed.
I used to believe that it was rude to call Jewish people “Jews”; like it was a vulgar word, similar to calling African-Americans “nigger.”
Don’t ask me why, I have no idea, but I used to think my testicles were actually something I called “pee balls” that held all the urine. If I pushed them in, the urine would come out. I think this was because it happened that way in the bathroom once (I pushed them in at just the right moment) and led me to believe they were small, urine-holding balls.
In summer 1980 I was six. We moved to the Seattle area and every morning everything outside was covered with a layer of gray dust.
Somehow I thought that the air in Washington was just dirty and dusty and dingy, not like the clean air from home. It was years before I connected that with the ash from Mt. St. Helens which had blown up two weeks before we moved.
When I was young, I thought 9/11/2001 could never happen.
Yesterday, Creaky wrote about 3 o’clock whistles sounding like air raid sirens, concluding “It took a long time for my parents to convince me that we were living in peacetime.”
When I was a child, I thought that firefighters were special people who were immune to being burned up in a fire.
And after 18 hours of watching this terrible tragedy, one simple sentence has brought me to tears. Yesterday we were living in peacetime…
Corr
I used to think that there was some official government office that tested whether things were poisonous or safe to eat. If you were in jail, they gave you a plate of something and made you eat it, and if you were ok, it was food. Otherwise, it was deemed poisonous.