It occurred to me a while back that, growing up in my parents’ house, I thought nothing of a couple of things that after I moved out and experienced various other peoples’ homes, I realized were pretty darn strange. To wit:
We had two refrigerators. In the kitchen (well, one of them was in the utility room, but that was right next to the kitchen with only a doorway separating them). We were a family of three (me, mom, and dad). I guess it wasn’t all that strange to have a freezer in the garage (we had one of them too) but two fridges for three people?
Odder still, we had a bar. In the house. I don’t mean a breakfast bar, either. I mean a real honest-to-goodness bar with a sink, a bunch of glass shelves in front of a big mirror with a ship on it for glasses and booze, bar stools, bar lights (they actually said “Bar” on them) and a whole lot of booze. My dad built it, apparently, sometime between when he bought the house in 1961 and my memory started (I was born in 64 and never remember it not being there) . This was your basic suburban tract house. And the weirdest thing about the whole thing was that my parents barely drank. They entertained a bit when they were in the Masons/Eastern Star and sometimes had parties at the house, but I never saw them drunk and rarely saw them drink at all. I thought this was absolutely normal and never once recall thinking there was anything odd about the fact that there was a bar in my house.
How about you? Any strangenesses that seemed completely normal to you when growing up and only became odd upon later reflection?
Eating peanut butter and (sweet) pickle sandwiches. A common lunch at my house, but nearly everyone else I’ve talked to about it says it sounds totally gross.
Well, we didn’t have an indoor bathroom until I was 6, nor did we have a TV or hot water. For Valentine’s day the year I turned 6 my grandfather unveiled a new kitchen and bathroom. It doubled the size of the house.
We had a neighbor, nick-named Cougar Martin, who had a number of wild animals as pets. He had a bear and a couple raccoons, but no actual cougars.
2 bunk beds and a twin bed with our dressers in the closet in 1 bedroom, washer & dryer in the kitchen, portable dishwasher in the hall closet, sleds and ice skates in the closet in the living room, in the kitchen cabinets syringes, scalpels,and tweezers, and a M1 rifle on the top shelf in my parents bed room closet.
Both my parents worked six days a week for as long as I can remember. Going in on Saturday was just what you did–until I was 15, I honestly thought only sitcom parents stayed home all weekend.
My Dad owned this giant “bean bag” when I was little. But it wasnt a standard bean bag, as it was filled with foam, no beans. It was more like the biggest pillow you’d ever see. Probably 6 feet wide, which to a 6 year old it was HUGE! Anyway, my Dad would put it in the entry way of our house and my brother and i would climb up to the top of the stairs, climb over the railing and catapult 10 feet down into it. It was THE BEST fun! But now, looking back, I cannot believe he used to let us do that!
I had both of those things in my house growing up, though we did have 5 kids in our family so 2 fridges weren’t really crazy. And my parents did drink. They converted their formal dining room into a bar, complete with barstools, sink, and all that, because they were the types to have people over for drinks much more than having people over for formal dinners.
I thought the following was perfectly normal, but everybody else says there is no way their parents would allow this. Ok, so as an only child with a big backyard connected to woods, my parents let me dig several gigantic holes. The largest one was 10 feet long, 4 feet wide, and about 4 feet high. There were 2 others a bit smaller. I wanted to keep going bigger and deeper, but my mom finally made me stop. At the time I was about eight, so the deepest one was already over my head. I also made various thrones out of the side, and attempted a tunnel or two. All that dirt was piled next to the edge too, so at the top of the heap I really felt like king of the mountain range.
The best part is, I used to fill the largest one up with water and take mud baths. It was awesome! When it came time to move, my parents had to rent a caterpillar to fill them all in
My family calls grilled cheese sandwiches “toasted cheese.” One day in 2nd grade I had to read the lunch menu and I said “toasted cheese” instead of “grilled cheese” and all the kids laughed at me :mad: Obviously it was traumatic enough for me to remember 20+ years later. Sometimes I still can’t remember which one is the “right” way to say it.
I also always assumed people my age had dads that served in Vietnam. I was quite shocked when I went to college and my English teacher asked who had a parent that served in Vietnam (we were reading The Sorrow of War) and no one else raised their hand but me.
That is one of the strangest things I have ever read because I could have written it down to almost every last detail including my parents having to hire heavy equipment to fill it in. I loved to dig more than anything when I was that age and I got shovels and picks and wheelbarrows for presents. I have outside witnesses if you don’t believe me. The only difference was that I wasn’t an only child and my biggest one was meant to be used to raise some kind of fish or crawfish but I couldn’t get it to hold water so my brother and I used it as a mud wrestling pit.
That is just the tip of the iceberg though. I grew up in rural Louisiana on a huge amount of land. I also built an underground house and a real log cabin. A lot of things like having three shooting ranges at our house and every type of weapon you could want to shoot anytime (my father was a dealer) would freak a lot of people from other places out now but they were just sort of cool at the time.
My mother wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at me digging giant holes if we had that much land - if I’d dug up the lawn, she’d have been less happy - but I was way too lazy even as a kid to bother digging anything requiring that much effort.
I grew up in England and we called it “cheese on toast”. I didn’t learn what a “grilled cheese” was until I was about 15; when I first got to the States, I thought it was the mozzarella cheesesticks I had noticed people eating in the school cafeteria (totally unknown in Britain).
I am a triplet. I grew up used to people staring at us as I walked down the street or randomly stopping us to ask strange and personal questions. It wasn’t until I moved away from my sisters that I realized that that wasn’t normal. Well, I should say, when I moved back and it started up again, I realized nice it was to not have to deal with it. I had totally forgotten what it was like.
It is for this reason that I have a lot of sympathy for the children of celebrities. It is one thing to choose that, but to born into it sucks.
We didn’t have water and sewer lines run to our house until I was 8 or 9, either. We got our water from a cistern beside the house, and took the slop pail from the bathroom to empty in the outhouse behind the house.
I don’t think this is odd so much as awesome, but my dad was a contractor/carpenter/mechanic/jack of all trades, and any tool or supply you ever wanted for any job was in the garage. Sledgehammer? Yup. Vice? Yup. Any type of saw? Yup. Boards? Bricks? Blocks? Yup. Glue? Solder? Welding tools? Yup. Glass cutter? Yup.
We also usually had a skating rink in our back yard most winters - my dad would flood the large garden.
We only had a bathtub, not a shower, until I was almost in junior high in the mid-80s. We had at one time I think 9 of us sharing that one bathroom. My sister and I had to share a bed.
Deer heads. Dad had an ever growing collection of mounts(full heads or just racks) on the walls. I go there, see em staring off at nothing, and feel at home, since a home should have deer heads in it. Mine would, cept I rather dislike both hunting and the taste of venison(my parents and brothers were almost shocked when I admitted that!), and really don’t feel up to it just to acquire a mount of my own.
Oh, and my parents were divorced, and found new spouses before I recall. I vaguely remember one of the weddings. It was also very amicable, and they had shared visitation of my brothers and I, moms on the weekends, dads during the week. I remember being flabbergasted when I realized my friends lived in the same house the entire week. The very first time I slept in the same bed for more than 2 weeks straight was boot camp when I was 18.
