My niece figured this out at a pretty young age. They don’t get smaller, grandma and grandpa live in the sky.
I thought that mean people had put up the “Do Not Pass” signs. Mean people who give orders.
The “Pass With Care” people though are quite nice. They are fine with you performing a pass. In fact they hope that you do it OK. They want you to be careful because they care about you.
I wondered how my grandmother, long before caller ID, could tell who was calling. When I asked her why she wasn’t answering the phone, I thought she said “Because it isn’t Irene.”
They were on a party line. Their ring was one long followed by one short.
When I was really young I wondered why my stuffed animals’ hair didn’t grow back when I cut it off. I was so fucking retarded.
I wondered why I couldn’t use the loo in one of those many buildings that had a sign saying “toilet.” Whyyyy did we have to wait for a service station with a toilet?
There were lots of places “to let” back then.
From watching old TV shows and monster movies with my Dad, I used to think what a dreary time it must have been when my parents were growing up, because obviously color hadn’t been invented yet.
Caution: Deaf Child
I always made sure my door was locked and went on high alert when we passed one of these signs. I think I assumed since they were born deaf and weren’t old enough to understand why they were deaf this made them very angry and they lashed out at random people on the street.
When I was 5 or 6 I was really worried about when “the long run” was going to be. I would hear people talk about “the long run”, and to make it worse there was a poster in our school gym that said something like “Exercise is good for you in the long run”. I thought there was going to be a big running race that everyone had to participate in.
I exercised like a motherfucker because I wanted to be able to make it in “the long run” even if I was only a little kid.
Also, I was sure that robots would replace people at every job, and that it was going to happen nearly instantly, like one day everyone would wake up and find out that robots were taking their jobs that week. I wondered what I would do all day and how I would make money as a grown up when the robots did everything.
I always wondered why I could see Wonder Woman’s invisible jet (specifically, from the Super Friends cartoon show). There was an obvious outline of it and everything!
Mr. smaje and I just bought the Super Friends DVD for l’il smaje, and I told him that – he said he had thought the exact same thing when he was a kid!
My sister and I found our mom’s “frisbee” and tried wearing it as a face mask. :smack:
Who’s the first car in front of this traffic jam? Is he driving slow and weaving so no one can get past?
I would watch cartoons at friends houses (in color) and assumed for this reason Cartoons were in color while regular TV was in B&W (despite watching cartoons on our B&W TV set).
After figuring out we were the only ones in the neighborhood with B&W I asked my parents “are we poor?” My parents asked why I thought that - I said “because we are the only ones with B&W.” The next day my dad bought a color TV.
I STILL wonder this. “If everyone went 5 MPH faster we’d all BE there by now!”
I worked as an underground miner for years and many of my friends had Suffered accidents over the years. My daughter , until about fifteen thought that as men got older their fingers fell off. ( she’s now a Dr and I hope she knows differently )
The miner is back. My other daughter heard we were " high ballers " so she naturally thought I went underground and played football all day
A couple more:
I used to see dispensers in ladies rooms marked “napkins”. I wondered who these fancy rich people were who chose to pay for napkins, when they could just use the free paper towels, like the rest of us. But then I also wondered what was so special about the napkins that they actually cost money, to begin with.
This one’s a little weird: I was in the living room, playing, when it suddenly occurred to me that I WAS a “me”. That I could see out of only my eyes, and control only my own body, and think thoughts to myself, and other people must be the same way! I’m not explaining it very well. Anyway, I kept thinking about it, and started thinking I was very lucky I got to be in a human body, and not, say, a lamp. Somehow the thought that I could’ve been a LAMP scared me to death, and I started crying and my mother came in and I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what I was upset about.
I’m still glad I’m not a lamp, though.
My parents’ good friends were “from grease.” Boy was that confusing.
I also thought that <a> getting trapped by quicksand, <b> getting bitten by a snake and <c> getting chased by a swarm of bees until I found a lake to jump into were much, much bigger dangers than they actually turned out to be.
I thought that clubs that advertised “No Cover” were strip clubs. The other ones had dancing girls, but they were covered.
It would be harder to explain, except that I think everyone has gone through that experience and so we know exactly what you mean. I still remember exactly where I was (walking down the hallway at the babysitter’s house) when that thought hit me.
Well, except for the lamp part.