The DO NOT PASS signs were originally DO NOT PASS GAS signs, but people stole the GAS.
I always wondered where they got all the people killed on TV Westerns. There couldn’t be that many condemned prisoners, and why would they cooperate? What happened if they drew faster and killed the good guy?
Why liverwurst and oyster sauce had those names. Since I liked them, but hated liver and oysters, it was obvious that they contained neither. I knew that duck sauce was so called because it was to be put on duck, even though it contained none. But the delicious deli meat and the brown sludge in a bottle didn’t seem to have any rational basis for their names.
I remember my mother talking about dyeing her hair.
Somehow I missed the hair part and thought she was planning to die.
Whenever my father got us up in the morning he would tell us ‘UP and ADAM!’.
I couldn’t figure out what Adam had to do with it and what about Eve?
A neighbor died. I liked him, but I was too young to go to a funeral. I listened to my family talking about it for, what seemed like weeks, (probably a couple days.) I was really upset when I heard about the “polar bears.” I’d never seen a polar bear. I really want to.
When I was little, 3 or 4 or so, in nursery school, one of the aids or teachers or
whatever referred to people as animals (not in an animal house kind of way, but in
a conversation about racoons). I didn’t believe that us human beans were animals, we were different, we were human beans. That was a major mind fuck to a 4 year old.
Human beans. I can’t tell you how long I believed that we were closer to beans than beings. I didn’t look like my dog, so I wasn’t an animal, and everybody always told me I was a human bean. I didn’t know what a human was, but I sure knew what a bean was.
The money thing, I thought it was awesome that you could go to a store, get stuff (CANDY!!!), give them a crappy wrinkly piece of green paper and get back a bunch of cool shiny stuff.
I also remember hearing the earth was round. My mom picked me up at my grandmothers after second shift, and I remember asking her about it and sitting in
the car fighting with my mom that it can’t be round. I was 3 or 4. My poor mom.
Heck, the morning of my fifth birthday, when Mom woke me up, I didn’t believe her that it was my birthday. I’m not sure why I didn’t, nor why I would argue the point even if I thought her wrong.
I remember wondering why a person would want to have their baby delivered, rather than taking it home from the hospital themselves.
I got the idea(possibly from my mother, even), that all little girls had babies inside them, but it took a really long time before they grew big enough to make you “pregnant”, which was when your belly started growing and a baby was almost ready to be born. That’s why ladies had babies and little girls didn’t- the baby took until you were an adult to grow big enough to be born. Some girls were born with more babies in them than others, and babies grew at different rates, which explained why some families had more children than others. Some relatives were talking about an article in a tabloid claiming an 8-year-old had given birth, and I chimed in, saying that it was surely not true, because the baby couldn’t possibly have had time to grow that big, yet. I don’t remember any of their reactions to my indignance. Eh, they probably just ignored me. I think I was six.
I wondered how Santa Claus managed to get Elvis to make toys for all the girls and boys around the world.
I remember watching old shows and films like Three Stooges and someone would offer Moe a drink. “I don’t drink,” says Moe a lot. How can he not drink?? If you don’t have SOMETHING to drink, you’re gonna die! And if you eat food, but don’t drink, you’ll choke to death!
My grandma told me Baptists don’t believe in dancing. I was all like, “But I can show them dancing! I can prove it!”
I remember, whenever it would rain, the windshield would fog up, and my mom would take a tissue and wipe the fog off so she could drive. I always wondered why she wasn’t scared of the windshield wipers going back and forth, they were surely going to cut her up a treat.
We also frequently drove past a curious sign telling us it was “Unawful to Litter” which I thought was a very strange way to tell us it’s cool to throw trash there.
Thanks! And now I know [pause] the rest of the story!
When playing hide and seek I used to just stand there and close my eyes. If I can’t see you…you can’t see me.
When driving in the car I used to wonder why the moon always went the same speed as our car and always went to the same places we were going.
When my mother would get me up in the morning, why did she always mention “Up and Adam” and why I they never stuck around for me to meet them.
I also thought it was “up and Adam”. I wondered who Adam was.
When I was about five I asked my father about smallpox. It was gone from the US by then so my father, among other things, told me it was far away.
Later I looked out the back door and saw a swarm of gnats at the other end of the yard. Since they were small and far away from me I assumed they were the small pocks.
Okay, how about those NO STANDING signs? I puzzled over them for years.
NO ADMITTANCE/NO ENTRY signs on doors: “Employees only” would have been clear enough to me, but my generation rarely if ever saw one. The former made no sense to me. Why even have a door there if absolutely no one could enter?
Those velvet rope thing-a-ma-jigs: Clearly they are meant to guidelines for the movement of patrons of an establishment. But no one explained to me the difference between such a guideline function and that of an actual barrier. I couldn’t see the point of a “barrier” that was so easily overcome. I mean, I could easily walk under it, and any mildly agile adult could probably jump over it. Or bring it to the ground, and then step over it.
I’d see litterbugs throw still-lit cigarettes out the car window and onto the road. This had much more disturbing implications than just annoyance at the indifferent attitude or regular concern that any litter at all can contribute to bad outdoor esthetics and even, given a large enough accumulation, affect traffic safety. (“Every litter bit hurts”) … I mean, ARE THEY ALL COMPLETELY NUTS?! Lit cigarettes can start a fire!!! And I wasn’t thinking about freak situations wherein the wind blows them in through a car window or building window, where they may touch something flammable. Or, less remotely, one might have ignited some paper litter. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was certain that the road material could catch fire.
Ah, I don’t mean to try to top you, but that reminds me of three something-for-nothing “inventions” of mine.
When I was very young, I reasoned that it would be very easy to have a vehicle run on a level surface with no fuel (and nothing external to push or pull it.).
Picture a car coasting down an incline. Now forget about the surface it rides down, and just imagine the car out of its context. It has a down-in-front slant, right?
Well, then, all you have to do is build a car with the back wheels higher than the front, to create “slantness” and you have your fuel-free car. (This was at least a decade before it became common for ordinary road cars to be built-up in back.)
Later, at age 10, at least, I thought you could have a spaceship featuring two large magnets mounted inside. The larger would atrqact the smaller more than vice-versa. (WRONG!) The space ship would move in the direction of the larger magnet. No fuel or outside impetus would be necessary. Another Perpetual Motion dream. A bright classmate, although mostly in love with drawing, had the acumen to know why such could never work. But whan he tried to expalin it to me, the fresh terminology he used simply baffled me.)
I wasn’t one to give up. A huge book, devoted to teaching kids science, showed an example of a failed PM device. A funnnel led down to a curved pipe which arched back over the funnel. The weight of the water was supposed to be unbalanced, so the water would constantly fall from the arched pipe opening into the funnel, and so on.
The explanation given was that it was a fallacy for there to be an inbalance, by the principles of hydraulics. In truth, water would simply reach its own level in any container, or system of connected containers. I had just read, though, of capillary action. I thought that a capillary tube could create the needed balance if added to the original scheme.
I was so sure that I sent off a diagram to the current President, John F. Kennedy. I actual expected a hefty check in return for the idea. For some reason, JFK was busy elsewhere, and some flunky handled my correspondence. He gently encouraged me to continue with my interest and study of science.
I also “invented” the exact same space propulsion system. I remember drawing it at the home of a classmate who was a science buff, and he saw no problem whatsoever with my design.
I searched for ages for a town called Bigelly after hearing some song lyrics and felt really stupid when I eventually realised it was ‘Big L.A.’ being referred to!
Before the laws changed, in the UK many hotels used to advertise that they had a ‘7 day licence’ and I used to think that people couldn’t stay there for more than a week. I thought when we went on our fortnight-long summer holiday my dad would have to check us out, and then check us back in to the hotel after a week!
I realised this wasn’t the case, but it took a while to work out that it referred to hotel bars being allowed to serve alcohol on a sunday…