Funny anecdotes from your childhood?

On a visit to my grandmother’s, she gave us each one cookie before dinner. We went out back to eat them and a chicken flew up and packed my cookie out of my hand and began eating it.

I started to cry and ran inside to tell my Mom and grandmother. They, of course, didn’t believe me when I said a chicken took my cookie. I had to take them and show them.

I wandered off once, I was about five, and a cop spotted this lost, crying kid by the side of the road. He said he’d take me home. Having been raised right, I refused to get in some stranger’s car. So I walked home and he sloooowly followed along in the car to make sure I arrived OK.

There was a girl who I always bickered with in preschool for reasons that I can no longer remember. Anyway, the way my mom tells the story, she came to pick me up one day and found that I’d had another argument with this girl, only this time the fight was different. Apparently the girl had started parroting her parents and was saying really racist things and I was, in my mother’s words, morally offended. So I yelled at her, “Why do you keep on saying white people are better than black people? You’re not white, you’re beige!”
My mom doesn’t remember how the girl reacted to that, though. Eventually the girl and I were going to go to kindergarten together, and my mom had to request that we wouldn’t be put in the same class.

When I was in 6th grade our teacher taught us how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. During that year’s school carnival there was to a be a competition to see who could do this the fastest. In order to prepare for this event, I decided I needed to “grease up my cube”.

It is a known fact, among Rubik’s Cubists, that you can eliminate a great deal of friction while solving the cube by dismantling it and rubbing a thin layer of Vaseline on all of the parts that rub against each other. I was in my room doing this when an entirely different thought entered my head.

By the time I was in 6th grade I had been aware of the fact that, uh, manipulating my penis resulted in a pleasurable, if messy, sensation. I also was no stranger to the variable that Vaseline presented in this equation. To make a long story short, I had the cube about halfway put together and copiously lubed when I decided to, for want of a better phrase, hump it.

My Wranglers were half down and I was really giving it to old Erno Rubik’s puzzle when I heard my bedroom door open and my Mother sigh, “I don’t think that’s how you solve one of those Jon.”

The door clicked softly shut as I stood there horrified and still twitching a bit inside the cube. I avoided making eye contact with either of my parents for the next few weeks.

fucking tonya payne beat me in the competition too. bitch.

@Blondesjon, that is the greatest story in the history of everything! XD

There was the time when I was 8 or 9 that I tried to row from Lewes, DE to New Jersey. The ferry went back and forth all the time how far, how hard could it be? We were in Lewes for vacation, my folks and my older brother and I, and we had a little rowboat, a wooden dinghy that my dad had made.

I don’t really remember how it all started, exactly. Lewes beaches are on Delaware Bay not the ocean and I was a pretty good swimmer, on the swim team at the local swim club, no champion, but I could swim the crawl and the breast stroke, butterfly and backstroke and I decided to row to New Jersey. I could see it, at least that’s the way I remember it, though at sea level I don’t think I should been able to see much of anything in the distance except water but that’s the way I remember it. I got loose and out on my own because it was one of those Dad asks mom “Where’s Lilly? Mom asks Dad “What do mean, ‘Where’s Lilly?’, I thought you were watching her!” Mom says “I thought you were watching her!!” Mom and Dad freak. They looked around and around and my dad finally looked out on the water and there, out in the distance, was Lilly and her little boat. My dad jumped in the water and apparently swam like a fiend to come out and get me. Boy was he upset!! But his favorite part of the story is how mad I was. I was pissed. I sure I could do it and I didn’t like the implication that somehow I wasn’t up to the task.

@Blondesjon That’s hilarious. Best part, absolutely great, on the spot, comeback from mom. She didn’t miss a beat there, did she?

All puns intended, BTW ;-)

During the summer of 7th grade, I attended a pool party for my friend. Save for one other guy, it was pretty much an all-girls party. I had one girl their in particular that I wanted to prank badly, and I somehow got the idea into my head that it’d be funny to pull down the back of her swimsuit bottoms and blast away with a can of silly string I had been provided.

As soon as I got the opportunity, I did just that. What I did not expect was my stunned reaction to seeing a bare ass for the first time. What had started as a rather douchey prank somehow turned into a horrible opportunity to sneak a peek at some girls rear. I still blasted it with silly string.

I was slapped mercilessly, yeah…I regret nothing..

Dad was on a business trip, and the wife of one of their friends was visiting family members, so Mom decided to invite the woman’s husband over for dinner. After the meal, I wandered into the living room where they were sitting on the sofa. According to Mom, I asked, “Are you two going to snuggle like you do with Daddy?” Mom was mortified.

My brother, who is 13 years older, used to sneak into the bathroom when I was in the tub. There is an alcove for the toilet between the door and the tub, and he’d stand in it and make a whistling noise. I would converse with my friend Whistle.

Him: Whistles
Me: Oh, is that you Whistle?
Him: Whistles a response
Me: How are doing?
Him: Whistles a response

And on the conversation would go. In later years, he told me that he had a dickens of a time keeping a straight face during our little chats.

@Blondesjon Your Mom totally rules.

When I was little and we were stationed in Hawaii, my Mom told us that my Dad’s former boss was visiting the islands and was coming to dinner. She made us our own dinner earlier and we were banished to the back of the house – or so she thought. It was obvious this was an important person or we wouldn’t have been fed earlier and banished so as not to embarrass her by misbehaving.

When this man, Mike, arrived, he apparently was jovially insistent that we kids join them (which my Mom later told me caused her to really scramble to come up with more food). She threw on some chicken breasts for us kids and “Mike” ended up sitting next to me at the table. He was the NICEST man, kidding with me, talking earnestly and engagingly with all of us kids and just being so sweet and funny. I don’t know why, but at some point I stuck my fork under my chicken breast and was wiggling it and making it “cluck” at him, which he found hilarious. At the end of the evening, he told me he was going to come back some day and take me out to lunch because I was so sweet. Of course, he was kidding, but being little I was very disappointed when he didn’t. I thought he was the nicest man ever and always wished he’d come visit again. Years later, I asked my Mom about him and she said, “You have no idea” and told me who he was. I nearly died of embarrassment. That jolly, sweet man was General “Iron” Mike Healy, commander of the Green Berets and the person upon whom John Wayne’s character in the film (Iron Mike Kirby) was based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Healy

The man was a hero, but to me he was just the most fun guy ever. Mom still razzes me about it to this day.

I can’t even come close to @Blondesjon ‘s story!

@Blondesjon That was just too good. I had to immortalize it so I have submitted humping the cube to the Urban Dictionary. It hasn’t been approved yet but I have a good feeling about it, they, love that kind of stuff. And if it isn’t approved? At least you know I tried. Hope you like it. :-) Now I just have to come up with a good word or phrase for “the snappy comeback your mom makes when she walks in on you “humping the cube.”

Oh God. Nothing is going to top Jon’s story. Ever.

In the aftermath of a big dinner during the era of Welcome Back Kotter (late 70s), all the adults were still sitting at the table telling jokes of the ‘up your nose with a rubber hose’ variety, made famous by the show. From the living room, I pipe up, quite loudly, with “Up your vagina with North Carolina”. I was like, eight.

@augustlan LOL. I can’t even picture that. My sweet little Auggie. You were like 8 and your not going to tell us what happened after you piped up, quite loudly, at a family dinner, “Up your vagina with North Carolina”? You expect me to believe that there was no reaction, no response? Please, I’m begging you my dear, the rest, what happened after, that’s half, if not more than half the story Auggie… I’m waiting….

@lillycoyote There was a stunned moment of silence, and then everyone cracked up. My mother comes towards me, laughing her ass off but trying to maintain her composure to ask me where on earth I’d learned that one. (Answer: Elementary school!). She calmly explained, snickering the entire time, how it was inappropriate to say such things. I’m sure I was beet red.

@augustlan LOL. I think that’s the hardest thing for mothers, parents and adult friends of small children to do when something like that comes out of their mouths. You know you shouldn’t completely crack up, you know you not supposed to encourage something like that but how can you help yourself. Good thing you were so embarrassed because you probably didn’t completely process that your mother was simultaneously trying to explain to you that it was inappropriate and laughing her ass off at the same time.

@augustlan I’m totally teaching my kids that one. If all goes to plan, they shall exclaim “Up your vagina with North Carolina!” in the face of every new person they meet. The eldest is 3, so he may have trouble with the whole ‘Carolina’ part. It may have to be “with a mini-minor,” I’m afraid.

@Blondesjon I will never look at a Rubik’s cube the same way again! Thanks for a hysterical bout of laugh out loudness!

I think I’ve told this one before on here in answer to another question, but I’ll tell it again anyway. Gene Wilder was in a comedy called “Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” when I was a kid. We had recently seen it and this particular day we had gone to the mall. I bought a paperbook book of the movie at Waldenbooks and was reading it in the car on the way home. I was sitting in the middle of the front seat between my parents in our station wagon. My 4 sisters and two brothers (all older than me) were in the middle and back seats.

I got to a word in the book that I didn’t know the meaning of and so I asked generally to the whole car, “What’s a testicle?”

Instant pandemonium. My Mom gasped “Joan Catherine!!” and Dad burst out with “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU READING???!!!” and my siblings died laughing in the back. No one would tell me, so I had to look it up in the dictionary when I got home.

@Blondesjon You might be interested in getting a pair of these for the wife.

@Blondesjon I get so much junk email that I only just noticed tonight that my submission for humping the cube had been accepted by Urban Dictionary. A modest accomplishment at best, certainly, but your story has now been immortalized in its own little way.

@lilycoyote You are awesome!
@Blondesjon You will live in language forever!

@filmfann It was a story that just demanded that someone do something; a story more than worthy of being at least a footnote in the history of such things. It was the least I could do.