Did you have any funny misconceptions as a child?

That being an adult would be cool.

That good things always happened to good people and bad people would always be punished.

That all the folk tales explaining the origin of things were true.

That by this year the world would look like those sci-fi stories.

Okay this one makes me actually question my intelligence because I didn’t figure out I was wrong till I was like 13.

The only context in which I’d ever heard the word “atmosphere” was when I heard about objects like meteors “burning up in the atmosphere.” So naturally I concluded that Earth was surrounded by a thin shell of fire and that’s what the atmosphere was.

Lol at me.

That a hive of bees lived in the oil furnace in the basement. You could hear them buzzing whenever the heater came on. There was a sight glass about 2”, 5 cm, in diameter that the technician would use to set the flame mixture. The bees lived in there! Don’t break that glass!
(I was maybe 4 or 5 years old.)

The following are from when I was very young (younger than 12):

- That life was fair.

- That 50 years old was very old.

- That I could eat anything and not worry.

Still through my teens and twenties I didn’t know saying one wrong thing could ruin a long standing relationship with family or friends. That one still shocks me.

That all adults were good people with good intentions. I believed this until I was about 17.

That the secret to Superman’s ability to fly was in his cape and all you had to do was get a cape like his. I found out otherwise by jumping off the roof of the barn in my new Superman cape when I was five.

Animals spoke English to each other when we weren’t around. I spent hours trying to get animals to speak to me until I was six.

That if you could raise cats for their fur by feeding rats to cats and the cat carcasses to the rats, you would have a perpetual supply of fur with no feed expenses. This was never actually tested. I realized at ten that I could never kill cats for a living.

That someday there would be small remote control planes with video cameras available and we could each travel the world in our living rooms through the TV. This predated drones and Google Earth by about 55 years.

That, like my home town, the rest of the country was about evenly divided between Jews and Christians.

That because we took a plane to visit relatives in California, California must be in the sky.

That the song line “my bonnie lies over the ocean” was about a very large woman named Bonnie who stretched from one shore to the other.

I believed that all languages were coded. For example, the German word for “lobster” is “Hummer”. I was trying to find a pattern, such as h=l; u=o; m=b [except when preceded by another “m”, in which case m=s]. It was frustrating, and I gave up quickly.

I believed that animals could understand me, too. Between ages four and seven, I whispered my address to every dog I passed on the street, in case he ever needed a place to stay.

I remember when they were talking about Bill Cosby possibly buying CBS or NBC back in the 70’s, and I was like, “Nuh-uh! You can’t buy a TV channel!”

I somehow I thought that NBC, CBS & ABC were part of the national infrastructure and the cable channels were…well, hell…like toll roads I guess.

That trees make the wind. They wave back-and-forth and, much like a fan, create all that energy. I could see trees moving gently in a breeze and dramatically in a heavy wind, so it all made sense to me.

That Mount Rushmore is one of those natural stone formations.

That tiny people lived inside traffic lights, refrigerators and other random places I can’t remember anymore. That tornadoes were always preceded by piano music like scales played up and down. That Mrs. Pinkel had a butt with a tail like porky pig.

I was both the youngest and shortest kid in my class. This was during the early 90s when the dairy farmers were pushing this “milk is good for your bones” thing, and then later the Got Milk? campaign.

I thought if I could mix up milk with something to make it sticky (like, say, mud) and get it all over my body, it would soak in and make my bones bigger, and then I’d get taller. Like a magic potion or something.

I got in a lot of trouble for wasting milk, on a few occasions.

I used to think that the world was a good place.

* Despite being Jewish, I believed in Santa till I don’t recall what age. Ditto the tooth fairy.
* I thought my mom’s hair was naturally brown till I was at least in my 30s and she in her 50s.
*And this falls under the heading of misprounciation rather than misconception… I’m told that in my early years I called lettuce and tomatoes “lessus and tomesses”.

To be continued

I can remember my surprise around 10 or 11 that roads and pavement actually wore out.

Whenever any random b&w shit came on the telly I thought the actual world looked like that then
Also, if it was raining out, it has to be raining on the entire world coz we only have one sky duh!

Oh! I remembered another good one. When I was a little kid I thought checks were free money. I thought I’d come up with a genius way to get rich quick: just find a friend, and agree to write huge checks to each other so you can both be rich.

Before I tried to ride a bicycle, I thought you had to work really hard to keep them from falling over, even when they were moving.

I thought that labour day was something else.

I grew up by a river estuary and I believed that when the tide came in on my side of the water it went out on the other side and vice versa. I was also sure my grandfather could make playing cards appear out of thin air because I saw it happen.

Where I used to live, there was an empty closet that I liked to go in. My grandmother (an immigrant who didn’t have the best English) saw me going in there once and told me

“Get out! They going to fell down!”

I thought she meant that if I went into that closet, the people living above us would break through the ceiling and fall down on top of me.
I never went in the closet again as a kid, but when I was older I figured maybe she was just talking about the hangers that were in there.

Seeing American Gigolo made me think adulthood was going to be soooo cool.

I thought the Easter Bunny was pink and about 7 feet tall and I thought the whole concept of a giant rabbit hopping around with baskets of easter eggs was terrifying. I also believed that “God” knew my every thought and deed. I remember sitting on the toilet around age 4 or 5 and being extremely stressed out that “God” could see me going to the bathroom. haha

I thought that the neighborhood was full of pot heads and thugs. I hurled a rock at a group of teenager’s when I was a kid because I didn’t tell the difference between rollies cigarettes and pot. I was bullied by them for 6 years. They would hold me down and crack a rock on my head until I named ten chocolate bars. I took it personally I didn’t know that they were trying to calm me down.

^^^Where was your mother?

@Dutchess_III She lived 50 blocks away in Edmonton. I lived with my father.

Where was your father, then? What did he do when you told him?

@Dutchess_III I told him and he said that he moved me to a bad neighbourhood to toughen me up. That’s the last that I told him.