In a comment earlier today Shokku reminded me that I should remember to see things with my child’s heart. And while I appreciate the sentiment, I have to say life has gotten much better since I started engaging my brain in, well, thought. I was not the most logical kid/teenager ever. To wit, a list of things I believed to be true as a child/teen:
- Olives were composed wholly of chemicals and manufactured in some factory in New Jersey. When I was about 11 my dad told me they grew on trees. I was amazed.
- Richie Cunningham was an actual person who actually lived in Milwaukee and once a week would flip on a camera that let us see into his house. Don’t get all up in my grill about the fact that Happy Days took place in the 50s, we’re talking about kid logic here. I like to think of it as a incredible forward-thinking on my part that foretold the coming of reality TV.
- The crust of bread was filled with all the vitamins and nutrients, just like the peel of a potato. I admit I only believed this because my dad told me it was true. However, it wasn’t until i was in my mid-20s that I realized his claim was totally preposterous.
- Along the same lines I thought all Chinese food was Chow Mein and therefore an abomination to food. It wasn’t until I was a junior in college that I tried other Chinese foods and realized it is a delicious and good. My mom has still not earned back the mom points for that kind of atrocity and she was already in the whole due to the next item.
- My mom doesn’t like sour cream and I believed that I didn’t like sour cream until I was a senior in high school and she had moved to Wisconsin and my best friend Jodi Hanson made me try it. All along I thought I didn’t like it because my mom told me I didn’t. She lied.
- I thought my mom was absolutely ridiculous for not using the machines at the laundromat that offered to wash, fluff dry and fold your laundry for only 65 cents a pound. When I finally got the courage to ask her why she didn’t use this option since it made more economical sense she thought for sure I was brain damaged, because the machines that the signs hung above didn’t actually do that at all, but rather it was a service you could use.
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When I was a kid, my dad’s friend told me that the orange things in green olives were the fingertips of the people that worked at the olive jarring company. I believed him. But I ate them anyway. I’m not sure what that says about me.
Whenever I eat olives with the pimentos, I pretend like I am sucking the eyeballs from a skull, or the guts from a bug’s exoskeleton. I am not sure what that says about me.
That was just thinking with a child’s brain. I didn’t mean you had to stay ignorant. Christmas magic you must enjoy only with a child heart. Ignore the man behind the curtain and enjoy the pyrotechnics.
The biggest childish misunderstanding i remember is overhearing my parents and grandparents talking about a family that died off one by one, even the kids, from TV. ???! They DIED from TV! Yikes! What were they watching?! It wasn’t until years later i realized they must’ve died from TB. Yeah. Child brain and child heart. Both pretty sweet and funny. And if i hadn’t seen with my own eyes my sisters kids be born, i’d still be believing that babies come out of our bungholes.
i’ve been mentally composing a post similar to this idea, although more like “things i was pretty sure would happen to me.” for instance, i was pretty sure that i would get kidnapped.
on another note: my dad told me that potato chips were made out of scabs and ketchup. it seemed kind of false, but it also seemed a little true. i could never find the ketchuppy flavor in a potato chip, though.
i’m with you on the chow mien. i throw up the first time my mom made me eat it and thought that all chinese food would make me throw up too. thank god for lee ann chin – she eased me back into without fear. not that lee ann chin is actual chinese food.
mom told me eating raw cookie dough when she was making chocolate chip cookies would give me worms in my stomach.
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darned mom.
All moms say that. I just don’t think they want us eating all the dough.
Raw cookie dough won’t give you worms, but it might give you salmonella, which is a bacteria, not a worm.
My mom always used that “stop making that face or it’ll freeze like that” line on me. I believed this so deeply that, until I was in my late teens, I would smooth out my face at night so I wouldn’t wake up all wrinkly.
To my credit, I have very few lines and wrinkles for a woman of my age. So there.