Things we thought we knew as children

(1) When Marilyn Monroe died, my mother felt sorry for her, and said she had worked so, so hard. I could tell it was some kind of self-sacrificing, patriotic, war-effort kind of thing.

I somehow knew she was the widow of former U.S. president James Monroe. After all, I had never heard of anyone else named Monroe but those two. Plus, a former First Lady would obviously have patriotic work to do.

I didn't know what Marilyn Monroe looked like (this was in 1962, before we had a television), but I knew that James Monroe had been president many years earlier. So Marilyn Monroe must have been very old, indeed, so old that even getting out of bed and doing those patriotic things must have been hard for her.

(2) I grew up in a neighborhood populated by university students. In those days, there was strict gender segregation: each house in our neighborhood would be occupied by men students, or by women students (who were called "co-eds").

From time to time, a crew would show up with a backhoe and dig a big hole in the front yard of a student house, to fix the sewer pipe. Naturally, from a kid standpoint, this was a very exciting event.

This only happened at the houses occupied by women students, never at the ones occupied by men students.

I asked my father why.

He explained that co-eds flush "foreign objects" down the toilet, which would get stuck in the sewer pipe and clog it.

I understood immediately. Those silly, irresponsible, irrepressible, fun-loving co-eds would impulsively grab some random object, like a textbook or a harmonica or a beach ball, run into the bathroom, and, giggling like mad, flush it down the toilet, just for fun.

I knew this must happen, because my elementary school class had gone on a field trip to the city's sewage treatment plant, and we had learned about all the strange objects that showed up in the sewage stream.

 

All the classes in elementary school had these huge cabinets and I was convinced that was where the teachers slept at night.

 

I thought the Hush Puppies from Long John Silver's contained hush puppy shoes. It took me yearly 25 years before I could even bring myself to try one, despite common sense.

 

We had a window above our toilet without a screen and during hot weather left the window open. Inevitably, a leaf would float down through the window and land in the toilet.
I thought that was what happened to feces if you didn't flush right away. It turned to leaves.

 

That grown ups always knew what they were doing

That I was more likely to be murdered than die of old age
(not me in particular, but that this was true for everyone)

That I had been abducted by aliens
(really... as in I really believed it when I was 10 or so, not that it really happened, although I still do have dreams about it...)

That certain people could read my mind

That it sometimes rained inside my house and my bedroom at night, but the rain was like the static you see on an untuned television rather than water

_

I suppose I was pretty fucked up as a kid

 

There was a point where I thought you put your penis inside a woman and peed to get her pregnant.

 

Until I read Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), I didn't know that the vagina and the anus were separate structures. Admittedly, I had not thought this through very clearly.

 

when i was little and i would watch tv, and people would laugh i thought it was actual people watching the tv show and i could hear them laughing

 

You reminded me of a good one.
It took me a long time to understand the concept of recorded music.
I always thought that when we listened to the radio, there was a band in the studio playing all the songs.

 

Me, too.

Also: my mother used to roll up two matching socks together, with the open end of one sock slipped over to hold it all together, making a little round-ish bundle of two socks.

In our sock drawers, we had these bundles, no loose socks.

I thought those two-sock bundles were called "pears" because they were shaped like the fruit.