I was driving earlier this evening, saw a sign and thought of it. Is there anything you thought or believed as a child, that you look back at today and laugh?


When I was a little kid, I knew what these signs meant.



They were always right in front of stores, right by the door. Being the smart child that I was, I deduced this was where you parked if you just had to go in and use the bathroom.

I mean, why else would there be a picture of a guy sitting on a toilet?

lol- that's pretty funny.

I remember being very young, probably 3 or 4, and walking into the kitchen where my mom was preparing dinner. She was frying chicken, but she was also preparing a yellow squash dish as well. I remember seeing these laying on the counter while the chicken was frying...



and deciding that they were pre-cooked chicken legs.



.

When I was young I thought the red lights on the transmission tower was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!

In elementary school I didn't know you learned things and studied. I thought you either knew it or you didn't. I didn't understand how people knew things like multiplication tables. I thought I was dumb since I didn't know everything they did. Their parents must have talked to them or something. Maybe they were first born.

Listening to the radio to me all songs were music - “Winston tastes good, boom, boom, like a cigarette should”. “Chock Full of Nuts is that heavenly coffee, heavenly coffee, most heavenly coffee money can buy”. It took me a little while to separate songs from advertising.

When I was younger than 8 (we moved) there was a window in the bathroom that made a street light look like a TV rendition UFO circa 1965. The window was textured not frosted. I finally figured it out on my own but until I did it scared the crap out of me.

When I was young, my brother once told me the gasometers along I-44 heading into St. Louis held Coca-cola. When they were low, it meant they were running short on Coke this year. The whole family played into it for years until someone straightened me out.

This is what a gasometer looks like. They were removed a decade or so ago.

I couldn't figure out what this sign meant. There was no internet and I didn't want to ask someone, so I looked everywhere, dictionaries, encyclopedias. When I got my booklet to study for my driver's permit I saw the section on signs.

D'oh!

Sales Tax.

Virginia didn't have a sales tax when I was growing up, I remember going to NC and buying a model airplane at a shopping center and handing the clerk my $2.

She told me it was $2.05 or whatever . "Duh" , I asked her what was the extra 5c for...sales tax.

Which I had no clue the meaning of.

Thank you , that kind man that overheard me talking with the clerk, and gave me the nickel

All the way home, I was twisting my mind wondering why there was a tax on selling something.

I thought lesbians were just folks from Lesbia. Not joking here.

Thanks to a somewhat mischievous older female cousin, I was convinced that the windmills on the farms in Kansas were big fans to keep the cows cool.

As a kid my Mom had special Napkins in a hall closet. I knew we used cloth napkins when we had Holiday family dinners and used the good china. I could not figure out what purpose these could serve. She did explain the enema bag though that was in the same hall closet.

quote:

I couldn't figure out what this sign meant. There was no internet and I didn't want to ask someone, so I looked everywhere, dictionaries, encyclopedias. When I got my booklet to study for my driver's permit I saw the section on signs.

It is short for pedophile, BTW.

we had a thread on this quite a while back, but I got the lyrics wrong on many rock songs, like "Taking care of sisters", instead of "taking care of business" by Bachman turner overdrive.

I thought salt and pepper were opposites of each other; if you had too much salt, just add some pepper to neutralize out the salt and vice versa.

I couldn't figure out why anyone would sell their garage.......and how does one get the new garage home?

Well, I guess this will make me sound like an idjit, but...

I recall that I became confused and somehow I got the idea in my head that everybody's birthday was on January 1st. Everyone has a birthday every year, and every January 1st, it's a new year, ergo...

Told ya

Oh, and when I was about 6 or 7 I asked my mother where babies came from. I knew that women became pregnant, but I didn't understand the process. My mother gave what I think was an appropriate answer for a child of that age. She said that when a man and woman meet and fall in love, they get married. Once they're married, the woman becomes pregnant and nine months later, voila!
So, I thought about this for a time and concluded that there was some automatic process that took place in a woman's body that caused her to become pregnant- asexual reproduction. OK, got it. A few days later, I'm with my mom standing in line at a grocery store checkout and I turned around to see this gal, ready to give birth at any moment- full term. I thought to myself "Hey, she fell in love and got married!", so I waggled my finger at her and said "I know what you've been doing!"



My dear old mom rang little Para's bell.

Now that IS funny. Ha !

It really is, and my mom never knew that I knew, but that night, I overheard her tell that story to my dad and both of them laughed.

Wagging your finger...that cracked me up.

In my earliest memories driving up the New Jersey Turnpike past the Bayway refinery in Elizabeth, NJ, I remember thinking that clouds were made by the refinery smoke stacks. It was a revelation. "So that's where clouds come from!"