the past

When I was in about 1st or 2nd grade, I saw a history book for the first time. As we would read them in class, I'd think to myself "Wow, someone actually had to sit there with a blank book, pen ready, all through out time and writting down anything interesting that happened!" That same year we learned about the Magna Carta...as we read that, I thought "That had to be really annoying to write down a chapter about some King signing papers...it must have been a boring year."
Then I remember comming home upset one day after learning about the Civil War because I had the idea that the book-writer kept dying and someone else would have to take his place in order to get it into history.
Later I was told that history books were written by people who studied the past...but then I thought to myself "I was right! Someone did have to sit there and write about importaint things when they happened in order to create the books now."

I used to think that the world was all black and white, just because of all the photos and videos! (I'm 14) I used to think I was like a Sim character from the computer game, being moved around by some big person with a mouse! (maybe this is God with a rodent pet, you never know!)

when I was growing up there was alot of talk about the cold war and the iron curtain....i could never understand this....how could there be an iron curtain??? what did they hang it from?? lol...and the cold war??? was it just cold there??? or was it about being sick with a cold??? was always strange to me...lol

When I was a child I would watch the evening television news with my parents. Whenever the newspeople would mention "Gorilla fighters", I remember thinking "Wow, those things are SMART!"

When we were little, my sister was unclear on the concept of "battlefields". She thought that a battlefield was a designated location where two opposing armies would have to go when they wanted to fight.

One day, she was playing with her Legos and my little green army men, when she had an idea: she took one of the flat green Lego sheets, mounted it on wheels, and stuck a towing attachment to the front, so that she could hook it up to her Lego truck, and proudly presented it to me, this innovation that promised to revolutionize military tactics forever: the portable battlefield! No more would armies be forced to miss fighting potentially decisive battles due to the lack of a convenient battlefield! They could just carry their own wherever they went!

The fact that I almost fell out of my chair laughing when she showed me this didn't discourage her in the least, and she went right on playing with her portable battlefield until her next inspiration struck, which had something to do with shaving off all of Barbie's hair.

In the early 50's when I was in the early elementary school years we had bomb drills in school where we closed the blinds and got under our desks - I thought we closed the blinds so the bombers would think no one was there and hid under the desks in case they came in just to make sure no one was there.

I was 10-12 years old in the mid-1960's during the Vietnam War and could not for the life of me figure out why the Viet Cong gorillas (guerillas) would shoot at American soldiers.

I used to believe in the olden days there was no color in the world, only black and white. I believed this because I saw old pictures that were only in black and white and also because old t.v. shows were only in black and white. I concluded during those time frames, color did not exist in the world.

I used to believe that the world was in all black and white back in "The good ol' days" and that the world came to colour when the wizard of oz figured out how to add colour to movies they did it for real life as well.

I used to think the civil war was fought by the Confederacy and the Union (like the Food that makes you cry) Soldiers

When I was annfant my mother wished to keep me away from an electricity sub-station by telling me that the bogey man lived there. It had the opposite effect to that intended, as I thought that the bogey man sounded nice, and I would go up to the sub-station to try to attract his attention.

Another thing: I was born in World War II, and my father was called up for army service. After the war i remember my mother saying to my father at one breakfast 'If there's another war you're not going in it!' I asked why. 'He might get killed', she said. Who would kill him, I asked. 'Some nasty men', she replied. As I had visited my father while he was stationed near the sea, I somehow thought that the war was a cave, and these nasty men lurked in a corner.

I used to believe that historical movies were made while the real thing was happening. Like when a country would go into a battle one of the knights on horseback would be carrying a video camera and taping it all for history. I was very disappoointed when I learned that I hadn't been watching the real King Arthur and Julius Caesar but just people pretending to be the. What a rip-off!

I thought guerilla warfare was "gorilla warfare" in which they trained special army gorillas to fight using camoflage techniques to keep from being seen. Each country had its own army gorillas and when people wanted to be sneaky and not be in a real war, they would send out the secret gorilla troops to hide in the forests and shoot each other.

Whoever had the most gorillas left at the end of the battle won.

when i was ten i was in the classroom with my teacher and some kids rushed in and excitedly announced that we were all going to die on sunday because some guy was going to blow up the world. i was terrified and criwed about it all the time, no matter how many times my mum tried to reassure me, explaining that they'd just overheard something on the news about saddam hussein and nuclear weapons. i was convinced that the world was going to blow up right up until sunday.

when i heard that Henry v111 had six wives, I thought he was married to all six at the same time. I had visions of him marrying a new wife as the others looked on.

I grew up in the 80's, and there were a lot of post-apocalyptic movies around, like Mad Max, Threads, and The Day After. I firmly believed that the "end of the world as we knew it" was just around the corner. My school uniform was green, and I thought the school had picked the colour so that after the fall of civilisation us kids would blend into trees better, have a better chance of evading Mad Max-style slavers, and maybe survive. On the special days we were allowed to wear street clothes to school I never would, as I just KNEW that'd be the day nuclear war broke out (somehow I never thought about it happening on a weekend or holiday). Aged 13 I changed to a school with a blue uniform, and I was really worried about my future survival. I was a lonely, strange kid, but learned alot about being self-sufficient just in case.