the world

My daughter, when she was small, used to think that when you took money to put in the bank, that the bank had seperate piles of everyone's money. So she had her seperate little pile in the bank and when she wanted to take some out, they would have to go to her little pile to get it.

I used to believe that adults had as much money as they wanted, a never ending supply. I used to think my mother was so stingy when she wouldn't give me a few dollars to buy lollies from the shop!

When I was younger I thought that whenever the ball went over the goal line in football it was a corner, regardless of who kicked it out. This meant that instead of a goal kick, you had to cross the ball into your own box! I never let the ball run out for a goal kick because of this. Not great cos I was playing for the school team at the time!

when I was young I used to believe David Letterman was the president. I mean, he was always on TV at night during "adult" time and he always wore a suit and tie..

my brother, as a kid, once mistook the name of the city "Miami" for "My Ami." A family friend, i guess, named robert (this was before my time), used to talk about "His Ami" all the time, so when our mother spoke of going to Miami, my brother blurted out, "No! It's not your ami, it's Robert's ami!"

When I was in junior high (1970s), I heard that if the Equal Rights Amendment passed, men and women would no longer have separate public bathrooms. That idea haunted me for years. I would actively worry about it. I would wake up in the morning and wonder if today was the day when the restrooms at the mall would no longer be separate.

When I was a senior in college, I asked my women's studies teacher if this was ever part of the ERA. Her face got sad as she told me it was part of the misinformation put out by those who were against passage of the ERA. And I knew I had gotten an object lesson in the power of propaganda.

I thought Oakland was in Oklahoma. I was a big Oakland Raiders fan, and when I was six I was really sad to hear we were moving to California from Pennsylvania, which was so far away from my favorite football team!

I used to believe…

k this is really bad cos i believed this until like a week ago - I've always thought that the Falkland Islands were in england. And this is REALLY stupid of me cos a.Im from scotland which is pretty near england b. Theres the word ISLAND in it, which i obviously forgot and c. I'm 17. Enough said.

For baseball fans:

I used to think there was a ballplayer named Nicky Sasky. It was later that I learned his actual name was Nick Esasky.

A short time later I heard about a player with a similar name. But this time I figured I had it right because if there was a Nick Esasky it stood to reason that there would also be a Mack Esasser, right? Wrong. Macky Sasser.

In order to get my 3 year old son to eat a good breakfast before going out to fish we told him that the fish only took bait that had egg breath on it. After that he was reminding me to cook eggs, and every worm had to have egg breath blowen over it before it went into the water.

When I was 6 or so, my mom told me she was going on a business trip to Seattle. I thought she meant she was going to see a friend named Attle (i.e., "see Attle"). She came back and was telling me about her hotel room. When she mentioned there was only one bed, I asked, "so where did Attle sleep?" She laughed at me.

My sister was about six or seven when my mother took up both out to Seaport Village in San Diego. It has some lovely wishing fountains. My sister and I both wanted to throw a penny in the fountain but my mother only had one. My sister every so quietly opened my mother's purse and pulled out her check book.

"That's okay mom," she said, "You can just write a check."

In Kindergarden, my teacher told us about the presidential race (Ford/Carter) taking place the next day. Imagine my disappointment and utter confusion when I woke-up the next day, turned on the TV, and did not see Ford or Carter racing around a track (a horse track specifically in my mind) to see who wins & becomes President.

I believed that the coliseum where basketball games were played was full of water and it was where people would go to fish from up in the rafters. I was kinda disappointed to find out what it really was.

Up until I was about 15, my dad had convinced me that Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers, I was eventually corrected by my teacher in front of the entire class.

As a child I enjoyed watching a tape of an educational special on dinosaurs. One line in the show went, "Dinosaur bones have been discovered in every continent except Antarctica." I asked my parents what "Antarctica" meant, and they (who must have misunderstood me, since I can't imagine them telling me this on purpose) said that it meant a place where there were many houses and buildings. Even years later, when I knew what the continent of Antarctica was, I still had this image of houses and buildings whenever I watched the tape and heard that line.