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I remember my dad taking me to the movies once when I was a very young lad. It was some third-rate Frankenstein movie that I wanted to see in the early 1950s in Times Square in NYC. He had zero interest in the movie and all he wanted to do was doze off, but I kept pestering him for money to go out to the lobby and buy candy. After maybe my third or fourth trip he leaned over and told me that the manager had come over told him that I was going to the candy counter too often and that I’d have to stay in my seat or leave. I had a feeling that I was being tricked, but I wasn’t sure, and I stayed in my seat until we had seen the movie twice. (Actually, I saw it twice. My dad slept through it.) His ruse worked.
When I was very young my mother would sometimes take me to the movies in the daytime. Her method was to just walk in at any time she felt like it, no notice at all given to "start" times. So I thought it was the normal thing to walk into movies 15 minutes till the end, then get popcorn between showtimes & sit for the first hour of the same film until the part where we had started watching before & leave mid film.
It was news to me later on when I went to movies with my friends that they only went in at the start of showtime
One that comes to mind for me was my mom explaining how it was that she knew when I did something "bad":
"I've got eyes in the back of my head.", she'd say.
Guess when I was 6 or 7 I actually believed it and tried one day to part her hair and inspect her head while she was napping on the couch! I found no second set of eyes but I could never figure out how she knew stuff.
Another was that putting egg shells in the garbage disposal sharpened the blades. Thought of that one this morning and got the idea for this thread.
My mom told us that she was a witch. I thought that was interesting, so I told lots of people my mom was a witch.
Which eventually got back to her, and then she had to explain to me that she wasn't REALLY a witch. That was kind of disapointing to me.
Another example of things parents say.
When you want to do something, and they say "They'll think about it." Eventually, I came to understand that was just a long drawn out process of saying "no". LOL
When driving near Olympia, WA there were a bunch of mounds in a field. My mom said that's where people were buried a long time ago. Turns out they're called Mima Mounds.
About the time of the Mima Mounds, I came home from kindergarten and my kitten, Buttons, wasn't around. I asked mom and she wasn't sure where Buttons was. After a couple days she said the cat may have been eaten by a wild animal.
When I was in 9th grade we were having dinner with another family and began talking about our pets. I explained how my cat, Buttons, went missing and might have been killed by a wild animal many years ago. Mom jumps in and says, no, I ran over the cat while backing out of the garage that morning, sorry.
Unfortunately, Dad's political beliefs influenced mine for a very long time. If only he knew how his ranting of this or that would guide my life.
Take managed medical care for instance, of how one's doctor was just a gate keeper to the specialists, of how it was all a racket. That had me avoiding doctors for so long or misunderstanding what others said because of that "fear".
Or 2nd Amendment affairs for he was one to see "no one has need for such" or "if you want to fire a gun like that, join the army". If he were alive today, he'd might disown me for how I think now.
My mother would tell me if I crossed my eyes they'd stick that way. She also told me if I sat too close to the TV it would ruin my eyes. I was told not to crack my knuckles because I'd get arthritis which isn't true but they do say Chronic knuckle cracking may lead to reduced grip strength. My mother didn't buy much candy for us, she said chocolate caused acme. Another one she told me was not to play with frogs or I'd get warts.
I heard all those, too. But I particularly didn't believe the one about crossing your eyes, because I had never seen anyone with permanently crossed eyes, and I figured if every kid I knew had crossed their eyes at some point, there should have been a lot of adults walking around with them that way all the time.
At my inlaws house, they manufactured shoe taps. They had a big machine in the basement that would make quite a racket when it was running.
Therefore, my kids, when visiting their grandparents (my inlaws), were afraid of the shoe man. My inlaws played it up, saying things like "Shhhh! What's that noise? Must be the shoe man!" My kids were afraid to go down in the basement, and would often throw things downstairs. (Mostly potatoes from my MIL's potato bin. LOL).
My kids thought MY parents had a shoe man that lived in the basement too. They would throw toys and potatos down those basement stairs too. LOL
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