I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years

I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.

One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan

That hiding candy (or other things people wanted) was a universal property of grandmothers.

English is not my first language, but I had heard the expression “search all nooks and crannies”, but thought the last word was grannies - cranny is an unusual word.

Now,my own grandmother was in the habit of hiding candy for us to find. I thought the expression existed because all grannies hid things. Search all nooks and grannies!

I grew up with a family that didn’t have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn’t spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn’t get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.

So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system … I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.

What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.

I’m Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn’t have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle … but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.

That encountering quick sand in real life was a real possibility every day.

Bonus: My kid doesn’t believe that Santa is magical, he just has really advanced technology.

My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.

So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.

I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.

Growing up, we had a neighbor in the Air national guard who was a boom operator on KC-135 refuelers, meaning he controlled the boom that comes out the back of the airplane and transfers fuel to other aircraft. The boom operator lays face down on a bench and looks out a window in the back of the plane to control the boom.

When I learned that they “operate on their belly”, I somehow interpreted that to mean he performed medical operations on people’s bellies.

It didn’t even make sense to me at the time but I figured there must be some special reason that the operation had to be done while airborne and I was impressed that our neighbor was not only a doctor but an airborne surgeon who specialized in this one belly surgery that couldn’t be done on the ground.

I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

That adults had it figured out.

That average people actually care about anything but themselves.

That there is justice in the world.

That the Empire State Building is a restaurant named Empire Steak Building.

That a blowjob involved the act of physically blowing air on the penis. When I found out it actually involved sucking, I was like, “Oooh…yeah that sounds much more pleasurable.”

That every time people had sex, the woman became pregnant. I thought that every sex scene in a film meant the film had to be stopped for 9 months until the actress could give birth.

When adults said things like “In this day and age, nobody says please and thankyou any more”, I misinterpreted “this day and age” as “The Stayan Age”, which was our current age, which obviously followed on from Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.

There’s a highway that formed a loop around the city where I grew up and we used it pretty regularly, but mostly only the western half (since we lived on the west side of town). My parents explained the concept to me that it had “belt” in its name because it circled around the city like a belt goes around a person. This idea intrigued me and I eventually asked my parents if someday we could drive all the way around it. My dad seemed kind of surprised but said we could sometime. I got excited and started planning for things we would need, like a tent and food, since it would obviously take a long time.

The highway’s only about 25 miles/40 kilometers long.