I hadn’t had “the talk” and assembled my own understanding about marriage = “the ability to touch each other’s private parts.”

I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house’s upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and “tag” touch the groom’s crotch and then pull her dress up, and… at that point I didn’t really understand what she would “have” under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically “tag you’re it” style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.

I didn’t have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn’t associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.

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.

We live inside the earth. Dogs say barf.

The semaphore homunculus lived in the stop lights at intersections.

In my Superman onesie (w/ cape), I could fly, but was never brave enough to launch from a high enough step on the stairs. I knew I was flying, but…

When I was a young lad I thought milk was cow pee and was super confused by the world.

that my grandparents remembered middle ages or even the dinosaurs

Americans/Canadians made out while they undressed before sex, like in the movies. English people calmly undressed in front of each other and then began having sex in a dispassionate and business-like fashion. I think some other kid heard an adult say it as a joke then passed it on as a learned truth.

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

Tigers are female lions.

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 usualy human voices.

That kissing is how you become pregnant. No, really.

I thought adults were smarter than me

rice turned water into soil

That the world used to be black and white. I once asked how the people making The Wizard of Oz knew when the world was going to change, so they could film the movie correctly.

I thought that the Michelin tire company was headquartered in Michigan, USA and not France. In my defense, most of the US auto industry is based in Michigan, and they sound similar.

Also: I will never accept the “fact” that the Michelin Man is named “Bibendum”