Misunderstood

Every once in awhile my kids will mention something that they didn’t understand when they were younger.  Often the misunderstanding is the result of a subtle difference in meaning for a word, or sometimes it is because they don’t entirely understand h0w something works.  The other day I was driving YaYa home from oboe, and she mentioned that when she was in first grade, her  classroom teacher was talking about writing checks.  One of the students said something along the lines of “it doesn’t matter if you don’t have money to buy something; you can just write a check.”  The teacher corrected them and explained that it most certainly does matter.  You have to have money in the bank to write a check, otherwise you will end up in jail.  Bewildered, YaYa said that I wrote checks all the time and didn’t have to have any money.  Her teacher said that probably wasn’t true, but YaYa didn’t believe her, and she told me in the car that she was terrified for a year that I was going to end up in jail every time she saw me write a check.  She kept waiting for the police to come and collect me.

I have several fond memories of misunderstandings when I was a child as well.  For example,  my aunt and uncle once took a little vacation to Winnipeg, Manitoba.  My mom watched my cousin Brian.  Not a reader, and definitely not a speller at that stage of my life, I thought they were going to Winnipeg to “win-a-pig.”  I could not figure out why they came home with a Canadian dollar bill and special Canadian coins, but did not come home with a pig.

Often in the winter, my father would go into town for a turkey shoot, where he and lots of other townspeople played the card game shoot, and turkeys were given out as prizes.  One time I asked him where the turkey shoot was.  He told me it was in the community building, which at that time had just been built on the south edge of town.  It was a metal corrugated building, a gathering place for the town.  For years, every time we would go to the community building I would very closely examine those crinkly metal walls, trying to figure out how there could be no bullet holes when so many men were shooting turkeys inside the building.  It definitely didn’t sound very safe to me.

My aunt was a teacher.  While she was teaching during the school year, my mom watched my younger cousins.  Sometimes we had them overnight when my aunt went to a workshop.  She had to attend a certain number of workshops every year.  I was always terribly sad, because I thought that the school was making her visit a factory and do hard labor for many, many hours.  I couldn’t figure out why someone would have to do this when they were a teacher at a school.  My mom always said, “Oh, the school board makes all the teachers go to workshops.”  I thought this was so mean.

To make matters worse, at the end of every Sesame Street episode on television, there was a little announcement, “This program is sponsored by the Children’s Television Workshop.”  I thought that meant that in order for me to watch Sesame Street in my comfortable living room, a group of desolate children were forced to do hard labor in a gloomy factory.  I felt guilty about watching Sesame Street every day, but I loved Cookie Monster and especially Oscar the Grouch and Snuffalufagus too much to stop watching.  After the program, though, I’d go off and think about those poor children, suffering for the sake of muppets.

I also thought that when I mailed something to one of my aunts that lived far a way, the post office workers dropped the letter onto a special grey conveyer belt that launched out of the post office and created a direct conveyer belt line to the post office where my aunt lived, delivering the mail instantly.  Obviously, I had a good imagination.  When someone finally explained to me that mail was delivered via truck, the whole process of mailing a letter lost some of its luster.