As I continuously creep closer to senility, I tend to think about the past more. For the last week or so I keep thinking back to the things adults would tell us that just weren’t true. Yes, it’s true, our parents told us lies. Now I’m sure they had their reasons, and some of them may have even been legitimate, but they were lies nevertheless. Here are some of the ones I remember.
Millions of Starving People
“There are millions of starving people in China and if you don’t finish your dinner I’ll send it there.” I don’t have an issue with “millions of starving people in China”, or even helping them, it’s the sending the food we didn’t eat to them. First, I never once saw a package of leftovers leave our house with an address “To: China and all the starving people therein.” And even if they did what kind of shape would they be in when they got there? Back in the sixties we didn’t have quite the capabilities for transporting items to the other side of the world like we do today. Although from what I have heard about communism in China, maybe it would have been an improvement.
Cross your eyes and they will stay that way
We all heard it, we would cross our eyes and our parents or grandparents or our busy body neighbors would tell us “If you keep doing that your eyes will stay that way.”. If this were true we would be living in a world where the majority of people would be cross eyed. Can you imagine what the world would be like? People would be seeing double. They couldn’t walk in a straight line or drive a car. We wouldn’t be able to function. Our elected officials wouldn’t know how to govern. Wait that is already happening.
Wait an hour before going into the water
When we were young we were lucky enough to have a summer home on a lake, the “little house on the lake” as you may have heard me refer to it in past posts. We were always told that we were not able to go swimming until one hour after we ate. If we didn’t wait, we would get all kinds of bad cramps and we would drown. When all the cousins were together there were 26 children under the age of 10 in the lake. As with most kids, we didn’t always listen. But none of us ever drowned. Or suffered cramps. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I realized the real reason. The adults in the room needed a break. Trying to keep watch over 26 little heads bobbing up and down in the lake had to have been tiring.
If you don’t stop it you’ll go blind
This is something I am sure you heard at one time or another. Especially if you were a young, adolescent, male. Of course, this edkj fisr qmrty. Sorry, I having trouble with my eyes today, it’s hard to see the keys. I better stop for now.
