There was a park near my house where often cops would sit to catch speeders. Driving past one day, I didn’t see a cop and I told my parents I was surprised by this. My folks told me that they were there, just undercover. I asked where, and they pointed to a woman walking a dog and they told me it was an undercover speed dog. For years I’d point out suspected speed dogs when we’d drive places. I am not a smart man.

In the 80s when i was a child there were billboards with PSAs saying don’t drink and drive. I’d promptly scold my parents if i caught them taking a sip from their soft drink after hitting the McDonald’s drive through.

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

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

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…

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 kissing is how you become pregnant. No, really.

That a bon fire was a “bomb” fire and therefore, very loud and very dangerous.

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 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.

That there were little gnomes inside the doors of the cars and that they were in charge of raising and lowering the windows, especially in the automatic cars.

Tigers are female lions.

We live inside the earth. Dogs say barf.

For a while, I thought kissing was how women got pregnant.

It MIGHT have had something to do with getting a half sibling in spite of my father saying he hadn’t had sex with the mother. Religion makes people weird, is it really that big a deal to admit you had sex out of wedlock, when everybody already knows you got someone pregnant?