when i was little i didn't understand the phrase, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." i was around pigs occasionally. i can't remember if we ever had a pig, but we certainly had friends who did. i thought their ears were kind of soft. i thought, "why can't you make a purse out of their ears?"
as you're growing up, you reach a point in life where you realize you aren't normal or your experiences haven't been normal. when you're very little, of course they're normal - they are all you know. and then you meet the real world and you find out that other people don't do things the way you and your family do them. i'm sure this happens to everyone, not just to people who grow up on a farm in a country with not very many farms. [there were 3 times as many farms in the united states in 1935 than there are now, and there are 2.5 times as many people in the us today. (from here.)] everybody is weird, right? just weird in different ways.
my moment came - and i have a vivid memory of this - when i was in preschool and i was playing over at a friend's house. maybe i was even spending the night? it came time to change clothes (to go swimming? go to bed?), and we went into the bathroom to change clothes, me and this little girl who was my friend. i was like, "people change their clothes in the bathroom?" in my house becky and i got dressed in the kitchen in front of the heater. that was the first moment i can remember where i thought, "oh. not everyone gets dressed in the kitchen. we do things differently at my house."
different AWESOME, obviously. but different.
in kindergarden i also once made a girl cry at lunch because she had a white bread sandwich and i told her that my mom said that white bread is bad for you. but that is a story for another day.
When I was in first grade, I made someone cry because I didn't understand how she could actually believe in Santa Claus. Yup, I ended that myth for her.
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