Who Knew?
I often discover things for the first time that almost everyone else was already aware of and took for granted. As an example, for many years I thought it was “for granite” not "for granted". I still prefer "granite".
Growing up with my parents included watching lots of old movies on black and white television. In so doing, I somehow morphed two actors (Van Johnson and Van Heflin) into a single person. We would watch a movie together and I would say, “there’s the guy that played the doctor in that other movie we saw last week”. My parents would argue, “He wasn’t even in that movie, boarhead!” This produced heated debates and went on for several years until the night we watched Until The Clouds Roll By. This was the only film ever made in which both of these actors appeared together. This was a full-on psychological trauma for me, nothing less than a non-surgical lobotomy. I had been betrayed by my own brain.
When I was about 14, I was asked to sit down to dinner with my new girl friend's family (the girl friend was new, not the family). I was nervous as I had rarely eaten at a strange family's house (neither her family nor their house was strange, just unfamiliar). Their entire evening meal protocol was the antithesis of what passed for normal at my house. They said grace, the portions were minuscule, "please pass this" and "please pass that", and cloth napkins no less. I was uncomfortable and felt pressured to contribute to the conversation. My brain sought relief from this ordeal and offered up something to escape the torture. It was so insightful I had to share it with them. I asked in a deadly serious manner "Did you ever notice how much pickles look like cucumbers?" This brought on a lot of spitting, choking, guffaws and table pounding. They thought I made a funny. I never let on that I honestly had no clue that the two were related and was actually trying to show how clever I was.