“And to think I thought it was a kind of tool…”
It’s kind of interesting what we think when we’re little, or when we’re just plain ignorant. That lovely time in life when we don’t know better, and we don’t think to ask about it. For as you know, when you’re little, you’ll believe anything because you don’t know better. One of my early experiences was when I was first introduced to the concept of the fire drill during kindergarten. For the record, I thought it was a kind of tool. I thought it was a special kind of tool. Never could figure out why they called it a “fire” drill, but I was fairly sure it was a tool. So Miss Kirk and Mrs. Gibson (my kindergarten teachers), like most kindergarten teachers, showed us how a fire drill worked before we had our first fire drill. No alarm, but we did go outside and stand facing the school. I figured that this was where they kept the fire drill. But Miss Kirk and Mrs. Gibson never showed it to us. Instead, all they said is that this is “just practice”. I’m thinking, “Just practice for what? You said you had a fire drill and I want to see it!” I found it all to be a rather pointless activity, considering that they never even showed us the fire drill, after all. It wasn’t until later that I learned exactly what a fire drill was, after we had an actual fire drill, alarm and all, and we did the same thing for the alarm and they called it a fire drill. Another thing I believed when I was little was in regards to Looney Tunes. As you probably well know, everything that the Coyote tried to use on the Road Runner was branded “Acme”. Acme birdseed. Acme firecrackers. Acme exploding tennis balls. You name it, it was Acme. Well, when I was really little, we lived in New Jersey (Glassboro, specifically). Well, as anyone who lives in or has lived in South Jersey knows, there’s a chain of grocery stores by the name of (you guessed it) Acme. Well, since I’d been to the Acme store before I’d seen the Coyote’s Acme-branded gadgets, I gathered that he got it at the local grocery store (go store-brand!). Hey, I was three – what do you expect? But to prove that no matter how things change, the more they stay the same, let’s fast forward to college. I’m at home for the summer. Now mind you, we get HBO at my house. Well, my father was into watching something on TV called “The Sopranos”. How strange, I thought. My father is watching a bunch of singers all the time on TV. I was too busy with work to pay much attention to it, so I didn’t bother to investigate. Just thought it was weird that my father was so interested in watching high-pitched singers, since it was very much not like him. Then I find out that The Sopranos is actually a gangster-type show. Now it all makes sense, once I heard the name “Tony Soprano” passed around a couple of times. I look back on these kind of things, and I just laugh and laugh…
Date posted: January 21, 2003