Not sure what age I was, maybe 4. I thought the music on the radio was live, that the musicians went to the radio station to sing and it was broadcast from there.

I grew up with a family that didn’t have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn’t spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn’t get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.

So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system … I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.

What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.

I’m Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn’t have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle … but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.

I used to think that there was a country called Cyclopedia, that was full of all kinds of fascinating things. I had a book all about it called “In Cyclopedia”.

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.

I used to think those coins in the fountain at the mall were just money people wanted to get rid of. One day, little me tried getting away with a skirt full of coins and got in trouble.

I mean, to be fair, a coin on the ground is fair game, and they don’t make these “unspoken rules” clear enough, so I couldn’t imagine a coin in a fountain not being free to just pick up.

I thought propeller planes worked by spinning so fast that they temporarily moved the gravity out of the way so the plane could fly.

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.

When I was little, I thought that “cash back” meant that the clerk literally just handed you money out of the register if you wanted it.

I assumed that most people were honest and only took the cash if they needed it. I didn’t know that it came out of your checking account lol.

That every time people had sex, the woman became pregnant. I thought that every sex scene in a film meant the film had to be stopped for 9 months until the actress could give birth.

That kissing is how you become pregnant. No, really.

There’s a park in Brasilia that has a “little rocket”. I refused to enter it when I was something like 4yo, because “What if it launches while I’m inside?”

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.

That male orgasm was painful. I got this idea from seeing their o-face somewhere and assuming it indicated pain.

I believed a kid who told me that every 4th of July, former US presidents who were still alive - which I somehow imagined was a large group - stood in a circle around the statue of liberty and held hands singing, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”

I thought the “Gulf War” was in fact the “GOLF War” and was happening at a golf course near our home… like … halfway to see uncle Peter!! 😅