Not Ice, and Other Stories

 

 

When I was a wee small child, I got a lot of things wrong.

Until I was about seven or eight, I had recurring ear infections, so I don’t know whether or not that played a role, causing me to mishear things. It sounds logical, so I’m sticking with it.

My oldest brother has always been amused by things I say, and several people in my adult life have suggested I try stand-up comedy.

The thing is, I don’t actually know how to write comedy. I just know that sometimes the things I misinterpret, or just the way I say something makes other people laugh. I don’t think it would work if I tried to do it on purpose.

Part of the reason some things happened was my total failure to ask questions when I didn’t understand something.

Why, you might ask? It wasn’t shyness or fear of being laughed at (I was laughed at quite a bit growing up). It was simply that for most of my early childhood, when I asked my mother, “Why?” about anything, she would reply with, “Because I’m your mother, and I said so.”

So I knew the answer. It didn’t solve anything for me, but it taught me to not bother asking.

When I was small, we had a very silly way of interrupting my mother when she was talking to another adult. Now, the three of us knew that interrupting adult conversations was a huge no-no, but in an emergency – and what isn’t an emergency to a child? – I would stand quietly for a few seconds and then, if they didn’t stop to pay attention to me, I’d say, “Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire.”

Granted, I thought that was the craziest thing in the world to say, and tremendously funny when I was three or four. But of course, I didn’t ask, “Because I’m your mother and I said so.”

There actually was a history to that one. My eldest brother came running in excitedly once when he was small, saying, “Mother, Mother, Mother!” while she was having a conversation. She excused herself from the adult conversation and turned to my brother and said, “You do not interrupt when adults are having a conversation. I don’t care what’s going on. If the house is on fire, you say, ‘Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire,' and then wait.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how ridiculous that statement was, and she and her friend both had difficulty keeping a straight face. But she solemnly went on. “Now, what do you want?”

It turned out that whatever it was my brother thought was such an emergency wasn’t for an adult. But because of that, he told my other brother when he was old enough to interrupt that that’s how it was done, and the two of them passed it on to me. They didn’t pass on the entire story, only what you had to say to my mother in order to interrupt. I was in school before I learned the whole story.

Another thing I was told as a child was to look up and down before crossing the street. This was the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. But again, “I’m your mother…” kept my questions unasked.

Common sense told me to look in both directions before crossing the street. But up and down? Why? Were there helicopters and submarines just waiting beyond my peripheral vision to kill me?

However, an obedient child, I dutifully looked at the sky and the ground before I crossed the street, while secretly looking to my left and right so I wouldn’t be hit by a car.

My mother thought I was being silly or a smart Alek or whatever she thought, but her complete lack of curiosity as to why I would do such a thing is a marvel. Maybe by the third child mothers are worn out with trying to understand their kids. Or maybe I was just too weird, and she didn’t want to go there.

Prayers were another fun place for misheard words. Being Catholic, we had a whole repertoire of formal prayers from which to choose. Somehow, The Lord’s Prayer I learned without a glitch. The Hail Mary had a word I wasn’t familiar with (womb) so I thought everyone was saying, “And blessed is the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” How Jesus was considered a wound was anyone’s guess. I assumed it was something to do with the wounds from being on the cross, since that’s the only way he was pictured in school. But what he had to do with fruit, I didn’t get until several years later.

The Hail Holy Queen had several wrong words in my version. I would pray, “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry poor vanished (banished) children of Eve, To thee to we send up our sides (sighs) mourning (I thought it was morning, though) and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then most gracious advocate, thy knives of mercy toward us (thine eyes), and after this, our exile, show unto us the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” It didn’t strike me as terribly odd, since prayers had lots of old fashioned words, so I just thought it was more of the same. Besides, so much was in Latin in those days, it could’ve been something Latin.

Then there was the Pledge of Allegiance, which I got mostly right. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for witches stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Since I didn’t understand half the words, putting witches into the mix was perfectly normal. There had been witch trials, after all.

But the best was a sign I saw at the bottom of the church parking lot, stapled to the telephone pole. I saw it every Sunday on the way to church. I had only recently learned to read, but I could only see the top line to read from a distance. While the parking lot also doubled as our recess yard in school (people who attended schools with real, actual playgrounds shudder that we played on a sloping lot of asphalt) we weren’t allowed to go close to the road, and the sign was right beside the road.

I was proud of my reading skills, but what I read made no sense to me. At the top of the sign were the letters N-O-T-I-C-E. Now, I only knew three and four letter words so far when I saw that sign. So, one fine Sunday morning I said, “Not Ice. What does that mean?” My parents didn’t know what I was talking about, so I pointed to the sign. “It says, ‘Not Ice.’ That doesn’t make any sense. What does it mean?”

My mother started to laugh, and it was several minutes before she had herself under enough control to teach me a new word: Notice.

Now, in our family, whenever something doesn’t make any sense, someone is bound to say, “Not ice, huh?”

I’ve had friends who have asked if we laughed constantly when I was growing up. No, I was a rather serious child, actually. They couldn’t believe these things happened without gales of laughter.

The end of childhood didn’t end my occasional failure to understand.

I had a rather untalented teacher in high school chemistry. She was essentially a warm body with a science degree, but chemistry wasn’t it. The only way she could explain anything to do with chemistry was word for word out of the book.

Can you put it another way? She could not. Unfortunately, not all of us could understand the concepts quite the way the authors of the book wrote them.

When the time came for our first exam, more than half of the class failed the exam. This was a class that now would be classified college prep or AP. The students in this class were not ones who were used to failing anything. Ever.

We reviewed the questions, and one in particular had people asking repeatedly for her to explain the concept. She did, using the same words over and over.

I have been convinced throughout most of my life that I have a short-circuit somewhere in my brain between my understanding of some things and my conscious mind. Either that or I’m possessed by demons.

This situation intervened just at that moment in class.

I raised my hand and asked, “Do you mean – ” and I launched into a 5 minute explanation of whatever concept was escaping my classmates. I used totally different words than the teacher had, actually saying it a different way. All around me I heard, “Oh, now I get it!” and “Is that what she meant?” The lights had come on. My teacher’s face lit up like the understanding of her students.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it!” she replied.

I wrinkled my face and said, “I don’t understand that.”

How I managed to not get sent to the principal’s office or at the very least kicked out of class, I don’t know. I wasn’t being a smart Alek. I truly didn’t understand any of what I’d just said. It was as if an alien was speaking through me. I guess my totally mystified look was the only thing that kept the teacher from sending me out. Instead, she angrily told the girl in front of me to explain back to me what I’d just said.

To this day I can’t do chemistry.  The closest I can come is a cooking recipe, but how it works is complete magic. Mine is not a chemically-oriented mind. I’m convinced my chemistry teacher ruined me for that science, and if I’d had a competent teacher, I might have actually understood the subject. Or not.

I had a similar experience regarding electricity. A friend was trying to explain how electricity works, and try as he might, he couldn’t impart that wisdom to me. He explained in several different ways. I finally explained it back, and he told me I was right. Again, I told him it didn’t make any sense.

He was exasperated and had run out of different ways to explain it. Someone who lived in the same house he did happened to come in and heard our discussion. That person then explained it to me, and I somehow understood what he was saying. His words weren’t that different, but enough that I got the concept. The second person was English, and my friend insisted that the only reason I understood was the accent.

Of course, then my friend followed up by saying, “Picture the wire like a faucet. Water runs through the faucet. Electrons do the same in a wire.  At that point (mind, I was an adult, if you consider someone in their 20s an adult) I picked up a wire, closed one eye and squinted at the end of the wire.

“Where’s the hole?”

I never did manage to live that one down. But my friend got to see firsthand how my brain short-circuit works. And while it’s frustrating to me, it certainly provides my friends with a certain level of amusement.