I mentioned Mrs. Hearn, my third grade teacher, a couple of posts ago. She gave me a way to spell "arithmetic," she had sons who would come to visit her every now and then, and looking back, I feel so bad for all the giggling they had to endure when they did. (They were awfully cute, though.)
One day, Mrs. Hearn apparently heard someone talking about cooties. Whomever it was probably accused a classmate of having them or something. Mrs. Hearn immediately told all of us to listen to her, and, with an extremely, seriously matter-of-fact tone, she said that "cooties" was not a word she wished to hear again. Did we know what "cooties" were, even? The answer I heard her give was "headlights." That made absolutely no sense to me, because headlights are on cars, and we didn't have cars, and maybe there was a grown-up use of the word that we weren't in on. Honestly, "headlights" stayed with me much longer than it should have.
Head lice. She had said, "head lice."
Well, that made sense, but I did feel really, really thick for not figuring that out sooner.
2 comments:
So many things we misunderstand as children. My grandpa referred to distances in rods -- I pictured a fishing rod, but weren't they different lengths? Yards? I pictured our immense yard. (We lived in the county.) Soil bank? I pictured people bringing buckets of soil to the local bank and depositing it in their "soil bank". (Actually, it was a 1950s-60s federal program to pay farmers not to plant a certain number of acres; it was intended to stabilize commodity prices. I told you we lived in a rural area) I was in my 20s before I realized that people grow the celery we buy in the grocery store, it doesn't just magically appear there.
Oh, and Smokey always wondered as a child who Richard Stans was and why his name was i the Pledge of Allegiance. ("...and the republic for Richard Stans.")
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