Children as a rule are gullible, but I was probably one of the most gullible that ever came along, at least in South Carolina.I believed basically anything I was told, and my father being what he considers to be a jokester, he would tell me things, I would just happily believe them. Some of these notions I gained from his "information" I believed until I was a teenager.
But he wasn't the only one. Something my mother told me I believed until I was in my 20s.
The first thing I remember believing that my father told me involved singing.
When I was 4 or 5, I noticed when watching various live performances on TV that the great singers, like Whitney Houston or Reba McEntire or Aretha Franklin would always raise one of their arms at the end of their performances. It was some sort of popular trend in the mid-1980s.
I asked my father one night why they did that, and he told me that it was because they needed to stretch their bodies for the final note, and it helped their lungs so they could breathe and get those notes out.
I believed that like it was the Gospel.
Fast-forward a couple of years when I was taking piano lessons and also singing in various competitions for church and school. I had a teacher, Joyce Wittig, who asked me why I continued to raise my hand at the end of a song, even when singing in groups, and I told her what my dad told me.
She looked at me like I had eight heads and explained to me why that was incorrect and idiotic.
You've all heard the expression that money doesn't grow on trees. My father never told me that. When I was about 4 or 5, he told me that, in fact, we had a money tree in the yard. I wanted He-Man and Thundercats action figures, so I spent the better part of a week's worth of daylight trying to find that tree in our yard off Boulevard Road in Sumter.
Eventually, my mother told my broken-hearted self that there was no such money tree.
But she wasn't immune from using my gullibility to her own advantage.
I hated taking baths as a child. I despised being wet. To this day, I only want to be wet when I'm taking a shower. I do not like pools, I do not like any form of moisture whatsoever.
But until I was probably 10 or 11 years old, I had to be practically beaten to get in the bath as a child.
One of the reasons was that I really enjoyed watching TV. I watched a lot of Nick at Nite (and my dad has another gullibility story related to that which I will recount in a minute), and my favorites around that time were Laugh In, the Donna Reed Show and My Three Sons.
I don't remember which one came on at 9, but it lasted an hour. I think it may have been Laugh In.
To get me to take a bath, my mother would let me stay up until 10 to watch all of it, but I had to go take a bath at 9:30. She told me that 9:30 was the time where the TV had the most commercials. Instead of five minutes, it had 10 minutes of commercials. So, I wouldn't miss anything.
I literally believed this until I was 23.
I was at a friend's house in 2004 or so, and told her I was going to the store to get beer at about 9:30. She said something about missing something, and I said, "No, it's OK. They play the most commercials at 9:30."
I was looked at again like I had eight heads.
As for Nick at Nite itself, until I was maybe 12, I believed that was actual TV. Like, I believed those were the actual modern TV shows that were playing at the time. I can't remember how my father explained away the black-and-white and color shows being on the same channel and alternating, but somehow he did.
The only "new" shows I knew about were Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing and Dark Shadows, which my grandmother wasn't supposed to let me watch, but she did anyway.
I seriously believed Mr. Ed and My Three Sons and Green Acres and all those other 60s and 70s shows were brand new.
I can't even remember all the things my father and mother told me when I was growing up. I believed everyone, though. My grandparents, my stepmother, my sisters.
One time, we were watching Unsolved Mysteries, and there was a story on some child murderer who had escaped from prison in Atlanta. I didn't know where Atlanta was, so I asked my sister, Cindy.
"Oh, I think it's up the road somewhere," she said.
I wouldn't sleep by myself for two weeks.
