I've been an avid reader for as long, I think, as I've been able to read. But I've also learned there's only so much that one can take from books and put to real life, also from a young age. I don't know why some of these (now humorous) past moments came to mind the other day, but I thought I'd share.
1. Using spit to test if an iron is hot. I think I read about this from "Little House on the Prairie" (or one of its relations). I was old enough to be using an iron, and thought I'd be smart and use the spit test. But I >also< thought that since the mouth contained so much spit already, why not just use my tongue. Tongue on hot iron=pain! Like Hume's example of a child learning from very minor experience not to put one's hand on something hot, I quickly came to the conclusion that I'd just trust the iron's having been on for a while was a sufficient indicator of its heat index.
2. Also from the "Little House on the Prairie" stories: one can make a snow angel by falling down in the snow and moving one's arms and legs about. Mind, in the "Little House" scenario, they were probably dealing with something like 3 feet of snow. I read these books when I was growing up along the Gulf coast in Texas, where >any< amount of snow meant SNOW! So we were visiting relations up in Pennsylvania one winter, and I remember the day we left when there was maybe 2 inches of accumulated snow on the ground, I was seized with the inspiration to make a snow angel. I got up on a tree stump, and did a big-assed belly flop on what turned out, to my injured surprise, to feel like totally solid ground. What the hell? That really sucked. (On the up side, one winter when I was living in Chicago and we had something like a 2-foot accumulation, I had a moment when I revisited my unsuccessful throwing-myself-into-the-snow desire. I put aside my age-old fear of hurting myself, took a big running start from the sidewalk outside my building, and hurling myself into a drift alongside the front door. That was positively glorious! So glorious, that after I dug myself out, I went back to the sidewalk and did it again. And again. And again. Any neighbors watching must have thought I lost my mind. But it was like falling into a gigantic feather bed. Sweet!)
3. Cookbooks. One weekend I was feeling all grown-up and decided to make scrambled eggs. Not knowing how to intuitively, I got down the cookbook, looked up the recipe, and went at it. Of course, the recipe was one to make scrambled eggs for like, 6 people. But I didn't know to look for that kind of information and divide down appropriately. I probably didn't even know how to divide at the age I was at. So I went to town, and was having a great time at it until mom came in and saw what I was doing, and had a minor fit. Mind, in my youth our family had to count pennies like crazy, so the eggs we had on-hand (all of which I probably used) were scheduled to last 2 weeks or something and there I was blowing it all away on one breakfast for me. Lesson in reading the cookbook carefully!
Do you have any similar stories you'd like to share?
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