Little Stories: The Underwater Subway
How I completely misunderstood what my father was telling me about an upcoming trip.
Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see more Little Stories here.
There’s a great episode of This American Life called “Kid Logic,” which is about children coming to amusingly erroneous conclusions based on the limited information available to them. For example, the episode begins with the story of a girl who’s left a tooth under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy and then wakes up in the middle of the night to find her father putting money under her pillow. The obvious conclusion would be, “Dang, the Tooth Fairy is just a story that my parents made up,” but this girl instead thinks to herself, “Wow — the Tooth Fairy is my dad!”
I imagine most of us had moments like these during our childhoods. Here’s one of mine.
I grew up on Long Island, but my parents and I would sometimes go to New York City to see various attractions. Usually my parents would drive, but on this particular day — I think I was about eight years old, so it would have been the early 1970s — we were planning to take the Long Island Railroad to Manhattan (I no longer recall what we were planning to see there), and then we were going to take the subway to Brooklyn, where my older brother lived.