Wednesday, October 03, 2007

The Diet of Worms

When we cook spaghetti, I often call it "worms" for the kids' sake. But then this week I took my daughter A out to lunch and we ate spaghetti. She loved it. She was shoveling it in her mouth like crazy and she finally stopped, spaghetti hanging out of her mouth, looked up at me and said:

A: Dad, how do they catch all these worms?

Me: You realize that spaghetti is not actually made of worms, right?

A (giving me a disbelieving stare): Then how do they cook spaghetti?

I was tempted to tell her that it grows on trees, but I refrained. It made me wonder what other jokes I assume the kids understand but that instead give them a warped view of reality.

4 comments:

  1. You can be assured that your children are damaged for life! My parents used to use the introduction, "Let me show you a trick I learned in the army!" before they demonstrated a short-cut to a simple task. I think I was a teenager before I realized that neither of my parents had served in the army! They also deny this, but they told me those snappy neon necklaces that you get at the circus will cause cancer. I would just shake my head and cry for all those poor, poor children. They were smiling, but little did they know....

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  2. My dad used to tell me that his boy scout troop had a gorilla mascot, and that the gorilla was the cook when they went on outings.

    My mom used to tell me that "all the vitamins are in the crust" of the bread and that's why she wouldn't cut them off.

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  3. hey! breadcrust is full of antioxidants. your mom was right that its good for you!

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  4. I kind of remember the gorilla cook story but I was never in the boy scouts. Dawn says she remembers it that way also. Forgot to check with Lynn when I saw her. I'm sorry I lied to you! The truth of it is that the cook on campouts was a mean tempered chimpanzee named Clarence Darrow! Yes, the humans he hung out with were lawyers. You know how campfire ghost stories get told on dark moonless nights. Well, if Clarence didn't like your story, he'd give you one of the most awful raspberries you'd ever want to hear...ah, hear for someone else's story anyway.
    Of course, this was when I was a kid, I was at Space Ranger camp with Flash Gordon and Merciless Ming. So, now you have the truth of it.

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