Out of Nowhere

I was sitting here finishing up the day's work when I realized I was singing a favorite song from my youth-- probably of that particular youthfulness at the right, when I was showing off my skirt to my cousin Steven. It was "Winter Wonderland," done now in my dotage with fancy jazz stylings.

I sang the part where the song goes:

In the meadow we can build a snowman
and pretend that he is Parson Brown...

But when I was a kid, I had no idea what a parson was-- never encountered the word, I think, until I started reading about the adventures of British children. So I always sang it this way:

In the meadow we can build a snowman
and pretend that he is parched and brown...

It didn't make any sense to me then, either-- how could a snowman be parched and brown? He'd melt first. But, still, I have to admire my little-girl brain trying to work some kind of logic into the lyrics, inserting the only words that seemed to fit the sounds. I'm probably--we're all probably--still doing this now, encountering things that we don't understand and finding that our subconscious brains scramble to find a solution, even if it doesn't work.

I don't know if anyone still reads this blog since I've gotten so lazy about posting, but I thought it would be fun to hear other people's examples of this kind of stuff from their childhood.

So spill.  ¶ 2:24 PM 18 comments