My grandfather said, “Arf!” He’d come around a corner, see you coming the other way and “Arf!” After while, this pre-kindergartener started saying it back – “Arf!” “Arf!” as a mutual greeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For decades I thought he was just mimicking a dog, and in fact, that interpretation of what he was doing led to a whole life of making animal sounds, weird sounds, character voices and impressions of celebrities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But decades after he died I came across an old Popeye comic from the\u00a01930s in which Popeye exclaimed “Arf!” when he was surprised by something. In fact, Popeye said this all the time! I suddenly realized my grandfather had been quoting Popeye from his youth and not greeting me but exclaiming surprise at encountering someone charging around the corner at him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine, a whole life of making sounds based on a fortuitous but erroneous interpretation! I wonder how many of the foundational ways we feel about life and about people, upon which we build entire life-guiding narratives are actually based on misconceptions and\/or misinterpretations, for better or worse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My grandfather said, “Arf!” He’d come around a corner, see you coming the other way and “Arf!” After while, this pre-kindergartener started saying it back – “Arf!” “Arf!” as a mutual greeting. For decades I thought he was just mimicking a dog, and in fact, that interpretation of what he was doing led to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-album","category-snippets-bits"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paauzo-1Lh","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6776,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6775\/revisions\/6776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/melanie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}