Can Aaron turn a clear misperception into a surprising gift?
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Story created & performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional vocals: Cori Birce
Art: Pete Whitehead
Original Music: thomas j. duke
Transcript
Aaron Calafato
Aaron Calafato
They laughed me out of the room. Oh, I was crushed. I'll tell you why they laughed, why I was crushed, and the whole story behind everything right after the music.
Cori Birce
You're listening to 7 Minute Stories with Aaron Calafato. This is season 4.
Aaron Calafato
Have you ever seen something one way? Maybe when you're younger, you see it for the first time, and then for the majority of your life, you see it that way until someone comes along and lets you know what you're seeing is not correct, or maybe you say something a certain way. Here's an example. I've said the word "Tuberware" instead of "Tupperware" for 25 years. It makes sense—it's a tub; you put things in a tub. I didn't see it. I didn't read it properly. And somehow, even being an educated person, I formed a habit and called it Tupperware until Cori was like, "What did you say?" I said, "Give me that piece of Tupperware, please." She goes, "You mean Tupperware?" I said, "Here we go. Another one for Aaron."
I'll give you another example: the Goodyear logo. I didn't realize until the age of thirty that it was like a boot or a shoe with a wing or feather thing on it. I think it's a wing, a Hermes kind of thing, right? I had no idea because at a very young age, when I saw it for the first time, it looked like an alligator. Open up a search engine—don't turn off the podcast while I'm talking to you—and look. Now, your eyes are probably going, "Yeah, it's a shoe or a boot with a wing thing on it." But on that wing, if you notice, there are little what look like teeth. I thought when I saw it, it looked like an alligator or some sort of half-dragon, half-alligator creature. It was cemented in my brain until one day I told someone, "Isn't it weird that Goodyear has an alligator as their logo?" The person with me was like, "That's not an alligator, dude." And I had that moment again. Oh, I felt like an idiot.
This perception and reality thing is a very interesting thing. That same phenomenon occurred when I was getting laughed out of the room during a second-grade presentation that I gave. This was right after summer ended, and the presentation consisted of two parts. The first part was, "Hey, tell us about a fun vacation or something that you did that was really interesting over the summer." And part two was just to tell us a very interesting fact that we might be surprised by. I was fired up about it. I put a lot of time into the presentation.
In the first part, I wanted to blow people's minds, and I told everybody in the class about a vacation that I took with my mom and my brother to a Holiday Inn. Now for me, this was a huge deal. We didn't go on vacation that much, or at all. My mom, my brother, and I lived in this old Civil War-era house. It had one air conditioning unit. My mom was a single mom teacher. She was doing everything she could, but things were tight a lot of the time. It was so hot in the house. We didn't have air conditioning where we slept. So for me, to go to the Holiday Inn, where they had a built-in pool, water slides, air conditioning—oh my god, it was like heaven to me. I thought it was the coolest thing. I could not wait to tell everybody in my class about it.
Well, after the first part, people started giggling. They started laughing at me. And I didn't understand why. I thought they were laughing because they were as excited as I was. But what I soon realized was one of the kids said something like, "That's not a vacation. That's just a stupid hotel." And I started to understand when I heard the other kids give their first part of the presentation when they talked about going to Paris and traveling to Mexico and staying at a timeshare and all that stuff, that my little Holiday Inn trip was pretty dumb.
The second part of the presentation was the fun fact part. So I figured I'd recover and hit them with some knowledge here that's going to blow their minds. Now the context behind this fun fact: starting when I was four years old, I'm in the car with my dad, we're heading north to downtown Cleveland on 71. That's one of the main highways as you're going to the city. We were on our way to a Browns game. And as dads do, he started pointing out landmarks. "Oh, that building. I knew this guy back in high school." And "Now I know two people who work in that factory." You know, the thing. I'm starting to do it now as a dad. It's a rite of passage.
As we're heading north on the highway and getting close to Cleveland, the Rust Belt essence starts to present itself. And when we started passing the steel yards, I would see the giant smokestacks and I asked my dad, "What's that all about?" And he said, "Oh, you didn't know?" I said, "No." He goes, "That's where clouds are made." Now, he wasn't trying to be facetious. I'm four. He's just trying to be fun and silly, but I didn't follow up with a clarification. And from that moment until elementary school, I thought that's where clouds were made.
So much so that it was the second part of my presentation. And as soon as I said that, they laughed me out of the room. And I was heartbroken. The class cleared out. The teacher was trying to console me. "We'll learn about clouds and where they come from this year. Don't worry." But this stuck with me. I couldn't get over this whole cloud factory thing and the stupid vacation thing. And I ended up talking to my pastor at the time. I remember after Sunday school asking if I could talk with him for a couple of minutes. And I told him the story. And he said, "You know what? I think you see the small things." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, not everybody can see them, but you have to be very disconnected from hardship. You have to be very disconnected from reality to think that a trip to the Holiday Inn wasn't special. Clean water, a safe environment, food, fun with your family—if that's not a miracle in this world, I don't know what is. You see? It's inside the small things where everything that matters exists. That is something that you should be proud to tell your class about."
And he said, "Now, the cloud factory—it's good to know the truth and the fact of the matter. But let me ask you a question," he said. "Even though you know the truth, which one would you prefer? The truth or your story?" I said, "I like the truth, but pastor, wouldn't cloud factories be even cooler?" He said, "You see? Heck, maybe one day, you'll tell a story about it."
Cori Birce
7 Minute Stories is created and performed by Aaron Calafato. Our senior audio engineer is Ken Went. Our resident artist is Pete Whitehead. Original music by TJ Duke. If you or your company needs help starting a podcast, Aaron and Ken's company, Valley View, does just that. Reach out to them at ValleyView.fm. Special thanks to our partners at Evergreen Podcasts, and I'm Cory Birce. Make sure to tune in next week for another story.
