A childhood belief about in the street

As a child I once got considerable ridicule from my father, and from the rest of the family to a lesser extent because, everytime we went riding I was convinced that I was seeing a significant number of flashlights that somebody had dropped into gutters alongside the roads. My father soon began to insist that what I was seeing in the gutters were beer cans and not flashlights. After I persisted in "seeing" flashlights for a while, my father would derisively say, "Oh yes, Schlitz flashlights and Budweiser flashlights!" I finally became convinced that I was indeed MOSTLY seeing beer cans. But I'm STILL not sure that I didn't see at least one actual flashlight in a gutter as the thing that got the whole affair started in the first place.