neighbourhood

My mum told my sister and I that we were moving to a house with a disco in the attic and a swimming pool in the cellar...she kept this going for weeks and my sister told all her friends at school. I spent ages trying to figure out how the water would stay in the cellar and how people could swim in the dark (cellars were always dark in my childhood imagination). When mum told us it was only a joke, my sis had to tell all her friends at school! meanwhile i was still trying to figure out if it WAS possible to have a swimming pool in your cellar and worried for weeks about electricity and the dangers of filling up your cellar with water!

I used to think buying ice ceam from the truck was the same as taking candy from a stranger, so I had to be very, very careful of the bad man in the truck. I had to buy it when my mom wasn't around so she wouldn't know I broke the rules.

We were told if the music was playing from the ice-cream van that they'd run out of ice-cream.
Needless to say, excitement on seeing the van was always short-lived!

I used to believe the older boy next door would chase me down and kill me with a chef's knife if I went over there or look at his house. I still think that, even though they moved away long ago.

In the alley behind our house, up on the telephone wires, was a rectangular box a foot or so long.
I believed that I saw it slide back and forth along the line between the poles, its purpose- to knock the snow off.
Now I know that it was just an (immobile) weatherproof connector for the wires, and my seeing it move must've been a dream.

We had friends that had a swimming pool and to prevent our son from peeing in it we told him there was a chemical that would turn the water purple if indeed he did pee in it. He was in and out of the pool quite often going in the bushes!

When I was little, one time when I was little I needed to get some new school shoes. I tried on a pair that were quite uncomfortable but I decided to choose them because I thought that the person who made them would be sad if no one got them.

I used to believe that the storm water pipe, that disappeared under the ground, at the end of our road was a tunnel to the devil and hell.

My husband's family used to go hill walking a lot when he was a very small boy. In order to encourage him up the slopes his father used to tell him that there was an icecream van at the top of the hill. Needless to say when they did get to the top they had always just missed the van, luckily his dad could always see it at the top of the next peak... He was a teenager before he finally realised that he never was going to get that icecream.

We lived in Fort Davis, Panama, when I was 4 yrs old. Mom commented, probably to a visiting neighbour, that "it's so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk!"

... It didn't work.

My neighbors across the street own horses, and when I was small I thought the horses were the people who lived in the house, since I never saw the human owners. And I thought that the horses would learn to talk every new years' eve, because then they would throw loud parties where everyone yelled.

At night, if you look up at tramlines, the light from car headlights etc reflects on them - my son used to think that this was the electricity flowing through to our homes!

I never stepped on cracks on the footpath and always tried to take only one step between the divisions - don't know why - I was too scared not to do so!

I used to think that my grans house was just over the hill i could see from my bedroom window. I couldnt understand when we visited that it took so long to get there. I asked my dad why he didnt just drive over the hill, and he said it was because the farmer would get mad. I walked up there with a friend years later and was disappointed to see miles and miles of fields!

I watched a documntary with my parents discussing "sludge" that aired on 60 minutes. Throughout the program they showed footage of large trucks pushing the sludge around. For whatever reason, throughout the program these trucks were backing up to push the sludge around. Well, when big trucks back-up, an identifyable alarm sounds to alert anyone behind truck . . . "beep, beep, beep." I was convinced that this sound was the "sludge alarm" (like a tornado alarm) and that you had to run away or be buried by sludge.

My parents used to take me to the mall a lot when I was a kid. The mall used to look a lot bigger on the inside than it did from the outside (at least it did to my 4-year-old eyes). My dad told me this was due to the fact that a man who worked for the mall would punch a button to shrink the building down at the end of the day. I believed him. So whenever I would whine about not wanting to leave the mall, my dad would tell me that we only had 5 minutes before "the man" pushed the button, so we had better get out of the mall quickly before it shrank and trapped us inside.