neighbourhood

Once my cousin told me that a Robber lived across the street from her. I thought Robber was the name of a man. I would always look for him, see a man, and think," I wonder if that's Robber."

When I was about five, we had a watertower in our little town. One day, I asked my mom, "Mommy, what is in that big tall thing?"
She told me, "Raisins."
So I always believed that there were raisins in watertowers!

I used to believe…

you know those shops that say 'open 7 days', well, when i was 3, i used to think that because 3 was such a BIGGG number, then 7 must be even bigger. i thought that all those shops were telling us how many more days they would be open 4, and were having closeing down sales. i got pretty worried because i thought Sydney was gonna become a ghost town because business was leaving it.

When I was about seven years old I remember seeing the "adult store" sign while riding in the car and thinking that I can't wait until I am big enough to start wearing adult sized clothing instead of little kid sizes. My Mom had to gingerly explain that it was not that kind of store.

when I was a kid of less than 10y I thought I was connected to my home with an invisible sort of elastic band and I had to be careful as to how many times I took a bend, so as not to get tangled with my "cord" ] afraid of not being able to return home properly if I did. And when my mum chatted with her neighbours and I stood aside waiting till she wanted to go back home, I often got very cross when she (or the neighbour) walked over or through my invisible cord. Bizar isn't it?

When I was 10 or so I saw the movie Jaws. I believed that he could some how transfer from water to water, such as the ocean, to my bath tub, to my pool or even a puddle(specially the big one at the end of my drive way). So when I went swimming, (some how) I saw Jaws and would flip out and literally almost drown myself. I honestly believed that I was being eatten alive in my shark infested pool.

Oh those silly years of giving my parents heart attacks with my over active imagination.

To stop me from bringing stones home from the beach, my dad told me the man that counts the stones at the end of the day would be sacked if i kept bringing the stones home. I was happy enough with that explaination untill I was about 12. Then I asked him, how does he count the stones at the very bottom. He still reminds me of this whenever we're at the beach!

As a child, I thought Belle and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast used to live at the Lawrence University Memorial Chapel. Everytime I pass it, I still joke about Belle living there.

When I was in junior high I was on a baseball team. We had practice every Thursday. Well, one Thursday I went to the park early, and the gate was closed. I had to think for a moment if I was allowed to open it and as soon as I did, really loud echoing sirens started to go off. I was really scared that I alerted some kind of security system and was going to be arrested until I realized that every other Thursday, because our city has a lot of refineries, alarms and sirens go off in the afternoon as some kind of emergency test, and you can hear them across the whole city. Thankfully, that's all that it was and I didn't get thrown in jail for trying to get into a park.

In my old neighborhood where I lived when I was little, there was an old man that lived in the house across the street. He would always play a really loud organ at night, and I thought that inside his house was Dracula and Elvira and other scary things that would wake up and roam the streets whenever he played the organ. This really freaked me out, especially at Halloween.

In the late 70's/early 80's, there was a restaurant chain called "The Big Yellow House". It was a big two-story buliding, shaped like, well, a big yellow house.

They were all built exactly the same, and in each of them, the restroom (the mens', at least) had this little door in the wall, maybe 3 feet tall. It was probably some sort of storage area or something, but I imagined that it was some sort of secret passage that led to a magical world. I always tried the knob whenever I went in there, but alas, it was always locked.

When I was really young, I used to have a fear of under-tunnels.[like underground short-cuts to the train]. I used to believe that if you walked underground, you would disturb drawfs working [like in snow white in the diamond mines]. And I thought the drawfs would then torture whoever who disturbed them. Pretty far-fetched huh? But I was really afraid of undergrounds then that I would discourage my mom to walk through them and walk the long instead. She never understood why though...

As a young child I noticed all around as we drove through town "pedestrian" crossings. At the time we attended a Presbyterian church and I thought they said "Presbyterian" crossings. It made me wonder where the Catholics could cross the street.

I used to believe when I was little that if you passed an American Flag at this one tall building you would have to be silent or George Washington would shoot his cannon at you.

When I was a toddler, I remember a TV information film about road safety which was about the Green Cross Code man, who magically appeared to help you cross the road safely. At first I thought he actually existed and he would appear if you tried to cross the road carelessly. But I soon realised that the Green Cross Coad was Stop, Look, Listen and Think.

When I was a kid I thought the huge signs that hung up in stores like John Lewis said "Please play here", as opposed to "Please pay here". As a result I was always askinh my mum to let me go to the play area, and she'd ask where, and I'd point out the sign, and she'd laugh at me and tell me it didn't say that. Sometimes I'd believe her, then we'd walk to a different part of the shop, I'd see another sign, and I'd say "Can I go and play over then there please?"

Even now when I see the signs it makes me laugh.

The old Sydney suburb of Balmain, where I was a child, had long been an almost self-sufficient town, with it's own Town Hall, Courthouse, Police Station, Fire Station, large Post Office, ferry, tram and bus services and a number of sporting facilities. It also had long rows of shops, three cinemas, four Primary schools, three secondary schools, a major hospital, several big churches (the Roman Catholics with their own convent and seminary). There was a major shipbuilding dockyard where my grandfather worked, a coalmine, several large factories and a big power station, together with many other enterprises. As a little kid I assumed that all suburbs were like that, and was horrified to visit relatives in places just full of houses and where all the people seemed to do was go there to sleep!