neighbourhood

Every July 4th my town has a popular fireworks display. The fireworks are shot off from a big hill on the other side of a channel of water running through to Lake Michigan. When i was young, i was at a party and i think someone who was drunk told me that Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were behind the hill shooting off the fireworks every year. If that wasn't an all-American lie! I wondered why no one ever made a big deal about it.

When i was 10 and moved to California, i saw those bumpy lane dividers for the first time. When i asked my mom what they were for she said, "so blind drivers can know where the lanes are."

i believed her.

when i was 15 i was telling my friend about it when it hit me. "how can blind people see the stop lights."

i'm glad i straightened that out before i took my drivers test.

When I was younger my mother used to go to a butcher shop to get her meats. I believed that they killed the cows right there in the back rooms and I was always trying to get a peek into the back hallway.

I used to think that when somebody wanted to move, they would have to switch houses with somebody else. no questions asked. i also used to think that if they did that, but still wanted to live in the same house but in a different area, they would "scoop" up each house with a giant machine with a spatula-type thing to move the houses.

In Britain where I live, the main feature on ordinary postage stamps is a picture of the queen's head. Once when my mother had a letter which she was going to post, I drew a picture of the queen's head on it. I didn't understand why she said that was no good and we needed a proper stamp.

When I was a little kid, about 4 or 5 years old, my mom would take me shopping. Everytime she bought something, she put down pieces of paper (which were bills) and some circular metal thing down (which were coins). So then I thought "Maybe it's like trading." The next time we went shopping, I brought pieces of paper with me and a couple of pennies. I took the toy I wanted, handed some paper and pennies to the cashier, and left.

I used to beleive that sharks lived in swimming pool drains and would come out and try to eat me. I would constantly be looking around for sharks when I would get up the courage to actually get in the pool. I also thought they could come out of the bathtub drain as well.

One day i was riding my bike around the neighboorhood and i saw a police car, i thought that it was going to arrest somebody, I thought that it didnt matter if the siren was off or on. so i followed the police car with my bike and it pulled into the drive way. I wated hours and hours expected the policeman to come out and arrest somebody. It turned out that that was where the policeman lived...

Up until I was around 12 I was scared to swim in public pools, because they had designs on the bottom, which I always thought to myself was either a giant squid or a human eating vacuum.

My mom told us that the ice cream van was a "music truck", that rode around the neighborhood making nice music for everyone. Finally, my older sister went to day camp, and found out the truth. She said, "you know what! The music truck *sells ICE CREAM*!"

My sister told me when I was about six that in order to ride the rollar coaster Space Mountain at Disneyland, you need to get a shot. I vowed never to go on that ride.

I used to get scared whenever my family would go out to restaurants and places advertising that they needed more employees, because I thought that "Help Wanted" signs meant there was a Wanted man on the loose in the area, and that they needed help catching him. The question of why a restaurant was advertising this never occurred to me.

As a child, I had some very strange ideas about the world, traffic crossing poles in particular. You know how when you want to cross the street, you press the button on the pole, right? My mom always told me that pressing it multiple times wouldn't make it go faster, but still I saw people doing so every day. So, I came to the conclusion that somewhere there was a big office that tracked every time each individual traffic crossing button was pressed, and produce a 'beep' noise. I thought to myself, "Gee, what a boring job," so I often pressed it to the beat of a catchy tune, so that it would 'beep' the same tune to the office workers and make their day more interesting.

At the Home Depot hardware stores, they have those zany little trucks driving up and down the aisles, like, all the time. My little sister and I were always terrified of the things and when we heard the beep-beep-beeping noise they make to keep customers from getting crushed under the wheels, me and my sis would run away from our parents screaming all the while. Usually, our pissed parents would end up in the kitchen department where a floor manager would direct them to a set of display cabinets containing their frightened little girls. Why would you ever bring small children to Home Depot?

I used to go to this one park all the time when I was a kid, & I thought my mom & I were the only people that knew about it. When my bestfriend told me she went to that park on the weekend, I said, "you KNOW about that place?" I was totally shocked!

I used to think that trash and stuff on the side of the street had feelings, so I felt I had to rescue it or else it would get cold and lonely.
Those poor rappers...

For some reason, whenever the ice cream van came into our area, I always seemed to hear it and never see it. I used to think the tinkly type music came from heaven, and it was years before I finally put 2 and 2 together.