neighbourhood

In Canada we have signs that read:
Max Clearance - 6'10" (or with other various measurements for truck heights on them) and I used to believe that we had a really tall guy, named Max Clearance in our fair city of Halifax!!!

When i was a little girl, I believed in a lot of things.
When i went with my mother to the supermarket we took a trolley and she put all the things that she needed in her bag.Then we went back home.
I didn t know she had paid a lot of money, I thought it was free.

I had a friend who lived in public housing and I thought it was the best cuz it was like a little town and this popcicle vendor used to always be around. I begged my parents to move there.

my sisters once convinced me that people had stuck razor blades in the waterslides at magic mountain (adelaide amusement park), thus slicing up any unwary children. the practicalities of installing razors into the slides whilst sliding down never entered my head, nor did the fact that my sisters continually emerged unsliced. i think they actually just didn't want their little brother tagging along.

When I was young I thought the oil company called Esso was actually 3SSO, because the font used for the E looked like a 3 backwards. I didn't recognise it as an E until it was pointed out to me that it was not a 3. I must be dyslexic or something.

Not mine, but my daughter's. She was about 4 when we went camping at a local campground that had its own water tower. She believed that it was a space ship and that aliens had come camping from another planet. She looked for the aliens all weekend!

During a neighborhood sleepover, the woman next door told all the kids that she had gotten lost while camping when she was a child. She ate some berries and wondered into a cave with bats. One of the bats in the cave bit her on her big toe (which was why it looked funny and was double-jointed). At nights she could turn into a bat and spy on all the kids in the neighborhood. For some reason, I was always afraid of that neighbor...

Our dad conviced us that the local mini-storage was really a midget colony, although they were nocturnal midgets and only came out at night. That's why the doors were always closed.

He also convinced us that the local pioneer cemetary was where the midgets were buried when they died. Took us a while to figure out they were really plots for cremated remains ....

When I was a child, I thought the double yellow lines in the middle of highways were for motocycles to travel between and cars had to stay to the right or left of "the motorcycle lane". I was completely disgusted with my father when he got too close to that lane, because he was putting the motorcycle drivers in danger. I remember thinking he was a terrible driver.

On every car trip I took from age about 8 to 12, I gazed with great attention at every concrete or other aggregate-type barrier we passed. This was because I believed that, since they were aggregate, and therefore mostly air, then it stood to reason that there must somewhere be an aggregate structure with "slices" or "spots" where you could see through them.

I used to believe that cats eyes in the road were real cats eyes that had been collected by some mad street cat catcher (think child catcher Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).

Begin a big fan of Stephen King when I was a kid, I came across the word 'mausoleum', and wondered what the purpose was. I asked my mom (who obviously got the word confused with 'asylum'), and she informed me that mausoleums were where they 'locked up all the crazy people'. For years after, whenever we drove past a cemetary, I would listen for the hoots and howls of the crazy folks locked inside he little stone buildings.

When I was little I thought that a pair of smoke stacks (which were part of a factory a few miles away) was actually Cinderella's castle. I could never quite understand why my parents would never take me there if we were so close.

I used to pass this sign for a warehouse that was "Open to the Public". Every time I saw it, I got mad because I thought they were discriminating against Catholics by only letting the "Public" in.

You have to hold your breath when you go past a cemetery. Or a school. Or over a bridge. Especially over a bridge, or the car will be too heavy, and the bridge will collapse.

When someone was awarded the "key to the city" I thought it was a real key which operated all the city's locks. Then I was worried that the recipients could gain access to my house!!!

i used to believe that sharks could somehow get into our swimming pool as babies through the 'pipes'. i believed that they could somehow lurk undetected in our pull until fully grown, when they would surge out of the shadows and attack me. (this was a result of seeing jaws as a very young kid).

In grade school, I thought a booster shot was where the doctor would place you in a booster seat, like the brown boxy plastic kind in restaurants, and then shoot you with a gun. It would hurt (just like my older sister said they did), but it would somehow be good for you, once you healed. Man, did doctor's appointments freak me out for the longest time.

When I was a little kid, the basics of commercial transactions was explained to me as 'you buy things that are for sale.' unfortunately, due to exposure to mass media, i quickly got it confused with 'on sale,' as in a cheaper price. Needless to say, I was an unintentionally thrify (and sometimes disappointed) shopper whenever I went to a store with my mom and always asked the clerk, "Is this on sale?"