neighbourhood: in the street

When I was little I used to believe that the green electricity substation boxes that you sometimes see on street corners were "where they keep all the dead mice!" When asked why I thought that I said "Well they've got to put them somewhere!"

when i was a little girl my mom used to tell me that if you walked over the drains in the ground in parking lots you would fall in. i believed her untill i was 9 and finally built up the bravery to walk over one.

When I was small, my father and I passed a massage parlor. I read the sign and informed my father that when I grew up, I would go to massage parlors all the time because I really liked massages. He laughed for a while, then explained that people go to a masseuse for a massage, not a massage parlor.

I was intrigued by barber poles. I would watch them continuously to see where the ribbons went and where they came from. I imagined them as being incredibly long, and I couldn't figure out how all that ribbon fit in there.

When my brother was little, he believed that the lights on top of bridges and tall chimmneys when illuminated at night, were Gods car lights. How cute is that!

I thought the "To Let" signs on buildings meant they were public toilets.

I used to believe…

you know how there are warning signs on fences saying "beware of dog"? well, when i was little and i saw a Long Fence sign on someones fence, i thought it meant "beware, this is a very long fence"

When I was little I used to think that statues were actually the bodies of the famous people they depicted, covered in plaster. It seemed pretty normal back then, but now that I think about it, that's kind of creepy.

When I was a kid i thought that stone lions in front of buildings (like libraries) were real lions that had been frozen, and i would whisper to them and tell them it was okay, and i would scratch them behind the ears.

When I was a kid riding in the car, I'd notice that a lot of people had mailboxes with the word "Post". I though that was the last name of the family that lived in the house, and couldn't figure out why there were so many people with that last name.

When I was around 5 or 6, i thought UPS trucks were driven by Oompa-Loompas that tried to kidnap children to make them test candy at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

When I was little I thought everyone had to live on the street that started with the first letter of their last name. Since we lived on Avenue I and our name started with F I was convinced we were going to be arrested. Every time I heard sirens I just KNEW they were coming for us!

when i was about 5-6..there was a building under construction near my school..i somehow felt it was a corrupt prison from hong kong,and that it was my mission to save people from inside

There was a turning just off our high street where there was (clearly now) a lot of development work going on. I used to believe that this was the end of the world and that if I strayed down this road I would fall off into I don't know what. I insisted my mum held my hand all the way past and became somewhat hysterical if she refused!

When my brother was little, my father told him that a mouse lived in the little box on top of the street lights. When it got dark, the mouse turned it on. That was why they didn't all turn on at once, some mice thought it should be darker before they flipped the switch. He went to school and told all his buddies, who laughed him out of the room. He still hasn't forgiven my father - and my brother's 31.

I used to think when we moved, it was because we were exchanging our house with the buyer's...