Stuff adults told you as a kid that you believed

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

I used to pull pranks on my sister (21 months younger than I) all the time. Hey, she’s blonde, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel! One day (she was maybe about 16 at the time) I had her convinced that people from Pennsylvania are called “pencils”. She initially thought I was pulling her leg (something about me saying stuff like that before to her or something like that, I don’t know) but after a while started to believe me. She was still a little skeptical when my dad, usually the authoritarian father figure, walked by her room and casually remarked, in a straight face, “he’s right, they are called pencils”. Well, now she was convinced!

This was one of the very rare instances I remember (read: only one) that my mom called both my dad and I to her to discuss our behaviour.

And “pencils” remains a family in-joke 20 years later.

62

I think the time that my sister had a stomachache and was directed to go upstairs and take two Tums for it was the best. She came back down and asked which color she was supposed to take for a stomachache. We all then launched into a collaborative lie about which colors were good for which things. Whooo, that was funny when she figured it out.

Myself, I remember being four, playing in my grandparents’ backyard, when the garage door opened! And no one was near it! I ran inside to report this, and was informed that it was a magic garage door, and that I should watch it carefully in case it did anything else. Damn door kept opening all evening. Sometimes it would get halfway, stop, and go back again.

Only years later, when we moved to a house with an automatic garage door opener, did I figure it out.