True List of Things I Believed as a Child, In No Particular Order

Ronald McDonald owned and operated hamburger restaurants all across the country, the most successful clown in the world.

Price tags on store items were arbitrary. If the number on the tag didn’t correspond to the amount of money in your pocket, it was your job to find one that was appropriately marked and switch them.

If, when riding your bike around the city, you needed the bathroom, you could knock on any door; they had to let you in to use theirs. By law.

A broken ballpoint pen was better than a perfectly new, sharpened pencil.

Bison were mythological creatures.

Male ballerinas danced naked from the waist down, but nobody laughed at them.

Anyone who could drive a car was a certified genius. If you could drive a bus, you could run for president.

If you adopted a baby from a foreign country, when it got older it would teach you its native tongue.

Bald men were so bad that all their hair fell out.           

The Brady Bunch house was a feat of architectural wonder.

Broccoli were little baby trees. If you could successfully smuggle a piece out of the house and bury it, you’d have a full-sized tree one day. It had never been done; grownups were too vigilant.

The Easter Bunny was a criminal mastermind. Every time something went missing, it was his doing. Payback for all those eggs and candy he gave us once a year.

The dog that our dad hated was brought to a farm in the country to live his best life there. (He lives there still, in a sweet green meadow surrounded by piles of the shoe leather he craved.)

Carolyn R. Russell is the author of “In the Fullness of Time,” a dystopian thriller published by Vine Leaves Press in 2020. Her humorous YA mystery, “Same As It Never Was,” was released in 2018 by Big Table. “The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen,” her volume of film criticism, was published by McFarland & Company in 2001. Her poetry, essays and short stories have been featured or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, 3rd Wednesday, Litro Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Club Plum Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Orca: a Literary Journal, and Dime Show Review. Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore. More at WWW.CarolynRRussell.com