THE THINGS WE BELIEVED BECAUSE GROWN-UPS SAID SO

One little thought about a number two pencil sent me down this rabbit hole this morning.

And, as usual, there’s always a story.

Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way first: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.

Those were certainly part of my childhood, and variations of those stories exist all over the world. If you’ve ever been to Epcot at Christmastime, you can hear stories and traditions from different countries about how the holidays are celebrated and how gifts somehow end up in the hands of children.

Different countries. Different characters. Different traditions.

But the same basic idea.

The grown-ups told us the story, and we believed them.

And why wouldn’t we?

When you’re little, your parents and the other adults around you are pretty much your source of truth.

Santa came down the chimney.

The Easter Bunny delivered candy.

A tiny Tooth Fairy somehow knew that you had lost a tooth, flew into your bedroom while you were asleep, took the tooth from under your pillow, and left money behind.

I mean, when you stop and think about that one, it’s a little strange.

A fairy with a dental collection problem.

But we believed it.

At least for a while.

And I’m trying to be light about all of this, because a lot of these stories come from love, tradition, and wanting to make childhood magical.

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny probably don’t fall into the same category as the things parents tell children because they’re trying to protect them or keep them safe. These are traditions that our parents often heard when they were children. They passed them down to us, and then many of us turned around and passed them down to our own children.

I did.

But if you strip away all the nostalgia for just a second, what are we actually doing?

We’re telling stories.

We’re telling fantasies.

Are we telling lies?

I don’t even know how I feel about that word in this context.

Because eventually every child figures it out.

Santa isn’t coming down the chimney.

The Easter Bunny isn’t hopping through the house hiding eggs.

And the money under the pillow did not come from a tiny winged creature.

So what happens when we find out?

Are we devastated?

Do we shrug our shoulders and say, “Yeah, I kind of knew”?

Do we suddenly realize, “Wait a minute. My parents bought all that stuff?”

Or do we pretend we still believe because, seriously, who wants the money under the pillow to stop?

When I was a kid, I think the Tooth Fairy left a quarter.

Our grandkids got a lot more than that.

I’m pretty sure I gave my own kids more than a quarter too, although I honestly don’t remember.

Somehow losing a tooth became a rite of passage with a payout attached.

And some parents don’t do any of this.

There are children all over the world who don’t grow up with Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. There are different religions, different holidays, different traditions and different stories.

Which makes me wonder:

What stories are their parents telling them?

Because parents have always told children stories.

And not all of them are magical.

Sometimes they’re warnings.

Sometimes they’re attempts to keep us safe.

Sometimes they’re attempts to keep us in line.

And sometimes a child hears something that an adult understands one way and takes it completely, absolutely literally.

That’s where the number two pencil comes in.

Lead poisoning was a big thing when I was growing up in the 1960s. We heard about lead paint. We were told lead could hurt you. We were told lead could kill you.

And that part was true.

But I was a child.

I didn’t understand the bigger picture of lead poisoning.

What I understood was very simple:

Lead can kill you.

And I knew that what was inside a pencil was called “lead.”

So somewhere in my little brain, those two pieces of information connected.

Lead kills you.

Pencils have lead.

Therefore, if you ate a pencil, you could die.

I actually remember holding a number two pencil in my hand when I was very upset with my parents about something. I don’t even remember now what I was upset about.

But I remember the pencil.

And I remember believing that if I ate enough of it, I could just keel over and die.

I probably thought it would happen instantly.

Of course, the “lead” in a pencil isn’t lead at all. It’s graphite.

But I didn’t know that.

Nobody had explained the chemistry of a pencil to me.

I had simply been given two pieces of information and put them together the way a child would.

That memory made me start thinking about all the other things we believed because adults told us they were true.

I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic school. I went to church.

And when you’re a child, some of those messages can sound very simple too.

Sin.

Hell.

Do the wrong thing and there are consequences.

Adults may understand theology, interpretation, context and nuance.

A little kid can hear:

Do this, and you go to hell.

That’s just the way the world works.

Children don’t necessarily sit around questioning their sources.

They don’t ask for footnotes.

They don’t say, “Can you show me the peer-reviewed study on that?”

They believe us.

And I don’t say that as someone sitting here blaming my parents.

I became a parent too.

I told my children stories.

I simplified things.

I passed along traditions.

I probably repeated things I had been told simply because that was what I knew.

Parents are trying to protect their children, guide them, teach them, keep them safe and somehow get them from infancy to adulthood in one piece.

My parents were doing that.

I was doing that.

Parents everywhere are doing that.

But there is something fascinating — and maybe a little scary — about how much blind faith children place in the adults around them.

We tell them what the world is.

And for a while, that becomes their world.

Maybe that’s why this subject interests me so much now.

Because I am a storyteller.

But most of my stories have one foot planted in fact.

Even when I wander off into fantasy, I’m still borrowing from real life.

I use places I’ve been.

Situations I’ve experienced.

Things that have happened to me.

And the people who populate my stories are very often inspired by people I’ve actually known.

The details may change.

The circumstances may get rearranged.

I might put someone in a place they’ve never actually been or create an event that never actually happened.

But there is usually something real underneath it.

I’ve always heard that writers should write about what they know.

That has never been particularly difficult for me because there are always stories inside my head.

There is always some subject that catches my attention.

Some memory that suddenly resurfaces.

Some question I want answered.

Some completely ordinary thing that makes me wonder, “Wait a minute. Why do we do that?”

And then I go looking for the answer.

I find the journey of answering those questions absolutely delightful.

Maybe that’s what we’re all doing from the beginning.

We’re born into a world full of stories.

Other people tell us what things mean.

They tell us what to believe.

They tell us what is dangerous.

They tell us what is magical.

They tell us what is right and what is wrong.

And because we’re children, we believe a remarkable amount of it.

Then we grow up.

We discover some of those stories were absolutely true.

Some were true, but far more complicated than we understood.

Some were traditions.

Some were fantasies.

Some were misunderstandings.

Some were things the adults themselves believed because somebody had once told them the same story.

And some were just doozies.

Eventually we begin sorting through all of it.

We keep some stories.

We discard others.

We laugh at a few.

We question a few.

And then, somewhere along the way, we start telling stories ourselves.

To our children.

To our grandchildren.

To our friends.

And, in my case, apparently to anybody willing to read them.

All because this morning I remembered a number two pencil.

There’s always a story.