"When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights. I knew evern then, you see, that there were people in the world -- too many of them, actually -- whose imaginative senses were either numb or completely deadened. , and who lived in a mental state akin to color-blindness. I always felt sorry for them, never dreaming (at least then) that many of these unimaginative types either pitied me or held me in contempt, not just because I suffered from any number of irrational fears but because I was a deeply and unreservedly credulous on almost every subject. "There's a boy," some of them must have thought (I know my mother did), "who will buy the Brooklyn Bridge not just once but over and over again, all his life."
There was some truth to that then, I suppose, and if I am to be honest, I suppose there's some truth to it now. My wife still delights in telling people that her husband cast his first Presidential ballot, at the tender age of twenty-one, for Richard Nixon. "NIxon said he had a plan to get us out of Vietnam," she says, usually with a gleeful gleam in her eye, "and Steve believed him!"
That's right; Steve believed him. Nor is that all Steve has believed during the often-eccentric course of his forty-five years. I was, for example, the last kid in my neighborhood to decide that all those street-corner Santas meant there was no real Santa. (I still find no logical merit in the idea; it's like saying that a million disciples prove there is no master). I never questioned my Uncle Oren's assertion that you could tear off a person's shadow with a steel tent-peg (if you struck precisely at high noon, that was) or his wife's claim that every time you shivered, a goose was walking over the place where your grave would someday be. Given the course of my life, that must mean I'm slated to end up buried befind Aunt Rhody's barn out in Goose Wallow, Wyoming.
(Stephen King, "Myth, Belief, Faith, and Ripley's Believe It or Not!")
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