Step on a crack, break your mother’s back!  Tell a big lie, your father will die!

I remember chanting this doggerel over and over as I pranced along the sidewalk as a young boy.  I have no idea where I first heard it, but I wasn’t the only one whose sing-song voice could be heard uttering the same incantation.

To this day, I try to avoid those sidewalk cracks, and most of the fibs I’ve told over the years have been small.  I swear!

That little ditty was just one of many such learnings we picked up as children from playmates, kindly old aunts and uncles, even parents.  And for periods of time, I believed all of them!

Eat your carrots, sonny!  They’ll put hair on your chest.  I’ve always loved carrots, especially raw, and I do have hair on my chest—gray now, of course, but still curly—so that advice bore out, I guess.

Drink your milk!  It will make your bones strong.  I readily believed that, but when I was that age, we were drinking powdered milk my mother mixed up from a box.  Even when ice-cold, it tasted vile, and I always wished we had a cat I could feed it to—but not a black one.

Superstitions played a big part in much of the advice I was given, even though my parents told me superstitions were premature explanations that had overstayed their time.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that meant.

It’s bad luck if you ever let a black cat cross in front of you!  To this day, if a black cat crosses my path, I detour.  It makes no sense, yet I do it, anyway.

Don’t walk under a ladder!  It will bring bad luck, too.  That seemed logical to me, but I would sometimes tempt fate by doing that very thing.  Today, though, a grown man, I always walk around ladders.  I mean, a piano could fall on me, right?

Bad luck will follow if you open an umbrella in the house!  I can attest to the truth of this one because I did open an umbrella indoors one day, just to test the proposition.  As it popped open, it struck a vase on the ledge beside the front door, sending it crashing to the ground.  That led to one of those rare occasions where I told one of those small fibs I mentioned earlier.

Look for four-leaf clovers if you want good luck!  My friends and I spent many an hour doing just that, and found lots of them, as I recall.  And because no great tragedy ever befell us, I suppose the statement was accurate.  One friend insisted on calling them shamrocks, and said we might find a leprechaun.  I never did.

Don’t pull on the wishbone ‘til after you’ve made your wish!  I tried earnestly to comply with that advice, but my brother—more interested in winning the contest than having his wish fulfilled—always pulled first and usually won.  And as a result, my wish that he would magically disappear never came true.

Keep your eyes closed and the boogey-man won’t get you!  I had a lot of faith in this one, especially in the dark of the bedroom I shared with my brother.  I would sometimes hear terrifying moans coming from the vicinity of his bed, so I’d cower under my blankets, eyes screwed shut, praying the advice was well-founded.  I never wished for my brother to be taken, but I did prefer it be he rather than I.   

Don’t cross your eyes for fear they’ll stay that way!  I remember my friends and I daring each other to try it, all of us fearful it might be true, none of us willing to be the one who found out.  I know now there’s nothing to it, and I attribute the fact that I have to wear corrective eyeglasses to some other factor.  But I did look cross-eyed at one of my teachers once, and was surprised when she did the same back at me.  She was one of my favourites ever after!

As I entered adolescence, the nature of advice I was given by well-intentioned relatives changed, although most of it was equally preposterous.

Don’t pick your zits!  You’ll end up with boils all over your body.  The spectre of boils was terrifying, but so, too, was the mortification of acne.  For a while, I tried to convince myself I was developing freckles, but I knew better.  A variety of creams and lotions entered the fray, but I did resort to picking at my zits out of desperation.  Sixty years on, I’m still waiting for the boils.

Beware the devil’s hands, boy.  If you succumb to his entreaties, you’ll go blind!  Well, all I can say to that is, although I do wear glasses now, I never once lost my sight.

Yes, you can borrow the car again.  But see that you bring it back!  This command from my father on every occasion I asked for his keys, was aggravating at the time, but has since become a standard family joke among my siblings.  And it’s a source of wonder to me now that one of my granddaughters owns and drives a car I used to own.  She brings it back every time she visits.

There are other gems of wisdom from my childhood, most of which I no longer follow, some of which I do.  They pop into my mind at the oddest moments, sometimes evoking a laugh, occasionally a tear.  They are milestones along the road I journeyed as I grew up, and they helped bring me safely to the cusp of my ninth decade.

And once upon a time, I believed ‘em all.