Ever wondered why the jillions of things we say and hear all the time are never called “old husbands’ tales” instead of the usual “old wives”? I don’t know either, so we’ll leave that for another time.

The tale I’m thinking today about comes from long, long ago, although maybe people still say it, most often to young girls, I reckon. It is, “If you eat the crusts of your bread, you’ll get curly hair.” I’m wondering if that was invented during a period of deprivation somewhere, because for reasons about which I’m not entirely clear, people don’t like the crusts on bread and so often leave then behind, causing parents who are barely scraping by to insist they get consumed, “and I mean NOW!” Remember? And perhaps they enticed little girls to eat those crusts by promising them a head of bouncy Shirley Temple curls. Who knows? I wonder what they promised young boys.

I was also told if I insisted on sleeping on a pillow, I’d end up getting a double chin, and guess what? Turns out they were right. At 87, I’m living proof. Oh, the things parents used to tell their kids, and perhaps still do, in order to keep them in line. I was prone to catch-and-release creatures, much to the horror of my poor beleaguered sister. For example, I loved toads — still do, find them fascinating, comical creatures — and my dear sister, along with our parents, insisted that my constantly handling those “disgusting slimy creatures” would give me warts. I handled hundreds of them as a kid and, in all my decades of life, have had but one single wart on my knee that eventually just disappeared, and furthermore, I never carried any of my toad pets on my knee. And one other thing, as I insisted to my family, toads are never “slimy.” I suppose they can swim if they have to but they are landlubbers. And while we’re at it, dear now dead family members, snakes are not slimy either. We should all have such cool and satiny skin, but would they listen to me? No. All they ever did was shriek and run away when I proudly showed them my newest serpent pal. Ignorant, I calls it.

But back to my dear, long-suffering sister. I used to steal — no, liberate — white mice from the lab in my high school, sneak them home and store them in the desk I used to share with her. I’d make sure they had water and food and I’d promise to come to play with them after I got back home the next day. But dear sister would get there first and the scream from her when she opened the desk drawer was just about the most delicious and satisfying sound I’d ever heard, before or since. Magnificent! I’ll never forget it. I have never heard such a long and horrifying, splendid sound since, even in the darkest of horror films. Delightful!

But I digress. Remember the old wives’ tale that stated if you swallowed a seed it would grow in your innards? My wise relatives always told me this tale and to be very careful to not eat any seeds that could just as easily be spit out. Well, hahaha folks, the joke is on you. Or them. Or us. It is true! Yes! It did happen and it’s documented. Not too many years ago, one Ron Sveden of Brewster, Massachusetts, was having trouble breathing, thought he had lung cancer or asthma, coughed a lot, and when the doctors finally went in to take a look, yes, there was a sprouting seed. A very young pea had somehow been inhaled into Mr. Sveden’s lungs as he dined, found it to be warm and wet and pleasant and had begun to grow. It had only gotten to about an inch long, but it was indeed growing. So much for that old wives’ tale. And yet there was another; it was the guy who discovered a young fir tree was growing in his very own lung. Yep! Documented. The tree was not large enough onto which he could hang Christmas ornaments, but who knows? How a seed got into that guy’s lung in anybody’s guess, but it did. You could look it up.

And lastly, and it’s hard to end this because there are so very many great OWTs out there, and you’ve likely heard them all, but here it is. “If you make a nasty face and the wind changes, it’ll stick like that forever.” Well now, maybe this has some validity. Don’t we all know someone in our lives who has a perpetually disagreeable facial expression when nothing you or anyone has said to make him look like that? I know a couple of people like that but will talk about one. His name is Norbert, and I refuse to play his game and say “Gee Norb old pal, what’s wrong? Come on now, things can’t be that bad now, can they?” Asking him that means you may run the risk that he’ll tell you in living color how miserable his wife, children, dog, job, boss, cat, in-laws, car, plumber, mechanic is/are, all the while keeping that unchanging, nasty expression on his face. So, maybe there’s something to that wind-changing thing. Maybe the wind did actually change when old Norbert got his first experience of nasty. I mean after all, old husbands’ tales could very likely have started out as real long ago and have just kind of stayed in place over the centuries, right? Hey, it could happen.

Thus, while we all snicker knowingly about these tales, maybe they have a wee bit of truth to them, after all. Maybe if we do step on a crack, some mother somewhere will, in fact, break her back. Be open-minded and vigilant, my friends, and do always remember to hang that horse-shoe with the open end up. OK? Good.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer. You can reach her at lcvs@comcast.net.