the yellow corvette

It's strange, the kind of things we believe when we're young. We come up with some interesting notions, seemingly out of nowhere -- at least, to an adult. They seem like the best answers at the time, however. Sometimes, we believe them for years. It wasn't until she began driving lessons that my mom realized that a painted "X" on a road doesn't, in fact, mark where someone was killed. However, she could forgive herself, as her father had told her that story when she was young and impressionable.
I didn't have the excuse of a mischievous parent.
Perhaps it was a strange coincidence in my home town, but something struck me as odd as I sat on the toilet one day many years ago (this was where I did most of my deep thinking and, coincidentally, most of my trying of my mother's patience). I thought to myself, why didn't I see any yellow cars on the street? Oh sure, there was the occasional car or truck owned by the city or the newspaper or some other company, but I couldn't recall ever seeing privately-owned yellow cars driving around. I surmised (and this seemed to make the best sense out of a confusing situation) that yellow cars weren't legal on the road, except when operated by a properly-licensed organization. This was a regulation that I didn't understand, but the only reason I could think of to explain this confusing problem. And besides, I had just begun public school, and inexplicable rules had become the order of the day.
There was this one problem with my theory, though. This one guy on the other end of my street had a yellow car. A Corvette. It was his baby: he took exceptionally good care of it, kept it in the garage in the winter, under a sheet in the summer, and drove another car, besides. The yellow Corvette stayed at the back of his driveway all summer, covered and withdrawn from casual view. But every once in a while, he'd roll it closer to the front door, work on it for a day or two, and drive it around for a few hours. I couldn't help but be stunned by his boldness. I was a little worried, partly for him, and partly for the rest of us who knew about his illicit drives (for no-one talked about either him or his car).
One day, I worked up the nerve to ask my parents about this yellow car mystery. They told me that it was perfectly legal to own a yellow car. When I asked them why there were virtually none, they said that it was probably because it just wasn't popular. This made sense in a mundane sort of way, but from then on I felt as if the mysterious owner of the yellow Corvette had somehow let me down by not being the dangerous rebel that I'd thought he was.