the cartoon mouse hole; or, my first experience with deception

{image taken from here}

You know how mouse holes in walls look in cartoons?  Well, when we lived in Papua New Guinea, we had a mouse hole exactly like that in our bathroom.  Aparantly there was already a hole in the wall there, for whatever reason, and someone just carved it to look like one of those mouse holes for fun.  (I didn't find this part out until years later.)  Growing up, my parents made me believe there was a mouse living in there.  And I totally thought
there was.  Especially as our cat Boxes used to catch mice, and I was quite used to finding them dead in my shoes.

So with the dead mice, and the mouse hole that looked identical to the one in the cartoons I watched, why wouldn't I believe that there was a mouse in our house (or several), or that that's what all mouse holes looked
like?  Since it's not something that's talked about in the playground, or taught in school, I was well close to being a teenager, I think, before I discovered that mouse holes don't actually look like that; that mice don't make them look like that.  

Isn't it funny what we grow up believing?