We Believed in the Music Man

Kelly Herron

Aug 31

4 min read

When my kids were little, I told them crackers were cookies.

Not fancy crackers. The plain square ones. I'd hand one over at snack time and call it a cookie, and they'd take it like it was the best ever, because it was.

I also told them the ice cream truck was the music man. Just a nice fellow who drove around the neighborhood playing songs for children. That was his whole job. Wasn't that lovely of him.

They believed both of those things for years.

I wasn't trying to fool them. I was trying to get through the day. And it worked — not because I was clever, but because they had no reason to check. Why would you fact-check your mother?

Here's what I've been sitting with lately: a belief doesn't have to be true to be useful. It just has to go unquestioned.

Who taught you the thing you're most certain about?

What the label said

Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the idea that vegan leather is the greener choice. It's right there in the name. Vegan. No animals. Better for the planet.

But look at what that word actually promises.

Vegan tells you what isn't in something. It tells you nothing at all about what is.

Most vegan leather is plastic. Polyurethane or PVC — petroleum, spun into a sheet and pressed onto a fabric backing. There's no plant in it. There's no animal in it either, which is the only claim the word ever made.

And it used to be honest about itself. For decades this exact material was called pleather, and nobody imagined it was saving anything. Then it got a new name. The material didn't change. The name did.

That's the same move I pulled with the crackers.

I never said a false thing. A cracker is a cracker. I just handed it over with a word attached that pointed my kids somewhere else, and the word was strong enough that they never questioned the thing in their hand.

What have you accepted because of what it was called?

Here's what makes it hard to unwind: the alternative isn't necessarily clean either. Though leather keeps animal hides out of the landfill, real leather is a byproduct of an industry with its own real costs, and roughly nine out of ten hides worldwide are tanned with chromium. Nobody in this conversation has clean hands.

And when I went looking for "the truth about vegan leather," almost everything I found was published by companies that sell leather. They have a stake. So the correction is also being sold to me. I had to check my checking.

What I can actually say is this: Most vegan leather is petroleum-based. Pleather gives you a few years. A tanned hide, cared for, gives you a decade or more. When Pleather wears out it doesn't break down; it becomes microplastic. That much holds up.

Everything past that is still being argued over by people with money in the fight.

But the small claim is enough for what I'm after. Not which one should you buy. Just this: vegan leather does not mean natural, and doesn’t automatically mean green either. I believed it did for a few years without ever once asking what the word vegan was actually telling me.

That's not him

Put on "Don't Stop Believin'" at a wedding and a room full of grown adults will sing every word.

The man singing it on tour is Arnel Pineda. He's Filipino, he grew up poor in Manila, and he was singing in a cover band when Journey's guitarist found him on YouTube in 2007. He sounds so much like Steve Perry that people have gone to shows and never realized.

That's the fun fact. Here's the better one.

Steve Perry wasn't the original lead singer either.

Gregg Rolie sang lead on Journey's first three albums. Perry didn't join until 1977, on their fourth. And Perry was only in the band about a decade across two stints — while Pineda has been the frontman since 2008, making him the longest-tenured singer Journey has ever had.

So the belief isn't just "that's Steve Perry."

The belief is "Steve Perry was the real one."

Two layers deep, and neither one is true.

And here's the grace in it: the song still works. Knowing the truth doesn't take a single thing away. You can hold the fact and the feeling at the same time.

Not every belief you examine turns out to cost you something. Some of them just get more interesting.

The examining

My kids figured out the crackers. They figured out the music man too. Nobody was harmed.

But I think about what else I handed them without meaning to. Not lies — I wasn't lying. Things I believed myself and passed along without ever pausing and examining the beliefs.

That's the part that's hard. Not the false things. The unexamined ones.

The ones that were true once. True somewhere. True enough that nobody ever thought to ask.

I'm not asking you to tear anything down. Some of what you believe will hold up beautifully under a second look — sturdier for having been looked at. That's what examining is for. Not demolition. Attention.

But you have to actually do the examination.

What belief have I believed for a long time, and it is time to examine it?