CORRECTION

Regarding the severance of my tongue... I must say that because I was just a babe, I have no memory of injuring my tongue, just family testimony and a series of infinitesimal bumps going across the middle of it, which could just as easily be taste buds. I wasn't even thinking when I told you how it happened, but luckily my mom corrected me, and we're able to set the record straight. I wasn't sitting on a stool, I was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table, and the accident occurred when I tried to crawl up.

I know why I thought it was a stool, though. Of course I have no idea what our home looked like then, except by the clues of photographs, so at some point I assembled it in my head until I had a concrete image of the scene in my mind, and naturally it was entirely fraudulent - but I didn't realize that while I was writing. For some reason I had placed us in the apartment of an old family friend, a place we frequently visited when I was in elementary school. It was there that I used to sit on the stools by the kitchen counter, with my mom, when I was quite big enough to get onto them myself.

When my mom mentioned this, my first instinct was to edit the post rather than posting a correction, but I'm glad that I've had the chance to sort out these assumptions in my head. It's always a strange thing when you remember events in your childhood in a skewed or false way, but of course this isn't something I remember: this is a story I've been told, that at some point past memory I transposed onto a familiar setting, changing the course of things in my mind. This is good news: even if I can't remember it, I can at least be reminded of what really happened.