Wonderful.  This is why I tend to devour everything Oliver Sacks has to say.  Whatever it is, it's just rich with story-telling and revelations and things I can almost always relate to.  (I'm weird that way.)

I've been caught by relatives many times recounting my version of a story that is far different from theirs.  As I'm telling it I believe with my whole heart and soul that that's the way it happened.  I can see it.  But if enough of them say it isn't so, it just isn't so.

When I was a columnist for a group of newspapers in suburban Detroit I wrote a column about kids and barns and in it I talked about watching Old Man Kilpela milk a cow, now and then squirting the milk toward the cat, who caught it in midair.  I talked about the old man's hunched shoulders and veined hands and thinning white hair.  I could see him as clearly at my desk as I had seen him through the barn door those many years ago.  Except I never saw him.  When my mother read my column she called me and said, "I don't know who you saw in that barn but it wasn't Old Man Kilpela.  He went into the woods and shot himself long before you were born." (Another one of those deep, dark secrets only dragged out as needed.)

She went on to tell me that there hadn't been an old man in that barn since then and that it might have been Mrs. Kilpela, since she usually milked the cows (and was old).  But I'm still seeing that old man.

Which is why I can both sympathize with and be terrified of unintentional plagiarism.  The only thing that saves me, I think, is my inability to memorize complete sentences.