When I was a child, my mother used to tell me stories of a heroic warrior who had gone off to fight a war in a faraway land and died in battle with an arrow shot into his heel. She would tell this story in such lengthy detail that i used to fall asleep before she got to the part about the warrior's tragic death.
Perhaps that's why I used to think she was telling me the story of my father going off to World War II. He had been seriously wounded and returned home to live a long life. So even as a child, I had come to realize that the warrior in my mother's stories wasn't dad. Who was it then? My mom said she didn't know — that it had just been a story her grandmother used to tell year when she was a child.
Imagine my surprise then when in elementary school I'd attended a children's story event at the public library and there I'd heard a librarian talk about s story from Greek mythology that sounded exactly like the one my mother used to tell me.
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