Stories have real power. I've heard that the third word a child is likely to say, after mommy and daddy, is story. Entertainment, literature and religion are mostly about stories and how they are told. In many professions, like mine, the stories you tell and how you tell them are what are most remembered. I once heard a fictional story I had originated told at a gathering of totally different people than those to whom I had first recounted it. I asked the storyteller who originated the story and she said it was a fable she had heard at a party, author unknown. I smiled, but started thinking that the stories we tell - in work, at play, in our relationships - take on a life of their own. John Milton, when confronted by a reader asking what he had meant in certain of his works, said to the reader, "What does it mean to you?" He went on to say that once written the work no longer belonged to him, but to the reader(s) of the world.