Yes, I remember my hometown well... The smell of children tossing olives into ravines, the brown streaks of Kit-Kat bars on pavement, young couples skipping through the streets making loud kissy noises to each other (but never actually kissing)...

        I was a child professor back in those days. Seven, perhaps eight years old, with an untamable wiry grey beard that hung down to my little child's paunch. I had received my PhD in Doctorate Receiving. I was perhaps, at the time, the youngest and most sought-after Doctor of Doctor-Becoming. I spent many lonely afternoons soaking in my meal-taking-tub, careful not to make a poop in the water, scrubbing at my enormous grey beard while demanding my servants tell me improvised stories of anthropomorphized foods replete with souls, dreams and intricate backstories:

"Tell me again about the gross mole on the back of the aunt of this forkful of mashed potatoes, Brenalynn! Describe how it would make this baby carrot squirm at their family reunions by the lake!" I would scream. And she would be forced to comply, having been born a Brenalynn.

        Brenalynn descended from a long line of servants all with equally disastrous names; her mother Tinderly was a servant to my then-mother (now my grandmother), and Tinderly was so named by Brittsniphanie. And Brittsniphanie was guaranteed life as a servant after being given that name by Brenalynn's Great-Grandmother, Alison. Alison received a normal name in an attempt to escape a life of servantry (or if you prefer, "servantrude") by her mother Gwendaloin. But unfortunately Alison was kicked in the head by a horse. Which is why she named her only son Brittsniphanie.