Why I was hurrying, I can't recall, but I suspect my goal was to eat as much pie as possible before Joe could show up and want some as well. I was really protective of my pecan pie (okay... maybe greedy is the word). Unfortunately, in my hurry I managed to stab myself with the fork. Where you ask? If I had stabbed my arm, hand, or even neck I would have been okay with that. But no. I speared the roof of my mouth with a fork. It is hard to understand how this happened and the mechanics of it all seem to be blocked from my memory.
No more pie that day. My mouth really hurt, but I knew from having bitten my cheeks (everyone does that, right?) that my mouth would soon recover. My theory was that mouths heal quickly so that we don't suffer pain when trying to eat and then starve (its a survival of the well-fed theory). I was wrong.
Two days later the pain was worse. By angling my head just right, holding a mirror in one hand, and bending under a light I could see that what began as four little puncture wounds had become a huge, gross, white patch, surrounded with red. Ugh.
A visit to student health, a pathetic attempt to explain how I had injured the roof of my mouth in the first place, and then a bottle of mega-dose antibiotics. All would be good again. But not really. I don't think I have baked a pecan pie since then. And every once in a while, I swear, I still feel twinges of pain on my upper palate.
