I am afraid that when I get home I will not know how to read these words and understand them

You may very well laugh at this fear (and I can chuckle at it too, looking back at the situation) but at the time I was actually very, very concerned that I wouldn’t remember how to speak or read English. There was precedence for my fear, though. When Maiol was in the U.S., one evening we went to a party, and someone had laced some of the food with hallucinogenics. Maiol ended-up having a "bad trip" and I threw him into a cold shower trying to get him to calm down. He stood there, fully clothed, in the icy water, babbling about everything. Suddenly he started to panic – what eventually came out was that he couldn’t remember how to speak Catalan, his native tongue, and was thoroughly convinced that he would never speak it again. He was completely convinced of this – and succeeded in convincing me that he was right. It was not a pleasant evening, as we sat there, him wrapped in a towel and shaking, and me talking with him, trying to figure-out how he could learn his language again. Not very realistic, but it seemed logical at the time.