And not just seeing. Hearing, smell, taste, touch are all qualified by what we’ve become over the years, what we are.

The scent of lilies, enrapturing to some, might recall the grief of a mother’s funeral. At age 70, the taste of cotton candy can evoke the white-knuckled joy of a first rollercoaster ride. And if I’ve been bitten once or twice by pit bulls, I’m going to quail and grit my own teeth whenever I spot one.

Being wary of subjective seeing is what makes police reports seem stilted. When an officer writes, "A sound like a gunshot,"� or "The subject drew what appeared to be a knife," he’s acknowledging subjectivity and hedging accordingly.

Sorry for the maundering, but I’ve been brooding about subjective perception ever since I misrepresented a bottle of Scotch last week. You know, the one my father brought home in the early 1950’s, a souvenir given to him for appraising a deceased widow’s household. You’ll remember that the widow, who loved her Scotch, had reacted to impending Prohibition by packing her coal bin with cases of it. So much was in there that she’d hardly dented it when Prohibition ended 15 years later. When she died after another 25 years, her executor presented Pop with a bottle of the Scotch, a memento of "a great old girl."

Pop tucked that bottle, its seal intact, in the back of a cabinet in our dining room sideboard. And there it stayed, aging further, through my teens and 20’s and 30’s.

When, after Pop’s death, my brother and I sadly emptied the family home, he had no interest in the bottle. And so I took it to my own home and stuck it in a cabinet there. It aged another 15 years before I sadly emptied my own house after my first wife’s death. I hauled that bottle north with me to New York State. It’s been in Fly Creek 14 years now, still aging.

Over all those decades, as often as I’ve glanced at the bottle or moved it for some reason, I’ve recalled Pop’s story, told to me as a wide-eyed 13-year old. About the old widow and her putting up a barricade between herself and a government that had lost its senses. About her keeping the stash intact after Repeal, just in case the country lost its head again. About her sealing the coal bin and buying fresh supplies, just one case at a time, for the rest of her days.

In all those years, I never realized that in recalling Pop’s story, I might be distorting it, too. But that’s how, last week, I unwittingly presented you with a lie. Well, more precisely, an untruth. To lie, you really have to be out to deceive. And I wasn’t.

When I was writing last week’s column, I brought the bottle to my desk (never mind from where!) so that I could quote accurately from its label.

Then, a few days later, I was sitting here and glanced again at the handsome bottle and its tawny content. (It’s dropped, through minute evaporation, to an inch below the neck.) I admired again the elegant black type against a "White Label" that is now a parchment yellow. And I looked more closely at the royal crest at the label’s top, and the words in tiny type below it: "By Appointment to the Late King George V."

Yikes! George V died in 1936! If this label was already calling George V "late," then, despite my belief, it was no pre-Prohibition bottle of Scotch. It was a post-1936 bottle. That got me looking closely at the tattered but unbroken tax seal. It carried a series of eight numbers, starting with the prefix "36-." I’m betting that 1936 was the year of its importation, the very year of the king’s death. And since the label calls it "Eight Years Old," the content was distilled in �28, not in �12, as I told you last week.

What Pop was given 55 years ago was not a bottle out of the old dear’s pre-Prohibition stash. It must have been drawn from one of the cases the she had bought, one by one, to support her tastes till her life ended. (I wonder, was there need to embalm her?)

I’ve tried double-checking the bottle date by phoning the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau down in Washington.

I read the serial number slowly onto their voice mail and asked them if they could confirm the date. But they may be awhile getting back to me. Washington is in disarray just now.

Anyway, my eyes have been opened. What sits on my desk is not a bottle of 90-year-old Scotch, but a 78-year-old one, still unopened. And so it will stay. Then, when I kick off, in another 20 years or so, my own old dear will have a century-old bottle to sell.

And, luckily, she won’t be tempted to break that seal. Anne doesn’t like Scotch.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. Learn about his book at JimAtwell.com.