In Autumn of 1994, driving my Honda toward San Francisco, just passing the Sir Francis Drake "cutoff" on highway 101 at Corte Madera, I suddenly experienced a terrible flash of pain in my crotch.

"Bee sting!," I screamed.

That would be: the edited version.

I barely made the next exit without stacking ten cars, whipped onto a frontage road, skidded to a stop in a parking lot, then like an enraged badger, dug into my trousers ready kill any insect with my bare hands, only to find ... nothing:

Absolut Frankfurter.

No bee, yellow-jacket, black widow, brown recluse, spotted scorpion. Nothing.

I was 53 years old and this hurt so bad I did not care if I died right there.

So I cried right there.

Then I "got it," and I might add, without paying Werner Erhard one street dime. I didn't believe it, but, deep in my bohemian beer belly I knew this was "phantom" pain from age five, from a botched circumcision by a "quack" doctor --- hitting me now, 48 years, not to mention, sixty miles an hour late.

Finally, I called with my eighty year old mom about it.

And almost five decades later, the first words out of mom's mouth were, "oh my god we never should have done that to you, I am so sorry".

Her openness speaks well of her.

In 1945, when I was five, and in the hospital for a tonsillectomy, my parents had me circumcised as well. With no preparation, no word, before or after, just oops, then silence for fifty years.

I came out of the anesthetic in a hospital room, throat afire. I remember chrome bed rails. I was caged. It hurt to cry. Crying made me cry. The nurses said I could have all the ice cream I wanted.

Heroin might have helped.

A note to the medical profession: ice cream and tonsillectomies are mutually exclusive. Thank you.

Mom had to leave the hospital for awhile. The doctor probably told her to go, I don't know. I wanted her to stay. She promised to come back as soon as possible. The pain in my throat was so horrendous it took awhile to notice the pain in my groin. Soon though, my fingers located something strange there. A large bandage. Probing brought stabs of pain. I knew my tonsils had been "taken out".

Had they taken ... more? I was terrified.

Enter Treadwell. He checked my throat, then pulled the bed covers aside and without a word, leaned over my groin and began removing the bandages, while I watched him snipping with blunt scissors.

Then ... quite suddenly, doctor Torquemada ripped the adhesive tape away in one big yank.

The pain was like fire.

Treadwell should never have let a five year old see that mass of gore. A ghastly tomato-bulb of violet iodine and red blood, looking like a shelled shrimp covered with black stitches sticking out, as repulsive as wart-hairs on a crone's nose.

Instinctive screamimg brought fire to my throat.

Double wham!

Then everything changed. "I" suddenly shifted into a space of beautiful yellow light with no pain at all. It was as if an angel reached out and caught my soul falling from my body. I definitely left my body.

My next memories are post traumatic. "Incident In Horror Hospital" kindled in me a recurrent dream.

Simply: the arrest, detention, torture, trial, judgment and final sentence of my childhood.

Sometimes the dream came twice, in the same night. Always identical --- home alone --- hiding from a crone dressed in black, looking like a Halloween witch, but I knew she was real and utterly evil.

She gripped a butcher knife in one hand, and moved from room to room calling my name,"I'll find you David wherever you are. You can't hide from me and when I find you I'm going to cut off your thumb!"

In the dream I always hid behind dad's big chair in the living room, pulling myself into the smallest Houdini bundle I could make, longing to sink beneath the carpet, both thumbs gripped tightly inside my fists, then those fists rammed hard beneath my chest. And not because I thought I could actually hide behind dad's big chair and the witch would somehow "miss" me. I KNEW she would grab me. Then at the last second, always, I knew, it was "... that nightmare," again.

I remember fighting the bedclothes like a netted animal, wrenching myself awake, gulping air. My parents used metal blanket clips, not unlike something you might find in a hardware store, to fasten the corners of my blankets down, which were then tied to the headboard, to prevent me from throwing them off, which only added to the torture of feeling trapped. I was a bed-wetter too, living with the indignity of a rubber bottom sheet, cold in the morning. I remember waking up at times from the nightmare, somehow turned all the way around in the bed, so that my face was pushed into the the sheets at the foot, or the side, fighting for air, trying to dig myself out, feeling bound, terrified.

And ... HA! I ended up making "space" paintings!

And forgiving the doctor, and the nurse, not to mention the world!

And in the process, discovering the only good thing about aging.

And it wasn't wisdom.

It was, time.

Time.

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