It is the year 1980 and I am standing in the middle the street in front of the house I grew up in on 7th avenue.  The world has stopped spinning for one brief moment.  Everyone around me who was just full of life a moment ago is now frozen in place.  The wind has ceased running it's invisible fingers through the leaves of the tall oak trees around my home.  The birds hang still in the sky like they were painted there decades ago.  Nobody is moving.  Nobody but me.  Even though the moment is fixed I can still feel the heat of the high summer sun that adorns the sky directly above me.  I am only six years old right now but even with my young senses I can identify a metaphysical moment when I see one.

Turning my head around I observe that the other children I was just playing with now completely suspended in time.  All six of them have their expressions directed at me that carry a glance of both shock and amusement.  A couple of the larger boys are pointing at me in way that would indicate that I was either a three headed walking Salmon-boy, or that I had just eaten an entire box of plastic lids.  This seems like a memory I should remember...but I can't.  None of this seems like it happened to me.

I am not sure why they are reacting to me this way. 

Then I see her.

Rachel.  The most beautiful seven year old I had ever known.  She was the curly black haired niece of a neighbor of ours.  She only came to Cheyenne once or twice a year, and every time she arrived she produced in my tummy more butterflies than I knew what to do with.  We always played together with her cousins and it seemed like we had a smashing good time together.  Something this time was going terribly wrong.  While her cousins were looking at me in amazement she was burying her head into her small hands as if she was bearing witness to something truly horrific.

What could be the cause of all of this commotion?  Whatever it was could not be coming from me! I spin around to see if maybe there was something behind me that would provide me some context to what is happening.  I can see my mother's station wagon parked in the middle of the street about ten feet from me.  The driver door is wide open and my mom is frozen next to.  It looks as if she was racing racing over to me before time stopped. One of her hands is braced on the top of the door, and her other is perfectly formed into the biggest pointer finger you could ever see.  The look on her face is one of an anger so pure that it if she so willed she could shoot her now red blazing eyes through my heart and down into the asphalt that is behind me.

Now I am certain that whatever situation was unfolding here was centered on me.  For the life of me I can't understand what I would have done to create such a look of panic, anger, shock, and terror on the faces of the people around me.  After all it is such a picturesque day.  The colors that surround me are so intensely bright.  I crane my head up to the cloudless sky and look straight into it and see that it is the deepest blue I have ever seen.   Right above me I can see an airplane carving it's way through the atmosphere...like everyone else around me it too is suspended in this time freeze.  it looked so free...

To be honest I feel free as well.  There is something about this moment I am experiencing that makes me feel totally alive.  Maybe that is why everyone is reacting around me in this manner.  Maybe my brilliant light of self actualization is too much for them to handle.  Perhaps my aura is as deep and intimidating as the sky above and everyone else is forced to take a hard look at there own lack of life light.  I am now convinced that my friends, my mother, and my dear Rachel are all acting like this because they are jealous of my divinely inspired sweetness.

Man it feels good to be free!!  I am feeling such a sensation of inhibition that I would not be surprised if suddenly I found myself soaring above this scene like an eagle.  I feel so natural.

Wait a second.  I feel too natural.  I feel too free.  Something is not quite right....

Oh no!! No...no....no. 

Please Lord.  No.....

I have no panned my vision down below to my feet and I see the cause of all this commotion and new sense of freedom.  My heart sinks into my colon.

I see my pants and underwear down on the ground around my feet.  I am standing there on 7th avenue completely naked from the waist down.  My pale and pant less legs are planted in the middle of the street like two flag poles that wave a flag of childhood nudity.  My still scene has in one instant gone from a G rating to NC-17.  Now everything is making sense....I know now why everyone is looking at me like that.  The memory of the moment is flooding back to me.

Twenty seconds before I arrived at this moment I was simply playing with the most beautiful Rachel and her cousins.  Everything was going just like it should.  We were in a highly competitive of "kick the can" when it started.  My right leg began to itch.  Itch bad.  Really really bad.  This was the mother of all itches!  Quickly I had put my little digits to work on the demon.  My neatly trimmed finger nails were not having much luck in putting out the itch fire through my jeans...and it was getting worse.  At this moment nothing except getting rid of the itch mattered...not even social etiquette.

Scratching through the denim seemed like it was only aggravating UltraItch. It was expanding it's reach up and down my leg now.  It felt like there was an ant colony setting up base camp!  So I had to take drastic measures.  I had to get finger nail on bare skin.  There was no time to warn people around me...there was only time to take action.

Take action I did!  Within a half a second my pants came flying off.  As my fingers found pay dirt I began to scratch the itch with a ferocity I did not know I possessed.  While exorcising the demon itch I found myself letting out the most guttural and primal of screams...which later I found seemed to draw many neighbors to look out there window to find a half-naked youngster putting on a private show for his friends.

As the itch fled back to it's limbo I could feel this wave of relief pass over my body like a fall breeze.  The first thing I noticed was Rachel and her cousins are staring at me with jaws wide open.  I knew that being pantless was going to be a PR nightmare so I immediately started looking for my britches.  It was then that I noticed that in the haste of the moment that I had not just removed my Levi's.  Standing three feet away from me with my britches was my Batman Underoo's that must have been peeled off during the crisis.  Oops.  

The realization that I was standing in front of my dream girl in my full glory came to me like a brick to the skull.  I wondered what the implications of her seeing me like this were.  Did this mean we were now married?  I would like to think that I tried to break the awkwardness with saying something about how "this was a clothing optional" play date.  Instead I believe I just stood there stammering in my blinding nudity.

Things could not have gotten worse...or so I believed.  Then they did.  I heard the slam of brakes.  I turned around to see that my mother had just driven up on my own personal Woodstock Festival.  Through the windshield I could hear the muffled screaming and the look of a lady who had just found out that her son was now at best an exhibitionist and at worst a gigolo.

I tried to take control of the moment by offering the reason why this all happened in the first place.  I needed to quiet the storm of sobbing from Rachel, the laughter from her cousins, and my mom's panic attack.  So I shouted the phrase that would haunt me throughout my entire life.  

"I HAVE AN ITCH!!!!"

Later on when the story of my "freedom march" was retold to my father and brother that phrase was highlighted.  My dad and brother would later use that phrase as my Pavlovian conditioning.  Whenever they needed to get me to do something like mow the lawn, finish my homework, or just feel a moment of humility they would just look at me and whisper "I have an itch".I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to forget it.




And with that John woke up.  He said he could not remember what we had just talked about.  I told him that it had to do with the "I have an itch" story.  He became very agitated and went outside and started shoveling.  John later offered to pay me money not to have this particular episode included in his timeline.  It goes without saying that the amount that he was willing to pay was not enough.