While we were still seeing the dentist Dr. Ginopolis, and this must have been when I still had baby teeth, so I’m guessing I was about seven, so we would still have been living on the farm in the Great Stone House, I must have had some problem with a molar or two, such that Dr. Ginopolis sent me to an oral surgeon in Reading (or maybe West Reading) to have it (them) extracted.

I remember they put a gas mask contraption of some sort over my face, and I fell almost instantly into a sleep but I had extremely vivid dreams, one of which I remember to this day.

I dreamed I was a cat’s eyeball that had fallen out of it’s socket and the cat was chasing me with it’s paw as I was falling ever faster and the paw was repeatedly grabbing at me and just missing.

As I said the dream was quite vivid, and I had absolutely no idea how absurd it was until I tried describing it to some friends a little while later and they instantly broke into wild gales of laughter.

Anyway, I woke up from the deep sleep, molar(s) successfully removed. I think they gave me a certificate for a free milk shake at a diner along Route 422 just outside West Reading, and since we had no reason to come back that way anytime soon, my mother decided to stop there on the way home.

Big mistake.

I had had nothing to eat that morning in preparation for the anesthesia, and of course I still had whatever drugs that they had had me inhale coursing through my veins, so when I slurped down the vanilla milk shake I immediately began to feel sick.

My mother realized what was happening, so she tried to get me out, but she wasn’t quick enough, and I upchucked the milk shake on the floor in front of the cash register counter.

I don’t think we ever had occasion to visit that diner again.