What follows is the verbatim, edited only for reasons of personal privacy, text of an email I sent to a friend last night. You kind of get it or you don't. If you don't, that's alright, I kind of envy you.

"Saw your message on FB about your email reply. Went to my inbox and read your email I went back to Facebook to see what else I'd been missing while I was out (I don't use a modern phone, so all my internetting is on my laptop).

The very first thing I saw was a post by one of xxxx's friends from Buffalo, Ruth. I think maybe they're friends from grade school or something. Ruth and I are FB friends also. Anyway, she's a Christian woman, a very Christian woman, pretty fundamentalist but not at all aggressive about it like our acquaintance Franco. She also posts a lot of really sweet cat and other animal pics that come from kindness.

So, Ruth posted this pic of a UPS truck and the driver out on foot, arms crossed, facing the camera. Above the pic was the meme "When you were a kid did you ever ring somebody's doorbell and run away. Well, we're hiring." Kind of funny.

But it lit up for me a really painful experience, I suspect for many people it might be the worst one of their lives. It involved a UPS truck. You'd have to understand that when I was a kid I attended Catholic grade school, the boy's department in the tender clutches of the Christian Brothers (of brandy fame). We were required to wear the school uniform, blue trousers, a white shirt, and a blue school tie.

When I was in the eighth grade one day a classmate and I happened out and about during the lunch period. On our rambles we came across a UPS truck, keys dangling in the ignition. Out of the same kind of mischieviousness that motivates kids who ring the doorbell and run away, we took the keys out of the truck. Not having any idea at all what to do with them we took them inside the apartment building the truck was parked in front of. Totallly on the spur of the moment, we dropped the keys into the mailbox of a classmate of ours, Robert Bowler, who happened to live in that building. And we went back to school.

Shortly into the afternoon session I was called out of class by the acting principal and put up against the hall wall. Slap to the face, "What did you do with the keys?" I'd been being beaten by my father since as long as I could remember, a budding tough guy. "What keys?" Punch to the gut. Rinse and repeat. Same response, feigned ignorance.

So then the Brother (the male version of nuns) called my "accomplice" out to the hall and had him stand next to me. He couldn't help but notice that I'd absorbed some punishment. "Phillips already told me you took the keys, what did you do with them?" he bluffed. "We put them in Bowler's mailbox" my accomplice couldn't blurt out fast enough.

It seems some neighborhood denizen, no doubt a stay at home housewife - it was still the Fifties and that kind of neighborhood, no disrespect intended - had seen us and called the school. Whether or not she identified us by name, or whether her description was accurate enough that the acting principal knew where to start isn't for me to say. But he hit paydirt.

This would just be another boring story about a foolish childhood prank gone wrong except for what happened later. The acting principal sent us back into the classroom, telling us "Report to me after class." Here's where the flashback begins.

After school, when the building was essentially empty and no one could hear our screams, he gave us a beating. Not just any beating. He used one of those two inch wide, eighteen inch long metal rulers. In fairness, he never hit me anywhere but on the buttocks. I can't speak for Kenny. He hit me a lot more than he hit Kenny, because I'd stood tall. He hit me a lot, and so hard that in the days and weeks that followed my back, from the bottoms of the calves of my legs to about nipple high but on the back, turned the deepest purple I've ever seen on a human being.

I was scared to death my parents would notice, and I would have gotten another beating.

The point of this story is that when I saw Ruth's post I flashed back to that beating. My heart was still racing as I began this email, my breath shallow and rapid, my gut empty. After all these years, as if it were right here, right now.

I can only hope I haven't horrified you. You have plenty enough of your own stuff.

I just thought it was important to share. To openly acknowledge triggers, and the effect they still have on us.

It was only a UPS truck, after all. It didn't have to bring up all that terror and pain."

bp