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At 26, with the assistance of a team of highly-motivated psychological facilitators spending down a healthy post-doctoral research grant, he began to retrieve repressed memories of abuse he had suffered as a five-year-old child. In truth, his age at the time of the abominations is a conjecture, derived from a guess at the height from which he recalls having cowered before his tormentors. Any detailing of the boy’s humiliations would be prurient beyond the scope of our purposes here and likely would violate the rights of his publisher, but on the basis of just one batch of unsubstantiated accusations, which the team felt obligated to report to authorities, the boy’s parents were investigated, ostracized by family and lifelong friends, driven from their jobs, home and neighborhood. Their son’s retrieved memories were vivid, compelling, utterly incontrovertible. Regrettably, we can say no more about them here than that they featured a basement location, both parents, masked or hooded strangers with sharp objects, and a donkey or a drawing of a donkey. A second, more resourceful team of therapists helped resolve these memories to closely coincide with the actual layout of the split-level home of the boy’s childhood. To no avail did the parents insist they never had a basement. The “subterranean” abominations are now understood to have been suffered in the rumpus room with its below-ground aspect. Though he has not returned home since commencing his therapy, the son professes a willingness to forgive or at least indulge the hubris that compels even the most unfit parents to reproduce. A book-length memoir of his earliest memories, which also details the love affair that blossomed, bloomed, attracted pests and ultimately withered between the young man and the therapist who championed his cause, will appear in bookstores in time for the gift-buying season.

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