Terefy
had the debilitating habit of lucidly associating spoken words and phrases to
conjured mental images that would encompass his entire consciousness. Some words
and phrases that triggered this effect were "get out," which made
him picture a scene from childhood of his elderly aunt wielding a broom at a
pack of raccoons that had stumbled into her yard and knocked over a cracker
barrel filled with water, "obsequious" which brought to mind a picture
of a stout man with curly black hair who was aged far past his eighteen years
and holding a mason jar filled with a clear liquid. The man was Terefy's young
uncle Solomon and he would talk about something new every time the word "obsequious"
was uttered, which was, thankfully, an infrequent occurrence. More frequently
the crude phrase "cunt" was spoken and Terefy would picture the bloated,
sanguine face of a balding man with warts straining to scream a line of expletives
at the sky. To avoid running afoul of the word, Terefy made sure to keep clean-speaking
company. There were a whole plethora of other words and phrases that would send
Terefy off, mentally, to another time and place and make him forget momentarily
whatever might have been going on when the phrase was uttered. Such
a disorder, as one can imagine, often reaped disastrous results.