Our bodies are riddled with scars. Some fade over time, but others remain, telling stories while reminding us of our encounters with cutting surfaces, hard facts and hard knocks. I have a scar on the middle finger of my right hand that, gently curving, still shows up after all these years, from at least 50 years ago. I got it opening a can of dog food for our dog, Sandy. I remember watching the edge of the can, the can top, cutting through my finger as it happened, as if in slow-mo. And I remember how much it bled. It probably needed stiches, but that wasn’t likely, not in our house. Anyway, it didn’t happen, the stitches, the taking to a doctor, the actual treatment of a 2” gash. I doubt my mother even got out of her chair to look; I certainly, by that time, would not have insisted she do so.
I have a scar on the back of my right hand that I got carrying a friend from my hometown over the threshold of her college dorm in the fall of our freshman year. We were both extremely drunk, but I was used to holding it together (I’d been the designated drunk driver in high school) in a way she was not; plus, she’d just been puking her guts out, in the bushes adjacent to her dorm. My hand got caught trying to catch the door before it shut behind another teenager from my hometown, another friend from the past who was also drunk as a skunk. Do skunks even actually get drunk? On sour apples, or something like that? I know I didn’t cry or even register the pain all that much. I was that blotto, that inebriated. Inebriated. What a word. Blotto, too. Blotto. Blot.
I have a long couple of scars on my arms, both arms, from a day when, returning home with my adopted dog, Lottie Lenya Lou Mueller, we surprised my roommate’s cat, sitting on the open, unscreened windowsill in the kitchen; it went screeching out into the summer’s day air; I ran to find it hanging on by its claws to the side of the window, and building. I reached down trying to bring it back in, resulting in five- and six-inch scars where its claws gouged out tracks as it fell from my outstretched arms to the ground, five stories below. It haunts me still.
I have a barely discernible scar on my right arm from a mad dash to kill my little sister when I was four years old, maybe? Unable to stop myself when she stepped out of the way (if I was four, she was 2.5, but quick, I guess), I crashed through the glass window of the back door to our house on the corner of Maple and Main streets. Perhaps she was able to get away because I announced I was going to kill her, like cartoon villains who expound upon their intentions before attacking, giving the game away. I don’t recall, and I definitely don’t remember why I was so angry; I only know where the scar is, still, all these many years later, stretching from my elbow where it is a circle of faded whiteness resembling a large drop of water, extending almost all the way up my forearm, in a thin, thready line of more lightened, lighter skin.
On my knees I have many scars, including from a knee down fall last year in the snow. Mostly, most prominently, however, are the scars I got when I was 6 years old, on another snowy day. I’d walked down to the Hubbell’s house, just a few doors away on Church St. (the second house we lived in during my childhood), to see if anyone wanted to come out and play, but no one was home. On the way down their steep driveway, despite going slowly as I was afraid of falling, I went bang, onto my knees, and it hurt like absolute hell. All I had on was a thin onesie snowsuit and some cotton pants, I think. I cried all the way home. My mother, in the kitchen, was on the phone and don’t you dare interrupt me, you’re fine, stop crying, go back outside, which eventually, finally, I did.
Later, she removed my snowsuit to find it filled with blood. More gashes, and on both knees, gashes that were two or more inches long, sluggishly bleeding still; they also needed stitching they never got. I wear those scars to this day like the badges of honor they are; whose I’m not sure. Mine, I guess? Mine, of course. They’re quite impressive, even now, all these many years later. They never seem to fade. Sometimes in bed or in the bath, my fingers trace their outlines; they don’t tan, or not as well as the rest of my skin, not that that’s saying much.
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” – Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses