The Scar is the Thing

Not long ago a little girl that goes to church with us fell at home and cut her head. A couple of weeks ago I asked her about the fall, the cut, and the scar to come. I told her that one of the best things about a scar is that you get to tell the story behind it.

I showed her some of my scars and told her a little about each one. After the 3^rd or 4^th one she got bored and ran off to play. Since she wouldn’t listen, I decided to write about hem instead. Even if you run off after 2 or 3 scars, I won’t know it.

Every scar has a story.

I could approach this a few different ways. I could go chronologically. I could go top-to-bottom, or bottom-to-top. Or I could do it completely randomly. I think I’ll go random.

I have a lot of scars. Of course, I’m talking physical scars. None of this “Mary Ellen Moffat, she broke my heart” stuff. I guess I’ll give you those with a quick story first. Then get into the more involved stories.

From all of my years of playing football, I think I only have one scar. I cut the palm of my left hand during practice. I cut it on a snap on a teammate’s helmet while blocking him. I was left with a nice ½-inch scar.

Skateboarding also left me a single battle scar. I have a small round scar on my left knee. In the late 80’s “Golden Age” of skating, it was common practice to turn the front two truck screws upside down. This gave your front foot something extra to grab onto during an ollie, resulting in greater height.

One day I was on my way out to skate. I stomped the kicktail of my Rob Roskopp and reached down to grab the nose as it flew toward me. I missed. One of the upturned screws hit just to the right of my left kneecap.

One of my favorite scars is atop my left foot. When I was a boy my grandparents would take us camping in Waterloo. My granddad had an old flat-bottom aluminum boat we always took with us. One of our favorite camping activities was to partially sink the boat and play in, on, under, and around it.

Jumping off of the overturned boat was a favorite game. One day I decided to dive. As I jumped off of the boat it sank into the lake a little further. It popped back up just as my foot passed the edge. The corner of the aluminum hull cut a 2-inch gash along the top of my foot.

When I was either 7 or 8, my dad got my brother and I pocketknives for Christmas. When we opened them Christmas morning we were overwhelmed with excitement. We had to unfold them and check them out immediately. My mom quickly spoke up. “Don’t cut yourself.” My brother and I shot incredulous looks her direction.

“Of course we won’t cut ourselves.”

The knives were lock-blades. That meant you had to push a button on the back of the knife to close the blade. My dad showed us how to operate them. After he demonstrated on my knife, I re-opened it and tried to close it. My finger was not strong enough to push the unlocking mechanism. I turned the knife in my hand: the handle in my palm with the blade toward my pinky. This way I could push the button with my thumb.

I wrapped my fingers around the handle, pressed the button, and began closing the blade. I let go when the blade got to about 90°, and then closed it the rest of the way. Perfect.

My second favorite gift that Christmas was a summer sausage. After I opened it, I used my brand new knife to cut and eat several slices. Then it came time to close it again. I used the same method that had proven so successful before. Unfortunately, summer sausage is greasy.

This time when the blade got to 90° I kept going just a little further. The blade slipped out of my greasy fingers and imbedded itself into my pinky at the joint just below my fingernail. It went about halfway through my finger before stopping.

Unfortunately my mom saw the whole thing. My dad still has that knife to this day. I still have the scar.

The left side of my body seemed to catch the brunt of my clumsiness. I have another scar on top of my left wrist. This one came from a haunted house at my church (seems odd, no?) when I was 9 or 10 years old.

I played the mad scientist’s patient. I lay on a table while he pretended to hack away at my body and then hand fake body parts. One of the most important aspects of the scene was sound. Screaming, squishing, sawing. We needed authentic “experimenting on a live human” noises. Another important sound was sawing. You can’t just cut bone, after all.

My dad was in charge of the haunted house. He told the “Mad Scientist” in no uncertain terms, “Do not use a real knife!” Unfortunately we could not find anything to simulate the necessary sawing noise. Only a serrated bread knife run across the table’s edge created the proper sound. The table in question was the table I lay on in my role as patient.

Things went wonderfully for most of the night. As the last group passed through our scene, I had one last fake finger (a latex glove finger filled with sand) to give the “Doctor.” As he sawed the table and laughed a maniacal laugh I rolled my arm over to hand him the faux digit. In rolling my arm, I moved it closer to the table’s edge.

I felt the knife blade brush my wrist and thought, “Whew! That was close.”

The “Doctor” took the finger and threw it at the crowd. He flung a few more body parts at them and they left for the next scene. When they’d left, I finally looked at my arm.

What I thought was a brush of the blade was actually the knife opening a gash just above my hand. I ran to my mom, pausing only to show the gaping wound to everyone and anyone who would look at it. She rushed me to the ER where I received 3 stitches to close the cut.

Only my head rivals the left side of my body in sheer number of scars. At last count I have 5 noticeable scars, front and back.

The scar on the back is the newest addition to my head. That injury occurred in the summer of 1985. Just before 6^th grade.

My mother worked at the Carter, Floyd Clinic (now OB/GYN Associates of Northwest Alabama). To lose out the summer their office staff held a picnic at the home of one of the employees. They had a trampoline, so all of the kids spent most of the day bouncing 15-20 feet in the air.

At one point I decided to do my best impression of Prince playing guitar. I jumped in the air flailing on my air guitar. Then I flung myself backward, landed on my back, and sprung back up to my feet. It was, I must say, awesome! So I decided to do it again.

This time I made sure everyone was watching. I jumped and flung and… hit the back of my head on the outside bar of the trampoline. I bounced back to my feet, a little dazed. As I staggered around the trampoline one of the other kids noticed the blood trickling through my hair. Luckily the cut wasn’t that deep or that long. I didn’t even realize I had a scar until many years later when I shaved my head for the first time.

The front of my head has many more scars. Here’s a picture of the front. I’ll describe them based on the labels.

(A) This scar over my left eye is one of my earliest. When I was just over a year old, my brother (2 at the time) decided we should play catch with a metal vacuum cleaner attachment. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell me. He threw it, my head tried to catch it. Blood. Doctor. Butterfly bandage.

(B) This is a chicken pox scar just over my right eyebrow.

(C) This group of scars all came from the same source. Just a few weeks after the vacuum cleaner incident, my dad took my brother and I to Waterloo. This, of course, was in the days before child safety seats, so my brother and I roamed freely around the truck. We were parked in the parking lot of The Smoke House restaurant. My brother and I were on the passenger side looking out of the open window. My dad sat in the driver’s seat. He told my brother to roll up the window, and then cranked the truck to go home.

My brother was not fast enough. Before he could roll up the window, I leaned out too far and fell to the pavement. Face first. My dad jumped out and grabbed me and drove the 35 miles from Waterloo back to Florence with a screaming 18 month-old and a scared and confused 2 year-old.

Once at the ER, he called my mom. It took my mom, my granddad, my dad, and a couple of nurses to hold me down while the doctor patched me up. They decided to use butterfly bandages again in lieu of stitches. Probably a wise decision, given my propensity for flinching, flailing, and twitching.

The next day my arm swelled up. My mom took me back to the doctor. Either the fall or being restrained had broken my wrist. I’ll give you one guess which arm…

I think that’s all of them. Every scar. Every story.

By the way, this post is dedicated to Madeline. Thanks for the inspiration!