“Have you ever seen a bigger scar on a guy’s arm?”
My seat-mate held his left arm out toward me, an expectant look on his face. The rice fields of Glenn County rolled past the window. He’d been alternately listening to his iPod and regaling me with motocross stories. He couldn’t have been more than 17, taking the train from Seattle to Fresno to visit a sick friend. His arm looked as if it had been banged up, all right: a thin spider-tracery of scar circled his elbow.
I shrugged. Life provides so few opportunities for oneupmanship both effortless and harmless; I wasn’t going to pass this one-up up. I rolled up my left sleeve, showed him the scars athwart my elbow. “Fell off my bike,” I said as laconically as possible. “Traction for three weeks. They drilled a pin through my bone here, and…” — I twisted in my seat to show him the outside of my arm — “...it came out here. Then three years later I had surgery to straighten the bone, which didn’t really work, and two years after that more surgery to take out a metal plate that had worked loose.”
“Whoa.” He got a little quiet.
It was cheating on my part. His may have been the worse injury. In these days of lasers and high-tech composite sutures and radar and such, surgeons can leave scars remarkably smaller than the one my Clovis-point-wielding orthopedic surgeon put on my elbow in the early 1970s. And in fact, I hardly notice the injury anymore. The break was almost forty years ago, and the sole legacy other than the scar and the misshapen elbow is that I can curl a couple pounds more with my right arm than my left, which might have happened anyway.
I don’t think much about any of my scars, in fact: I hardly notice them most of the time. I have to stop and think for a moment to compile an inventory. There’s a small pockmark on my face from my bout with the chicken pox, and a little bit of acne scarring not far away. A pale mark on my left shin, almost completely faded, marks the spot where a sharp well cap edge taught me always to watch where I’m running. (Baby’s first stitches.) Long-healed holes in my wrists from IV needles still show up blue against my skin. Scratches from a dozen cats, some long dead, rake my arms, a couple marks from sharp Japanese saws among them. There’s a decorative little chevron on my right index finger, a workplace injury, where the filthy cutting wheel on a restaurant can opener peeled the skin and muscle back to expose the bone. (The proximal phalanx, to be specific.)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen my favorite scar, made when I ran face-first at age two into my grandparents’ gas space heater. It slashed open the inside of my lower lip, burning it as well. When I’m lost in thought I play with the little ridge of thick tissue still there after 45 years, running my tongue over it.
I think that to most people, scars bring pain to mind. They make me think of recovering from pain. I had a lover decades ago who had been in an accident with subsequent major surgery, a web of prominent scars around her pelvis and thighs her souvenir. I spent a bit of time that year tracing those scars absently, lightly, brushing smooth skin with the tip of my finger. The scars were part of the person she had become, a map of the experiences she had endured. Wound fills with blood, blood clots, clot is slowly absorbed and granulation tissue grows to replace it. Angiogenesis commences: new blood vessels grow in the granulation tissue. The heart extends its network into the healing wound to nourish it. At long last granulation tissue is replaced with collagen. A cicatrix is formed, a smooth second skin, less sensitive and less robust than that it replaces, a seeming paradox.
It is a process as old as the Ediacaran, though we have evolved refinements of it since then. Without scarring we would likely expire from paper-cuts, from skinned knees. These smooth patches of skin mark the history of life’s tectonics, a record of one’s path through the world marked by its intersections with the rough, sharp, or burning, and I do not mind bearing them. The scars that can be seen are not the scars that do the most damage. They are not the scars that can be reopened with a word, a glance, a moment of thoughtless pride making wounds the heart’s web cannot reinhabit.
Ah, the narrative of the object. How many young lovers have traded scar stories between light fingertips, naked and vulnerable and yearning to know?
The crinkled spot on my left cheek running into my mouth from 14 stitches at age 7, thanks to a big chomp from Charlie the shepherd/St Bernard mix. The big patch of lighter skin on the outside of my left calf, thanks to a wipeout rounding third base (I still scored!). And the bigger patch of light skin on the inside of my right arm, thanks to my clumsiness as I carried a vat of boiling spaghetti (enough to feed 8) from stove to sink.
All of these are fading, slowly. I don’t feel the pain anymore, of course. But I do remember the teammate’s wife who ran to her car to get the first aid kit, the friends who took me to the hospital and stayed with me while the ER doctor peeled off the scalded skin.
The inner scars are much worse. For me the most painful of all are the self-inflicted wounds, like an inner bell tolling as I recall the hurts I’ve inflicted on others.
tip of my thumb, nearly lost in an enthusiastic bout of cutting veggies. my c-section scar. the bites of long-dead mosquitos, etched in white against what my doctor calls “sun damage.” assorted scratches, burns, sites of former moles.
my husband: scars on his shoulder and near his eye, from a bike accident that left him unconscious up on grizzly peak blvd.; 15 years, and i still feel queasy thinking what would have happened if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet. my son: 17 stitches in his hand and arm, from attempting to jump his bike over a large rock at inspiration point. my daughter: her knee, age 4—she screamed so loud and long that the ER finally gave up on trying to stitch her, and settled for butterfly bandages.
the question your seatmate posed—maybe it is because there are young adults in my life, but it struck me as an interesting snapshot of that time when confidence in the breadth of one’s experience stands side by side with an innocence and vulnerability. my children sometimes startle me this way. they’ll all figure out soon enough that they will collect more scars on their journeys, that others also have scars, that some will heal well, and some will be less visible but more long lasting.
Orange: I still have a scar under my lower lip that is a perfect impression of my upper teeth, made when my dad accidentally pushed me on a swing when I wasn’t holding on at my 6th birthday party. The only thing I remember about the whole thing is that my mom gave me a birthday cookie to make me feel better, not realizing that I’d bitten through the lip and was bleeding inside too. I just remember biting the cookie, pulling it away covered in blood, and crying harder for the ruined cookie than I’d cried over the injury. It’s funny how memory works.
…a moment of thoughtless pride making wounds the heart’s web cannot reinhabit.
A brief pause, re-orienting.
Enthusiastic applause! Bravo.